The lingua franca of Thought. Wilfrid Sellars and the History of Philosophy

Sellars’ relation to the “history of philosophy” is not exhausted in his interpreting and making use of specific views, but also involves more general considerations about the relationship between “philosophy and its history” (the title of one of Sellars’ volumes). The latter considerations are “meta- philosophical” and address methodological questions that are highly discussed in contemporary debates (Williamson 2007, Kitcher 2011). In fact, thanks to his unique position as the first “analytic” philosopher to intensively study the history of philosophy, Sellars was able to put some central themes of the analytic tradition (the question of meaning, for instance, or of reference; the role of inference, intentionality, etc.) in dialogue with some classical themes from the modern continental philosophical tradition. Sellars’ careful analysis of both contemporary theories and their historical “forerunners” puts into conversation the two main “souls” of contemporary philosophy, namely the analytical and the continental traditions.