Interviste

1. You studied philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich, and then as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh under the super-vision of Wilfrid Sellars. How did you become fascinated by his philosophy and what role did his ideas play in your own work in philosophy?

JS: I became interested in Wilfrid Sellars' work when I was still in Munich and worked with Lorenz Puntel, a philosopher whom I hold in very high re-gard and who in my view, is too little known. He is one of the very few phi-losophers who has both overview over, and in-depth scholarly knowledge of, analytical and continental philosophy. He was in many ways my most important teacher in Munich and beyond. Due to his influence, I had from the beginning a focus on systematic philosophy, and I started writing my Master thesis on the problem of universals. I quickly found out that Wilfrid Sellars was the first, and so far perhaps only, philosopher who managed to develop a consistently nominalist or naturalist system in philosophy. So, I ended up writing a Masters thesis about Sellars rather than on universals. Later, I met Nicholas Rescher in Munich, and decided to become a visiting student in Pittsburgh. But as soon as I arrived in Pittsburgh I was so fasci-nated with the (non-sexist!) environment that I immediately applied for the PhD program. I became Wilfrid Sellars' last PhD student (after Sellars' death in 1989 I continued under the supervision of Nicholas Rescher). My dissertation was not on Sellars' philosophy, but on substance ontology, in order to lay the foundations for later work on a non-Whiteheadian process ontology.