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Sellars is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a problem. He was perhaps the first philosopher to effectively combine elements of American Pragmatism with elements of analytic philosophy and logical positivism. He worked on a broad range of subjects in both philosophy and its history, and has had lasting influence on subsequent philosophy. One of the things that makes Sellars such a difficult read is that he insisted on writing for the ages. He considered the lingua franca of philosophy to be the history of philosophy, so his writing is a rich engagement with both the philosophy of his period and of the entire history. Robert Brandom has called him, along with Willard van Orman Quine, one of the two most profound and important philosophers of his generation. His work is the foundation and archetype of what is sometimes called the "Pittsburgh School"—Brandom, John McDowell, John Haugeland, James Conant, and several others.
Sellars' most famous work is the lengthy and difficult paper, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," a sustained attack on what he called "The Myth of the Given," which, roughly, consists in the claim, central to both phenomenology and sense-data theories of knowledge, that we can know things about our perceptual experiences independently of and in some important sense prior to the conceptual apparatus which we use to think about the objects which those perceptions show to us. This attack is thought by some to entail the blurring of the traditional empirical distinction between knower and known, subject and object.
Sellars also deserves credit for certain now-common idioms in philosophy, such as the "space of reasons", used to indicate that talk of reasons, justification, and intention are not the same as and cannot necessarily be mapped onto talk of causes and effects in the sense that physical science speaks of them. This corresponds in part to a Sellarsian distinction between the "Manifest Image," or the way the world stands according to the language we ordinarily use in interacting with it (which includes, for example, intentions and thoughts), and the "Scientific Image", the description of the world offered by the physical sciences.
(Among many, many other things the Incompatible Food TriadThe Incompatible Food Triad is a puzzle that allegedly originated with the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, and has been spread by some of his former colleagues and students, including Nuel Belnap and George Hart, who keeps a page on it at: http://www. To dat puzzle has been attributed to Wilfrid Sellars.)