Metaphilosophy of the Life-world. Sellars, Husserl, and the quantum image of nature

The aim of this article is to assess whether the notion of “life-world” could be helpful for a philosophical theory that assigns a primacy to the scientific view of the world when it comes to establish what exists. I set out to integrate the concept of “life-world” as understood in Husserl’s late phenomenology with the point of view defended by Sellars in Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man in the World. In what follows, I will consider the image of nature proposed by the standard “Copenhagen” version of quantum physics. This will allow me to challenge Sellars’s assumptions that reality cannot be conceived as stratified, and that the term “phenomenon” has to be meant as “illusory appearance” in a supposedly Kantian sense. At the same time, I will discuss Husserl’s conviction that the ‘technization’ of science entails a philosophical loss of meaning of the scientific image of the world.