Abstrakt
There is no doubt that during the last century (and still today), the attempt to denounce the mythological character of what for brevity's sake goes by the name "the given" (das Gegebene or le donn or il dato - were we to include additional linguistic and philosophical contexts) is what paradoxically raised awareness of it. "The Myth of the Given" is not only a rather attention-grabbing phrase that first appears in § 38 of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (hereafter: EPM),2 but is also the original and programmatic title of all three lectures held by Sellars in London in 1956. The condemnation of the myth, or rather its unmasking (and regardless of the question of whether the Given is mythological through and through or solely in some of its versions), has slowly yet quite systematically prompted scholars and philosophers to question its content, function (whether necessary or dispensable) and origin.