In my previous
post on Wilfrid Sellars I referenced an autobiographical account by Sellars. If one is online, one could read that from Andrew Chrucky's
site. Thankfully, our library does have a copy of
Action, knowledge, and reality: Critical studies in honor of Wilfrid Sellars. It was at the library where I first read this. But Chrucky's site has always been useful. Here are some passages of Sellars talking about writing and philosophy:
I began to write a paper, catch as catch can, pushing ahead, letting the
argument go where it would — almost in the spirit of writing an
examination. I then made marginal comments and criticisms, after which I
rewrote it in the same spirit. As I remember it, the paper started out
to be about names, the given, and existential quantification. Three
months and ten drafts later it began to be "Realism and the New Way of
Words." Rewriting large chunks of it at a time became a way of life.
Some seventeen major revisions occurred before it finally appeared in
print.
At last I had found a successful strategy for writing. And if, in the
beginning at least, the result was a highly involuted style, I had
learned that revising is a pleasure and that even the clumsiest initial
draft takes on a life of its own. It took longer to put into practice
the truism that a revision must simplify as well as correct and add. I
soon discovered that spinning out, as I was, ideas in a vacuum,
everything I wrote was idiosyncratic and had little direct connection
with what others had said. Each spinning required a new web to support
it, and the search for fixed points of reference became a struggle for
coherence and completeness. As a result, each sentence of ''Realism" is a
"flower in crannied
wall." I soon came to see that a dialectical use of historical positions
is
the most reliable way of anchoring arguments and making them
intersubjectively available. In the limiting case, this use of history
is illustrated
by correspondence and controversial exchanges with contemporaries. Even
on paper, philosophy becomes explicitly what it has always really been, a
continuing dialogue.
Until "Realism and the New Way of Words," my philosophical development took place
in foro interno,
in the classroom and in private discussion. Since that turning point,
it has found a more public expression and is available for critical
scrutiny. Nevertheless, as each publication moves further and further
into the past (O, A-series!), there comes that time when I am moved to
say, as did Carnap, "But my grandfather wrote that!"
