Husserl's Legacy in Sellars's Philosophical Strategy

In his Autobiographical Reflections Sellars recognizes Husserl’s key influence on his own “philosophical strategy”. He also acknowledges the decisive mediatory part played by Marvin Farber. Scholars have often discussed the real influence of Husserl and of phenomenology on Sellars’s thinking, but references to Husserl in Sellars’s writings are very rare and even rather vague. This explains why the overall influence of Husserl on his thinking has been acknowledged, yet the more profound and hidden details of this relationship are somehow still missing. The main purport of this paper is to show that Sellars’ normative naturalism has close ties to the late Husserlian project of a genetic phenomenology, but for appreciating this one should first focus on Farber’s attempt to naturalize phenomenology.