Wilfrid Sellars e la matrice fenomenologica del «dato»: Farber, Husserl e il progetto di una naturalizzazione della fenomenologia

Abstract

In his Autobiographical Reflections, Sellars recognizes Husserl’s «key influence» on his own «philosophical strategy» and acknowledges the decisive role played by Marvin Farber. Scholars have often discussed the influence of Husserl on Sellars’s thinking, but references to him are rare and even rather vague. The thesis here advanced is that fully to appreciate the Husserlian legacy in Sellars we first need to focus on Farber’s interpretation of Husserl. Farber was not only a student of Husserl and the main institutional representative of phenomenology in the U.S., he was also an independent thinker, fully engrossed in the philosophical debates of the American academic world. Reconstructing his interpretation of Husserl gives us therefore the possibility to see Sellars through new historical light.