Sellars Naturalism The Myth of The Given PDF

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SELLARS’ NATURALISM, THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN AND

HUSSERL’S TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
I. INTRODUCTION
In this paper, we shall attempt to sketch one of the most radical forms of nat-
uralism formulated within the analytic tradition, that of Wilfrid Sellars, to show
its intimate relation with the rejection of the myth of the Given in all its forms,
and to suggest that some classic forms of transcendental phenomenology, namely
Husserl’s “noesis-noema correlation,” and, more controversially, his conception
of the “life-world” (Lebenswelt), fall prey to (different versions of) the most gen-
eral form of the myth of the Given, that is the categorial Given. It will be further
suggested that a dialectical understanding of the relation between lifeworld and
science could succeed in escaping the Myth, albeit only at the cost of blurring the
boundaries between phenomenology and non-phenomenological philosophical
standpoints. Finally, one of the main aims of the paper is to exhibit the intimate
connection that exists between the rejection of the myth of the Given and a com-
mitment to a certain peculiar brand of ontological naturalism. More specifically,
it aims to show that (1) the resolute rejection of the categorial Given goes hand in
hand with the acceptance of a scientific naturalism that makes room for the tran-
scendental, albeit in a de-phenomenologized sense of the term, and that, (2) cor-
relatively, the resort to the categorial Given turns out to be the unacknowledged
cost of the anti-naturalism characteristic of Husserl’s version of transcendental
phenomenology both in his early and late work.
1
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
II. SELLARS’ SCIENTIFIC NOMINALISTIC NATURALISM
We will begin by offering the main outlines of Sellars’ peculiar brand of natural-
ism. Sellarsian naturalism combines nominalism, that is the denial that abstract
entities are ontologically committal, and scientific realism, as formulated in the
famous Sellarsian scientia mensura principle: “In the dimension of describing and
explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what it is that it is, and
of what it is not that it is not.”1 The peculiarity of Sellars’ naturalism, with its in-
teresting combination of scientific and liberal naturalist elements, can be already
discerned: On the one hand, Sellars’ naturalism is more radical than Quine’s nat-
uralism, since, unlike the latter, it does not countenance the existence of abstract
entities, at least in the dimension of describing and explaining the world; on the
other hand, we must always bear in mind that the superiority of the scientific
image of the world, as described in the Sellarsian scientia mensura principle, is
strictly confined in the domains of describing and explaining the world, as op-
posed for example to the domain of normative appraisal of human behavior.
But what exactly is naturalism itself, considered as a general philosophical
thesis and Sellarsian naturalism in particular? To answer these questions we need
to make a distinction between two senses of philosophical naturalism, namely
between ontological and methodological naturalism: Ontological naturalism is
often very difficult to define, but for our purposes it can be understood as the view
according to which everything exists within nature in the sense that there are no
residual dualism between nature (what exists within nature) and another, non-nat-
ural level of existence. That is to say, ontological naturalism is opposed to views
which make ontological distinctions (i.e., distinctions of levels of existence) be-
tween the natural and the supernatural, between nature and experience (in the
manner, e.g., of empiricism) or even between the natural and the transcendental
level (in the manner of transcendental idealism)—at least to the extent to which
this latter distinction is construed as something more than a purely methodologi-
cal one.2 As deVries puts this point “naturalism includes the thesis that everything
that exists in an element of the spatiotemporal causal nexus. It rejects, therefore,
any kind of purported causal or metaphysical dependence on something outside
space and time, such as God, souls, forms or other pure intelligibles.”3
In this sense, Sellars is surely an ontological naturalist. But is he also a meth-
odological naturalist? And does ontological naturalism imply methodological nat-
uralism? The answer to both questions is, dinterestingly, no, at least if
1
Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, §41.
2
See for example John Herman Randall, “The Nature of Naturalism,” Naturalism and the Human
Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944) 357.
3
Willem deVries, Wilfrid Sellars (Chesham: Acumen Publishing, 2005) 16.
2
SELLARS’ NATURALISM
methodological naturalism is understood as the claim that the descriptive and

explanatory resources of science are the sole basis of knowledge acquisition (in-
cluding knowledge acquisition about the process of knowing itself). Sellars argues
against m ethodological naturalism that knowledge attributions, and, more gener-
ally, attributions of intentional behavior, are normatively individuated. As he puts
this point in his famous “space of reasons” passage: “in characterizing and epi-
sode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that
episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and
being able to justify what one says.”4 What is more, for Sellars, knowledge attri-
butions, as well as other normative dimensions of human existence which are not
in the business of describing and explaining empirical states of affairs, are not
only legitimate but are in fact indispensable for our self-understanding as perceiv-
ers, knowers, and doers, that is—to use an existentialist turn of phrase—as
persons-in-the-world.
Now, as was mentioned above, Sellars is also committed to nominalism, which
in his eyes is intimately connected to his rejection of the myth of the categorial
Given (see Section II). Sellars endorses a version of linguistic nominalism accord-
ing to which abstract entities such as properties, kinds, relations, propositional
contents, and facts are, in the last analysis, linguistic or, better, conceptual
entities—a fact that is obscured by their surface grammar which invites us to as-
similate them to bits of discourse that describe empirical states of affairs (notice,
e.g., that the proposition “red is a property” has the same surface grammar with
the empirical-factual proposition “this table is red”). Sellars takes it that those
abstract terms are in fact metalinguistic devices which serve to functionally
classify the common (or similar) perceptual-inferential-practical role that certain
discursive expressions play in the context of our practices, abstracting from their
otherwise radically different mode of material or empirical realization in the
world (in different systems of material signs and different empirical circum-
stances). In this sense, the function of abstract singular terms such as “triangular-
ity” resembles that of the pawn in chess: The latter does not function as a name
which refers to—or represents—an abstract entity; rather, its function is to iden-
tify/classify the common (or similar) functional role which certain objects that
may well differ in their material and qualitative empirical properties can play in
the context of the game of chess.5
Notice, interestingly, that categorial concepts such as “property,” “fact,”
“kind,” and “relation” are among the most general concepts we possess and
indeed, for Sellars, as for Kant, they have a transcendental status in our concep-
tual scheme. Sellars transposes this Kantian transcendental perspective into a
4
5
Wilfrid Sellars, “Abstract Entities,” Review of Metaphysics 16 (1963): 627–28.
3
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
metalinguistic key, arguing that although those categorial concepts express essen-
tial features of the framework of describing and explaining the world, they do not
themselves describe and explain (sui generis, transcendental) states of affairs in
the world (or in the mind). In fact, Kantian categories are second-order concepts
that functionally classify the most basic kinds of first-order (i.e., empirical) con-
cepts we possess with respect to their epistemic-semantic role, that is, their role as
epistemic and semantic “coordination” devices as regards the basic kinds of things
that exist in the world.6
For example, according to Sellars’ analysis of the role of discourse about
facts—which, for Sellars, corresponds to the role of discourse about truth (i.e.,
about propositions of the form “p is true”)—“truth” and the “facts” should not be
construed as worldly things or entities the commitment to which is licensed by the
descriptive and explanatory resources of scientific or ordinary discourse,7 but are
in fact metalinguistic tools whose normative and practical function is necessary
for the descriptive/explanatory function of talk about the world (“object-language”).
These metalinguistic tools express a commitment to make an inferential step in
reasoning and make explicit its consequences for action; they do not have any di-
rect ontological import (i.e., they are not used to describe and explain states of
affairs in the world).8
Notice, moreover, that this nominalistic, metalinguistic construal of discourse
about facts enables Sellars to combine a strong scientific naturalism, according to
which what is “natural” amounts to what is revealed as such by the explanatory
methods of (ideal) science, with the more “liberal” view to the effect that this sci-
entific conception of nature does not exhaust what is true or even what facts can
be known. Since the role of discourse about facts (or about truth and knowledge)
is metalingustic and normative rather than descriptive and explanatory, there can
be a perfectly legitimate notion of “regions/domains of facts” whose individual
facts, although not belonging, strictly speaking, to nature—as the descriptive and
explanatory resources of the domains of facts in questions are not included in the
ideal scientific framework—do have conditions of correct or incorrect applica-
tion, can be true or false, and known to be so. All sorts of normative facts can
serve as example of the above kind: think, for example, of logical, mathematical,
ethical, or esthetic facts.
6
James O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2007) 115.
7
Examples of this latter kind of commitment are the postulation of electrons in the scientific image
or commitment to the existence of perceptible physical objects of various kinds within the mani-
fest image.
8
Wilfrid Sellars, “Truth and Correspondence,” Journal of Philosophy 59 (1962): 29–56. See also
Robert Brandom, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2015).
4
III. SELLARS’ NATURALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE

(SEMANTIC, EPISTEMIC, CATEGORIAL) GIVEN
Now, a very interesting aspect of Sellars’ philosophy is that his scientific nominal-
istic naturalism goes hand in hand with—and indeed is motivated by—a resolute
rejection of the myth of the Given in all its forms, and, especially, in its most gen-
eral form (which, in a sense, is present in all others), that of the categorial Given.
But before describing the myth of the categorial Given and showing the range
of (otherwise very different and, at first sight, totally unrelated) views to which
it can be applied as well as the intimate relation that exists between the rejection
of the categorial Given and Sellarsian scientific naturalism, we must first briefly
examine the more well-known Sellarsian notions of the semantic and epistemic
Given and show what is problematic with them.
The concept of the Given is supposed to give content to our conviction that our
only guarantee of a non-circular, solid (infinite-regress-stopper) and objective
(non-arbitrary) access and knowledge about reality is the existence of a point of
immediate contact between subject and object (the world) that enable the former to
have immediate (non-inferential) knowledge of the latter. This immediate epistemic
connection between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge makes the
cognitive contact between them absolutely immediate, transparent, “diaphanous,”
independent of any other knowledge, and is precisely what constitutes Given knowl-
edge, which, by serving as a foundation on which other bits of knowledge could be
justified, guarantees the very possibility of knowledge. (If we substitute “meaning”
for “knowledge” and “semantic” for “epistemic” in the last sentence above, we ar-
rive at a notion of “Given meanings,” i.e., of the semantic Given.) More precisely, a
certain (usually mental) state functions as a epistemic Given if (1) it is epistemically
independent, that is has an epistemic content independently of any (formal or
material) inferential relations to which it may stand in with other such contents; and,
(2) it is epistemically efficacious, that is, capable of “transmitting” its epistemic
status to other states or contents, thereby accounting for the possibility of objective
knowledge.9 (Again, if we substitute “semantic” for “epistemic”—and “purport” for
“knowledge”—in the above definition, we arrive at a definition of the semantic
Given.)
It is important here to note that Sellars, by characterizing the Given as a myth,
does not object to the notion of immediate, non-inferential knowledge (i.e., knowl-
edge that is not inferred by other knowledge). What he objects to is the idea that
the immediate, non-inferential knowledge in question is presupossitionless, that
it is “there” (in the world or in the mind) independently of its position (functional
9
See also Willem deVries and Tim Triplett, Knowledge, Mind and the Given (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 2000), xxv–vi.
5
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
role) within a historically evolved categorial framework transmitted though lan-

guage from generation to generation.
In his later work, Sellars suggests that the most general form of the myth of the
Given is that of the categorial Given, namely the view that “if a person is directly
aware of an item which [in fact] has categorial status C, then the person is aware
of it as having categorial status C.”10 The categorial Given is intimately related to
the epistemic or semantic Given: it is what explains why and how certain mental
states can be semantically or epistemically independent and efficacious; that is, it
provides the “ontological” foundation for the semantically or epistemically
“Givenist” functions of the those states. The Given can play its foundational role
(i.e., has epistemic and/or semantic independence and efficacy) just because the
categorial structure of reality is imposed on—or “discloses” itself to—the subject
who “receives” it as it really is in perception, thought, volition, intention, etc.
Yet on what grounds does Sellars reject the Given? In this section, we will
focus on his arguments against the epistemic Given (which, mutatis mutandis can
also be applied to the semantic Given).11 Although Sellars himself does not pro-
vide a general argument against all forms of the semantic and epistemic Given, we
can reconstruct the following general argument from several parts of his work.12
As was mentioned above, a state can function as an epistemic Given only if it
is epistemically independent and efficacious. However, nothing can be epistemi-
cally independent (presuppositionless) and efficacious at the same time. Epistemic
efficacy can be had only at the cost of commitment to some kind of epistemic
holism, that is only if one’s preferred “atoms” of knowledge stand in certain cog-
nitively significant relations (of presupposition) with other (particular or general)
knowledge about the world or the mind. To see this note, first, that any candidate
for playing the role of an epistemic “prime mover” can be epistemically effica-
cious only if has normative force, that is only if the distinction between truth and
falsity, correctness and incorrectness—or, in general, between what seems to be
the case and what really is the case (regarding the state of affairs it purports to
describe)—can be applied to it. This is-seems (or reality-appearance) distinction
must be operative even in the case of “immediate contents of consciousness,” that
10
Wilfrid Sellars, “Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process,” The Monist 64 (1981): 3–90, I
§44.
11
But as we shall see, one can reject the semantic and epistemic Given without necessarily rejecting
the categorial Given (we shall suggest that this is the case with the late Husserl’s notion of the “life-
world”). Hence, a case should be made against the viability of those versions of the categorial
Given too. This will be done in Section 3.3. In this section we will give a detailed description of
the categorial Given, explore its implications for a variety of philosophical views and show the
intimate relation of its rejection with a commitment to Sellars’ nominalistic scientific naturalism.
12
Mainly from Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind; see also Wilfrid Sellars, “The
Structure of Knowledge,” Action, Knowledge and Reality: Critical Studies in Honour of Wilfrid
Sellars, ed. Hector-Neri Castaneda (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1975) 295–347.
6
is contents which appear in consciousness “spontaneously, without being inferen-

tially related to other contents. Otherwise, if whenever it appeared to us that a
content ‘within our consciousness’ is of a certain kind it automatically followed
that the content in question really is of such a kind, the whole distinction on which
objective knowledge of anything (or, indeed, objective purport) depends, namely
that between right and wrong, reality and appearance, truth and falsity, correct-
ness and incorrectness, would collapse. In such a case, as Wittgenstein puts it,
“whatever is going to seem right to me is right,” but “that only means that here we
can’t talk about ‘right’” at all.13
But this means that “epistemic independence” is ultimately an incoherent
notion since its very meaning demands and simultaneously undermines the nor-
mative (and hence, semantic, epistemic) force of the items that fall under it. Thus,
in effect, only holistically structured contents can be epistemically efficacious.
For Sellars, the precise way in which epistemic holism works (is epistemically
efficacious) is, briefly, the following: Knowledge of particular facts presupposes
knowledge of general facts and the latter are justified to the extent that the frame-
work of which they are part is itself descriptively and explanatorily adequate. For
instance, an observational belief about particular facts (“this chair is blue”) can be
justified only if it is considered as part of a larger network of other beliefs—for
example about the conditions of observation (are they normal or abnormal?) and
the subject’s overall reliability. And the general principles of the framework con-
cerning the proper function of capacities and abilities of persons and the condi-
tions under which observation, introspection and memory are reliable are not
themselves presupossitionless but are justified to the extent to which the frame-
work of which they are part is itself descriptively and explanatorily adequate (here
considerations of explanatory coherence are crucial). The bottom line of all this is
that for something to function in epistemically significant (i.e., efficacious) ways
is for it to be a “node” (play a functional role) within a wider network of contents
and practices, that is within what Sellars calls the “logical space of reasons” or the
“language game” of “giving and asking for reasons”—the rationality of which
does not depend of its having any foundations, but in its self-correcting character,
that is the fact that, within it, any claim can be put into jeopardy, though not all at
once.14
Let us now turn to the most important version of the Myth, namely the myth
of the categorial Given. Our aim in this section is to show its unexpectedly wide
scope (since, as we shall see, it can be attributed even to transcendentally ori-
ented philosophical views that avoid both empiricist and rationalist versions of
the Given) and to demonstrate the intimate connection between rejecting the myth
13
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) I, 258.
14
7
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
of the categorial Given and endorsing a naturalistically oriented philosophy in

which the categorial structure of the world and the mind cannot be uncovered in-
dependently of the—fallible and self-correcting—methods of empirical inquiry.
As was mentioned earlier, the myth of the categorial Given is the view to the
effect that “if a person is directly aware of an item which [in fact] has categorial
status C, then the person is aware of it as having categorial status C.”15 That is,
one falls prey to this version of the Myth if one takes it that there is a direct clas-
sificatory awareness of categories such as “sorts,” “resemblances,” “facts,” “uni-
versals,” or even “particulars,” independently of our acquisition of a logical and
categorial framework—that is of a whole language.16
Now, this does not mean that mature language users who have mastered the use
of a categorial framework thereby become “ontological experts.” That is, for
Sellars, the fact one can apply a categorial framework in the world does not entail
that the categorial framework in question captures or reflects the categorial struc-
ture of the world. What mature language users learn when they gain mastery of a
linguistic framework is to attribute a categorial structure to the world, namely the
one that is reflected in their language.17 Yet, the categorial structure of the world
or of the mind cannot be somehow directly “read off” or intuited on the basis of
the basic descriptive and explanatory concepts of the categorial framework we
actually employ in our everyday language. Those concepts, which constitute what
Sellars terms the “manifest image” of man-in-the-world, although capable of
yielding “direct knowledge” of the world and our place in it in the context of cat-
egorial system of which they are part, are nonetheless not unchangeable essences
which put us in direct conceptual contact with the essential categorial structure of
the world or the mind.18 As Sellars puts it: “To reject the myth of the Given is to
reject the idea that the categorial structure of the world -if it has a categorial
structure- imposes itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on a melted wax”
(emphasis original).19
Recall here that the rationality of our categorial framework for describing and
explaining the world does not depend on any kind of “synchronic” foundation (not
15
Wilfrid Sellars, “Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process,” The Monist 64 (1981): 3–90, I
§44.
16
Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, §29–31.
17
Niels S. Olsen, “Reinterpreting Sellars in the Light of Brandom, McDowell and A.D. Smith,”
European Journal of Philosophy 18(4) (2009): 510–38.
18
As we shall see in Section 3 (3.2), the structure of the Husserlian “life-world” is essentially equiv-
alent to the categorial structure of the Sellarsian manifest image. The argument for the Sellarsian
view adopted here (to the effect that the manifest-image framework does not and cannot ultimately
provide direct access to the categorial structure of the world and the mind) will be provided in
Section 3 (3.3).
19
Sellars, “Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process,” I §45.
8
even a “transcendental,” phenomenological or “conceptual-grammatical” one),

but is rather a function of its self-correcting character, that is the fact that, within
it, any claim can be put into jeopardy, though not all at once. The rational—that is
non-arbitrary—character of a categorial framework consists in its self-correcting
dimension; it is only in this way that it can be considered as an inhabitant of the
“space of reasons.” Now, according to Sellars, a careful analysis of the specifics
of this self-correcting dimension of inquiry reveals the superiority of the catego-
rial framework of scientific image over that of the manifest image in the dimen-
sion of describing and explaining the world (see Section IVC. for more on this
important issue). And this gives Sellars reasons to believe that the categories
through which we conceptually represent the world (and ourselves) are not God-
given and did not evolve for the purpose of ontological insight but under selective
evolutionary pressures of survival within a relatively hostile and unpredictable
physical and social environment; their raison d’être is practical and their seeming
world-directedness ultimately has an evolutionary explanation. Moreover, for
Sellars, a philosophy free of the myth of the Given in all its forms would not have
to consider categories as mere “useful fictions” but could instead conceive of cat-
egories (and all other abstract entities), as, at bottom, rule-governed functional
roles, culturally transmitted through language from generation to generation.
And, as we also mentioned in Section I, according to this line of thought, at the
most general level, the job of categorial concepts is to make explicit (not describe
or explain) what is implicit in the use of ground-level empirical (i.e., properly de-
scriptive-explanatory) concepts, namely the conditions under which alone it is
possible to apply them in the world (or use them to make judgments).20
Now, recall Sellars definition of the categorial Given: “To reject the myth of
the Given is to reject the idea that the categorial structure of the world … imposes
itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on a melted wax.” In need not follow
from this definition that what imposes its categorial structure on the mind is rad-
ically external to the mind. On the contrary, the “Given” element which imposes
its categorial structure on the mind “as a seal imposes an image on a melted wax”
may well be the mind itself, transcendentally considered. And this means that
even some versions of transcendental philosophy—namely, those according to
which there is a sui generis level of transcendental description or explanation (of
transcendental “objects”) which is impervious to redescription on the basis of
20
In this sense, interestingly, categories would turn out to be (“transcendentally”) necessary for the
descriptive and explanatory function of ordinary (and scientific) empirical discourse about the
world, without themselves having a descriptive-explanatory function (Brandom, From Empiricism
to Expressivism. See also Wilfrid Sellars, “Counterfactuals, Dispositions and the Causal
Modalities,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II, eds. Herbert Feigl, Michael
Scriven and Grover Maxwell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1957) §62, 80–
83, 103–08).
9
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
scientific or philosophical postulational/theoretical explanations of the world and

the mind—fall prey to the myth of the categorial Given.21
In that sense, there can certainly be for example transcendental (or phenome-
nological) versions of the Given to the extent that they conceive their distinctive
(non-empirical) domain of inquiry as something that reveals a “primordial region
of being, experience, or meaning” which is explanatorily self-contained, that is,
completely independent of the realm, methods (descriptive and explanatory re-
sources) and self-correcting character of empirical inquiry. One realizes here the
radical nature of Sellars’ claim: no philosophical method can guarantee any priv-
ileged access to the real nature of the categorial structure of the world, the mind
or of our perceptual experience, by the sole use of purely non-empirical methods
of description and explanation. It is always possible that the real nature of any
non-empirically (e.g., transcendentally or phenomenologically) analyzed experi-
ence will be justifiably reconceptualized so as to be explanatorily accommodated
within the perpetually self-correcting process of empirical-scientific inquiry.
Ultimately, this is because our epistemic access to ourselves (e.g., to the cate-
gorial features of our direct perceptual “openness” to the world) is not categori-
ally different from our epistemic access to external objects. To think that there is
a difference in epistemic access between our relation to ourselves and our relation
to external objects, which makes it possible to discover the categorial structure of
the mind with the use of methods (e.g., phenomenological investigation) which are
independent of the findings of empirical inquiry and philosophical hypothetical
concept-formation, is to commit the myth of the categorial Given. The features
that constitute the being of our (e.g., perceptual) experience need not be epistem-
ically or semantically transparent to the perceiver, that is they need not automati-
cally confer implicit or explicit understanding of what they really are.22 A perceiver
can have implicit or explicit understanding of his own perceptual experience only
if s/he has mastered the use of a conceptual system which categorially classifies
perceptual experience in a certain way (as of a certain kind); however, this cate-
gorial classification, having evolved as it does to serve practical needs, interests,
and purposes of survival and collaborative action within a certain physical and
social environment, need not be a transparent reflection of the ultimate categorial
status of one’s perceptual experience all things considered, that is in the order of
being.
21
Indeed, for Sellars, this problematic sui generis level of transcendental descriptions and explana-
tions is in fact a transposition into philosophy of the basic categorial structure (or, the “pure form”)
of the manifest image of man-in-the-world (Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,”
15).
2 2
See also David Roden, “Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalized Phenomenology,”
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 (2013): 169–88.
10
Note also, in this connection, that it is precisely this resolute rejection of the
categorial Given that motivates Sellars’ scientific, nominalistic and certain more
“liberal” strands of his (peculiar brand of) naturalism. This is because (1) since no
philosophical method can guarantee any privileged access to the real nature of the
categorial structure of the world, the mind or of our perceptual experience, by the
sole use of purely non-empirical methods of description and explanation, it fol-
lows that our most reliable methods of empirical inquiry (e.g., science) play an
indispensable role in determining the content of our ontological commitments. (2)
According to Sellars, pace Quine, the results of our best sciences—and, most
importantly, our grasp of the rationale on the basis of which science itself revises
its own methods and conceptual resources of describing and explaining the
world—suggest that we have reason to believe that abstract entities of any kind are
causally inefficacious.23 Yet, for all that, there is no need to conclude from this
that abstract entities do not exist in any sense. As was mentioned in Section I, it
can well be the case that abstract entitles such as normative, intentional, modal,
semantic, and even “categorical” and “transcendental” facts (which are precisely
the facts that so-called “liberal” naturalists want to consider as parts of the furni-
ture of the world24) can be accommodated in a resolutely anti-Givenist worldview
if they are understood as playing a role different from (though not inferior to) that
of describing and explaining the world. And Sellarsian nominalism aims exactly
at fleshing out this point in detail, with the twin—extremely interesting—result
that it motivates a radical scientific and liberal form of naturalism at the same
time.
IV. DOES HUSSERL’S TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY AVOID

THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN?
A. Husserl’s Noesis-Noema Correlation

On the basis of the above analysis of the myth of the Given, we will attempt to
show that Husserl’s “noesis-noema” correlation, revealed by a purely disinterested
contemplation which describes “lived experience” in its pure “givenness,” inde-
pendently of one’s presuppositions, posits, ontological commitments, and explan-
atory procedures, is a phenomenological version of the myth of the Given (both in
23
Occam’s razor (entities are not to be multiplied beyond what is necessary for explanatory pur-
poses) plays an important role in these considerations. Of course, not everybody would agree with
Sellars’ view at this point. However, a full examination and defence of his views about nominalism
and the categorial structure of the ideal scientific image are beyond the scope of this paper.
2 4
For an overview of recent “liberal” naturalist positions see for example Mario De Caro and David
Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010).
11
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
its epistemic and categorial version). As we shall see, in this case, what has mythic
status in the Sellarsian sense is precisely the correlation between the noeses and
the noemata.25
But before we get to that, we should again make clear that, for Sellars, the myth
of the Given does not include only the specifically empiricist version of the myth.
If this were the case, Husserlian phenomenology would not be committed to the
myth of the Given. As Soffer, for example, points out, Husserl’s category of
“givenness” can be understood at least in three ways none of which involves a
commitment to an empiricist Given. The Husserlian category of givenness refers
to our mode of experiencing the world and (1) it points to the fact that phenome-
nology is concerned with a descriptive analysis of experience as opposed to a
hypothetical explanation of its physical causes, (2) it stresses the essential imma-
nence of experience, that is the fact that its acts (noeses) and contents (noemata)
cannot be thought as existing independently of consciousness, and (3) it refers to
the self-manifestation of objects in perceptual experience, as opposed to their
phenomenological status in a judgment or a belief about them. None of these
senses of Husserlian givenness fall prey to the empiricist Given since they do not
presuppose an awareness which is prior to learning, concepts or language, nor
does the occurrence of any of them in experience logically entails the existence of
empirical knowledge—their justification being always defeasible. For example, to
have a red tomato “given” in one’s perceptual experience does not imply that be-
liefs such as “this is a red tomato” or “I see a red surface” or “this tomato presents
a red sense datum to me” are adequately justified or “self-evident” in the
Husserlian sense; and this is because all these beliefs contain numerous implicit
judgments which are not strictly speaking perceived, and therefore, cannot be
“self-evident” or “given” in the strict Husserlian sense.26
However, as was stressed above, the myth of the empiricist Given is only one
version of the myth of the Given. As Sellars clearly states: “Many things have
been said to be ‘given’: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions,
real connections, first principles, even givenness itself. […] Often what is attacked
under its name are only specific varieties of ‘given’. Intuited first principles and
synthetic necessary connections were the first to come under attack. And many
who today attack ‘the whole idea of Givenness’ … are really only attacking sense-
data. […] If, however, I begin my argument with an attack on sense-datum
25
See also Carl Sachs, Intentionality and the Myths of the Given: Between Pragmatism and
Phenomenology (Vermont: Pickering and Chatto, 2014) 160–61; Tom Sparrow, The End of
Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2014) 32–37.
2 6
Gail Soffer, “Revisiting the Myth: Sellars and Husserl on the Given,” Review of Metaphysics 57(2)
(2003): 301–37.
12
theories, it is only as a first step in a general critique of the whole framework of

givenness.”27 Following Sachs,28 it will be suggested that the Given in the form
of what Sellars calls the “givenness itself” is a specific phenomenological version
of the myth of the Given to be found in Husserl’s works, especially in Ideas I29 and
Cartesian Meditations,30 where he develops his account of transcendental
phenomenology.
Central to this Husserlian account is the well-known philosophical method of
“phenomenological reduction” which culminates at the “phenomenological ep-
oché,” that is the “bracketing” or “suspending” of one’s presuppositions, posits,
ontological commitments, explanatory procedures, etc. to yield a pure description
of lived experience. The phenomenological epoché does not put the existence of
reality into question but brackets all ontological commitments to what is and what
is not actual in order to focus on the more “originary” phenomenon of the essen-
tial correlation between subjectivity and objectivity. For example, after perform-
ing the phenomenological reduction, our ordinary “natural attitude” of taking the
world to be real and objectively “out there” independently of consciousness is
transformed or “transcendentalized” and becomes the awareness that to take the
world to be “out there” independently of our consciousness is a legitimate and
meaningful point of view only as an intentional correlate of a (transcendental)
consciousness (i.e., not unconditionally).31
Now, as is well known, Husserl contends that this transcendental, purely de-
scriptive attitude should be understood in terms of the act-object model of inten-
tionality, where “noesis” is his term for the intentional act (e.g., the qualitative and
perspectival experience of perceiving a red tomato), while “noema” denotes the
“intentional content” to which the act is directed (the red tomato itself, considered
as an object to which perception is intentionally directed, not as a “thing-in-it-
self”). For Husserl, every experience consists of an intentional act (noesis) and a
corresponding intentional object (noema) which are “always already” correlated;
one cannot be thought independently of the other in this more “originary” tran-
scendental attitude toward reality. The noesis-noema intentional structure of ex-
perience is a plane of pure immanence (the object as meant is the immanent
27
28
Sachs, Intentionality and the Myths of the Given.
29
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, [1913] 1983).
30
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, [1931] 1988).
31
Husserl, Ideas I, §33–49; see also Herman Philipse, “Transcendental Idealism,” The Cambridge
Companion to Husserl, eds. Barry Smith and David W. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992) 239–322.
13
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
content of the act) where all existence positing is excluded.32 The result of all this,
as Husserl puts it, is that “when phenomenological reduction is consistently exe-
cuted, there is left for us, on the noetic side, the openly endless life of pure con-
sciousness and, as its correlate on the noematic side, the meant world, purely as
meant.”33
Now, this does not mean that either the intentional act (noesis) or the inten-
tional object (noema), considered in themselves, are Given in the pernicious
Sellarsian sense of the term. This is because the meanings that intentional con-
sciousness takes as its objects are never present in consciousness as a finished
datum; rather, they are continually explicated (awakening new horizons out of
given ones), and not fixed or indubitable like the sense-data of classical empiri-
cism. The same is true for intentional acts too: there is an infinite multiplicity of
acts of consciousness that cannot be exhausted or thematized once and for all.
However, as Sachs succinctly puts it “the phenomenological myth of the Given is
neither noetic nor noematic. Rather, the phenomenological myth is the noesis-no-
ema correlation as described from the perspective of the transcendental Ego.”34
The transcendental noesis-noema correlation commits the myth of the Given be-
cause it is indeed something—in this case the mind itself, functioning transcen-
dentally as the modalities of correlation—that imposes its categorial structure
transparently on the sustained attention of the practicing phenomenologist as “a
seal imposes itself on melted wax.”35 Recall that the noesis-noema correlation is
something that cannot be posited since it is revealed by the phenomenological
epoché, and the latter just is the rejection or suspension of all possible worldly
presuppositions or explanatory items thereof (be they empirical, scientific or phil-
osophical). In this sense it is a clear case of the myth of the categorial Given, in
which what is categorially Given is neither the categorial structure of the real
(“transcendent”) world, nor any determinate subjective act or objective content
directed to the world, but rather the immanent correlational structure of Givenness
itself, which alone makes the intentional “poles” of the correlation (subjective act
and objective content) possible and the essential modal structure of the correlation
transparent.
Moreover, since the noesis-noema correlation thereby functions as a presupos-
sitionless condition of possibility of semantic and epistemic contentfulness in
general, it also succumbs to a (non-empiricist, non-rationalist, but specifically
phenomenological) version of myth of the semantic and epistemic Given. Perhaps,
32
See also Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2005) 133–39.
33
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 37.
34
Sachs, Intentionality and the Myths of the Given, 160.
35
Ibid: 160–62.
14
it could be objected here, on Husserl’s behalf, that the awareness involved in the
noesis-noema correlation can be epistemically efficacious only if it is mediated by
concepts, and hence that Husserl does not fall prey to the myth of the epistemic
Given.36 Yet, even if this is so, as I argued above, I take it that, from a Sellarsian
point of view, more is needed for securing epistemic significance and efficacy. As
was mentioned in Section II, for something to function in epistemically signifi-
cant ways is for it to be a “node” (play a functional role) within a wider network of
contents and practices, the “language game” of “giving and asking for reasons,”
the rationality of which does not depend of its having any foundations, but in its
self-correcting character, that is the fact that, within it, any claim can be put into
jeopardy, though not all at once. And while the awareness of the noesis-noema
correlation can, in a sense, be mediated by concepts (functioning in a non-pred-
icative way), it does not seem to have the required semantic or epistemic “com-
plexity” in order for it to count as a denizen of the logical space of reasons.
Specifically, it is not at all clear how the systematically holistic and self-correct-
ing character of the latter can be so much as be involved in the determination of
the semantic and epistemic content of the self-reflexive and self-transparent
awareness of the noesis-noema correlation. The intentionality of the awareness in
question—its originary “sense-bestowing” acts—seems to be a presupposition-
less foundation and not just an expression of the intentionality characteristic of
conceptual contents or linguistic categorial frameworks belonging in the space of
reasons. This is evident, for example, in Husserl’s insistence that the essential
kinds to which intentional phenomena belong are revealed by eidetic intuition
totally independently of their role and use in a public categorial framework trans-
mitted through language from generation to generation.37 Far from depending in
any way on the latter, the categorial structures and the “space of pure possibilities
of the phenomena” revealed by eidetic intuition provide the presuppositionless
foundation for the very semantic and epistemic function of public linguistic
frameworks, including the most embracing one, the language game of giving and
asking for reasons.
Now, I think it is clear that versions of the categorial Given that entail the
semantic and epistemic Given, such as the specifically phenomenological ver-
sion that we attributed to Husserl above, are ipso facto problematic since they
inherit all the—ultimately self-undermining—features of the semantic and epis-
temic Given (mentioned in Section II). However, as we shall see below, the later
Husserl’s “transcendental phenomenology of the life-world” can be thought of as
committed to a version of the categorial Given while at the same time rejecting
the epistemic and semantic Given. In what sense can a phenomenological notion
36
Soffer, “Revisiting the Myth: Sellars and Husserl on the Given,” 305–09.
37
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 104–06.
15
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
of the life-world escape the myths of the epistemic and semantic Given? To what
precise version of the categorial Given does it fall prey to? Is this new version of
the categorial Given problematic too, and if yes why? Those questions will be
discussed in subsections IVB and IVC. But, first, we must provide a brief sketch
of the later Husserl’s notion of the life-world.
B. Husserl’s “Life-World” as a Delineation and Absolutization of the

Categorial Structure of the Sellarsian “Manifest Image”
In his last major work, the Crisis of European Sciences,38 Husserl introduces the
concept of the “life-world” and takes it to be the key for a transcendentally
grounded phenomenological philosophy.39 The life-world is the world constantly
given to us as actual in our concrete practical world-life. It is the “actually intu-
ited, actually experienced and experiencable world, in which our whole practical
life takes place.”40 The life-world is, above all, the common-sense “external”
world of middle-size perceptible objects which we put to use for various practical
purposes, the world of living-animate beings, as well as the social and cultural
world of values and institutions as the latter are straightforwardly experienced in
everyday life. This “everyday surrounding world of life” does not itself exist for a
particular purpose; on the contrary, every end presupposes it. Moreover, this
world is the ground and “horizon” of all human experience, activities and prac-
tices, including natural science.41
Crucially, our “lifeworld” experience (and hence the life-world itself) is un-
contaminated by theoretical-explanatory considerations characteristic of natural
science. The life-world may well be “practice-laden” but is theory-free. The pos-
tulated objects and processes of contemporary mathematized natural science, first
introduced by Galilean mathematical physics, are essentially abstractions from
the concrete qualitative practice-laden structures of the life-world; they should
not be understood as pointing to a “deeper reality” which supposedly explains
“lifeworldly” phenomena, but are essentially conceptual instruments, which ide-
alize certain coarse-grained perceptible features of the life-world for reasons
38
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An
Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
39
It must be noted that major themes of Husserl’s last work, especially as regards the essential struc-
ture of the “life-world” have been prefigured as early as 1913 in his Ideas II.
40
Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 50–51.
41
To experience the world in horizonal terms, among other things, means that the world is always
already there as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, both theoretical and extrathe-
oretical. Moreover, in this connection, Husserl makes the interesting suggestion that “the world …
does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no
sense when applied to it” (Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 143). That is to say, the world,
understood in horizontal terms, can neither be objectified nor pluralized.
16
of practical utility (for predicting the future course of lifeworld phenomena).

Ultimately, for Husserl, the postulated objects and properties of mathematical
physics have a “derived reality”: they can be about the world only if they refer
back to concrete “lifeworldly” structures themselves. And in this sense, they are
ontologically and semantically grounded in the life-world. The real world is the
life-world, the world qua surrounding world of human life, not the “natural world”
of the natural sciences—which can “explain” “lifeworld” phenomena only by es-
sentially abstracting from the “pre-thematically” given concrete qualitative reality
of the life-world.
Let us now briefly examine the basic features and structure of the life-world.42
According to Husserl, an essential feature of the life-world, which is accounted for
by its theory-free nature, is that it remains remarkably stable in its essential struc-
ture and its “concrete causal style” through the course of history (by contrast, the
world of scientific theorizing changes and develops). Importantly, the life-world is
holistically structured and systematically so. That is to say, each of the basic cat-
egories in terms of which the world of everyday experience can be pre-themati-
cally understood and articulated, such as (middle-size) object, person, space,
time, cause, mind, body, (inner and outer) perception, belief, desire, and action
presuppose all the others in different, though systematic, ways. Among the above
categories, those of (ordinary middle-size perceptible) objects and persons stand
out as the most important (i.e., “transcendentally correlated”) ones.
Persons are pre-thematically understood as essentially unified “things” (sub-
stances), whose attributes are bodily and mental capacities and abilities (in this
way persons are distinguished both by inanimate objects and by other sentient
animals). Those two dimensions of being a person (body and “mind”) are com-
bined together in a unity in the sense that mental capacities are essentially ex-
pressed in bodily capacities and abilities. Moreover, importantly, we experience
our affections by worldly things and our actions upon them as involving not me-
chanical causality but as caught up in a “web of motivations.” Our actions in the
life-world are motivated (not caused) by our intentions, volitions or desires; and,
on their part, lifeworldly objects do not affect us as external causes might do but
motivate us in a wide range of different but characteristic and familiar ways (e.g.,
the glass of beer over there makes me reach out my arm to grasp it). Further, since
persons not only perceive the world but act on it they are constantly subject to the
corresponding motivations and, for Husserl, this means that, in the context of the
life-world, persons directly and pre-thematically (i.e., pre-theoretically) experi-
ence the world as containing values (and counter values), which are themselves
42
See Barry Smith, “Common Sense,” The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, eds. Barry Smith and
David W. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 394–437. Our description of the
life-world here is indebted to Smith’s very detailed and illuminating exposition of this theme in
Husserl’s thought.
17
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
intimately connected with our goals or purposes. We directly experience, for ex-
ample, certain things (tools, buildings, plants, animals) such as dangerous, pleas-
ant, sweet, bitter, and their usefulness as equipment. We also directly experience
other persons as having both physical and mental characteristics, e.g., sexually
attractive, cruel, and expressive. Interestingly, webs of motivation do not pertain
only to relations between individual people (through an “I-you” synthesis), but
also to communities of persons as such (through a more complicated “we”-synthe-
sis, collective intentionality). In this way they constitute social facts which make
social institutions (as well as laws, morals, customs) possible and hold them
together.43
But what about the other basic category of the life-world, that of a “lifeworldly”
object? According to Husserl, within the context of the life-world, objects (1) are
given as unities (substances) through change and have determinate proper and
common sensible properties, indissolubly bound up and experienced as belonging
to those objects themselves (i.e., not as images or sense-data), (2) they are in con-
stant causal interaction with other such objects, (3) they are individuated by their
causal powers (their power to affect other objects and be affected by them), and
(4) they have, so to speak, their “habits,” in the sense that they behave similarly
under typically similar circumstances. And even if those “habits” break down and
something strikingly new happens, as it is occasionally the case, we still assume
that the (everyday) world exhibits a “universal causal style” which makes possible
“hypotheses, predictions about the unknown of its present, past and future.”44
Moreover, the world of everyday life admits of a distinction between reality and
appearance, albeit in a sense that is applicable both to primary and secondary
qualities. Things and their sensible properties, as well as the ultimate causes that
explain their manifest behavior, may appear other than they really are, but we are
always in a position in principle to determine their real nature without introducing
any substantial changes in the basic “lifeworldly” categorial concepts and distinc-
tions.45 This is an expression of the following fundamental features of the life-
world: (1) there is a distinction in all its spheres and dimensions between what is
normal and what is abnormal in the behavior of its “objects” (including persons),
(2) within the context of the life-world, abnormal behavior of any kind is, as it
were, passed over without comment, in the sense that it is not held to yield data
that is relevant to the general characteristic features of the life-world (i.e., not such
43
These ideas, as well as the notion of the life-world under the heading of “Umvelt” (surrounding
world) were already introduced by Husserl in the posthumously published Ideas II. See Edmund
Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy-
Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, [1913] 1989).
4 4
Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 31.
45
This means for example that, contra Galilean mathematized natural science, we need not view the
real world as bereft of secondary qualities.
18
as to give rise to the need to change our global understanding of its descriptive and
explanatory dimension). That is to say, the life-world can subject itself to local but
not to global (descriptive and explanatory) revision; judgments as to individual
matters of fact can be overturned in the course of time, but the general beliefs/
principles which stand fast at the heart of the framework simply cannot. This is
because, in the context of the life-world, behavioral patterns (of objects or persons
alike) which fall outside the realm of what is normal are taken as secondary to or
as deformations of that optimal behavioral patterns which alone count as real.46
Now, the most striking thing to note in Husserl’s description of the life-world
above is that its structure nearly exactly fits the Sellarsian manifest image of man-
in-the-world.47 Most of Husserl’s categorial distinctions as well as the essential
features of each life-world category are also to be found in the Sellarsian manifest
image, as the latter is described for example in Sellars’ well-known article
46
For example, the colour of an object seen in optimal conditions (in sunlight, on a clear day, without
the influence of other bodies which might affect the colour appearance), by normal persons (both
mentally and bodily), counts as the colour in-itself. This applies to both primary and secondary
qualities. Thus, the ontology of the life-world is that of the “direct realist”: in normal experience
we have access to the things (and their properties) themselves.
47
This becomes evident if we briefly sketch what the manifest image comes down to for Sellars: It is
“the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world” (Wilfrid
Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Science, Perception and Reality
(London: Routledge, 1963) 6). The basic conceptual category of the manifest image framework
-which cannot be further explanatorily reduced within this image- is that of a person -considered
as the locus of a set of normatively individuated capacities and abilities. Persons are human beings
conceived as single logical and metaphysical subjects that have the capacity to act at will and on
the basis of reasons within a world comprised of perceptible middle-sized objects (and lower forms
of life such as plants and sentient animals), whose behaviour is, by and large (but not always),
predictable and lawlike. An important feature of the manifest image is that its explanatory meth-
ods are essentially correlational, in the sense that explanation in the latter (be it about the behavior
of persons, animals or physical objects) is a matter of inductively correlating certain perceptible
and introspective (essentially observable) phenomena with other such observable phenomena. This
clearly distinguishes the manifest image from the scientific image, where explanation is essentially
postulational: The scientific image explains by postulating the existence of certain unobservable
entities and properties, which are non-normative in nature, and constitute the “underlying reality”
to which our common-sense conception of the world and ourselves is the surface “appearance”
(Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”).
19
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
“Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”48—with the welcome addition to

the Sellarsian manifest-image framework of Husserl’s notions of the “horizontal”
structure of the (manifest-image) world and of the “web of motivations” as explan-
atorily basic in accounting for specifically human experience. Indeed, I take it
that from Sellars’ point of view, Husserl’s conception of the life-world would be
an extremely sophisticated “transcendental description” of the “pure form” of the
manifest image.49 And in what follows, I will argue that the Husserlian life-world,
by being essentially an absolutization of the manifest image (i.e., by depicting the
manifest image as ultimately real, and the scientific image as of derivative status),
is a version of the categorial Given, albeit one which, due to the systematically
holistic structure of the life-world, avoids both the epistemic and the semantic
Given.
But before embarking on this task, let me note that there are certain interpreta-
tions of Husserl’s conception of the life-world according to which the structure of
the latter is ontologically and epistemologically grounded on a transcendental
consciousness very similar to that introduced by Husserl in his Ideas I and
Cartesian Meditations.50 In such a case, as we saw in subsection IVA, Husserlian
transcendental phenomenology would again fall prey to the myth of the Given—
where the Given element would be the “givenness” (i.e., the presuppositionless
status) of the correlation between the world and transcendental consciousness.
There are certainly such “transcendental idealist”—and even “transcendental
48
Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Science, Perception and Reality
(London: Routledge, 1963). Note that Sellars, exactly like Husserl, does not equate categorial
structure with predicative structure. The former is more basic than the latter (but Sellars differs
from Husserl in that he takes it that pre-predicative structure is a species of conceptual structure).
Our manifest experience of ourselves-in-the-world can well have categorial structure in a reso-
lutely pre-predicative form. (See also Wilfrid Sellars Science and Metaphysics (Atascadero, CA:
Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1967) 1–30. There, Sellars introduces a non-decomposable
(“this-such”) form of categorial synthesis which characterizes perceptual and affective experi-
ence, enabling them to conceptually represent individuals as such, that is not as instances of uni-
versals or as mediated by general concepts.)
49
Interestingly, Sellars believes that the most successful attempts to delineate the categorial struc-
ture of the manifest image are to be found in the philosophy of Aristotle (and the ensuing
Aristotelian tradition), in Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics and in later Wittgenstein’s philoso-
phy (recall that Sellars used to call the manifest image the “Aristotelian-Strawsonian” framework).
I leave it to the reader to appreciate the impressive similarity of the Husserlian life-world with the
Aristotelian world, Strawson’s descriptive ontology, and the later Wittgenstein’s descriptions of
our everyday language games characteristic of our “form of life.”
50
See for example Herman Philipse, “Transcendental Idealism,” The Cambridge Companion to
Husserl, eds. Barry Smith and David W. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
239–323; David W. Smith, “Mind and Body,” The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, eds. Barry
Smith and David W. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 323–93.
20
solipsist”—stands in Husserl’s thinking that persisted until the end of his career.
However, the interpretation in question is not universally accepted.51 For instance,
the concept of the life-world can be understood as itself a transcendental concept
which delineates the transcendental conditions which make life possible as com-
mon life within a shared world. In this way, the life-world, far from being inde-
pendently grounded in “transcendental consciousness” or the transcendental
“subject-object” correlation, would actually be what those contentious terms at-
tempt to express. And, in any case, I take it that the conception of the Husserlian
life-world sketched out in this section, where the latter is understood as the struc-
ture which expresses the transcendental conditions of the manifestation of per-
sons-in-the-(public, common and external)-world, can stand on its own feet
independently of any spurious—that is presuppositionless—transcendental ideal-
ist/solipsist baggage. Hence, the following question becomes important: Does this
late-Husserlian conception of the life-world, purged of its transcendentally ideal-
ist/solipsist connotations, manage to avoid the myth of the Given in all its forms
(epistemic, semantic, categorial)?
It seems to me that this “deflationary” understanding of Husserl’s transcenden-
tal phenomenology of the life-world has the merit of enabling the latter to escape
the myth of the Given in its epistemic and semantic forms. This is because nothing
in the concept of life-world described above commits phenomenology to the claim
that the structure of the life-world is epistemically or semantically presupposi-
tionless. Semantic and epistemic consciousness of the “essential” structures of
the life-world amounts to an awareness of a systematically holistically structured
network, namely, of a network of concepts and practices caught up in relations of
mutual dependence. In this sense, the “pre-thematic” awareness of the structures
of the life-world amounts to an awareness of the holistically structured catego-
rial framework of natural language (the Sellarsian “manifest image”) and need
not logically antecede it. Again, precisely for this reason, lifeworld phenomenol-
ogy (of this deflationary stripe) is not vulnerable to the version of the categorial
Given that plagued Husserl’s previous versions of transcendental phenomenol-
ogy. In that case, as was shown in subsection IVA, the problem was precisely
that the noesis-noema correlation was supposed to be a transparent structure of
51
See for example Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge,
1962); Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Dan Zahavi,
Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Merleau-Ponty, Moran and
Zahavi emphasize, for example, the essentially intersubjective, “communal” character, and holis-
tic structure, of “transcendental subjectivity” in later Husserl. Moreover, according to Zahavi, the
later Husserl comes close to the view that the constitution-manifestation of the world (as a public
field of experience), the unfolding of self and the establishing of intersubjectivity are all parts in
an interrelated and simultaneous process.
21
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
consciousness, which the mind, transcendentally considered as the modalities of

correlation, imposes upon the sustained attention of the practicing phenomenol-
ogist as “a seal imposes itself on melted wax.” This kind of self-reflexive trans-
parent awareness of the noesis-noema correlation is “there” independently of any
awareness of a holistically structured categorial framework in terms of which we
understand our everyday dealings with others within a common world (such as
the manifest-image framework). By contrast, this is not so in the case of our “im-
mediate” “intuitive” awareness of the life-world (at least under a “deflationary”
understanding of the role of “transcendental consciousness” in “constituting” the
life-world). And this means that the intuitive awareness of the life-world need not
and should not be understood as completely presuppositionless.
However, I submit that even this deflationary—and, to my mind, far more
plausible—understanding of the life-world does involve a commitment to an ob-
jectionable form of the Given, namely a version of the categorial Given. This is
because, even in this more “sober” interpretation of the life-world, the basic cate-
gorial structures of the latter are understood as unchangeable “intuited essences,”
that is as basic categories that govern all lifeworldly descriptions and explanations
which have an unchallengeable authenticity: they cannot be subject to revision
on the basis of scientific or philosophical postulational/theoretical explanations
of the world and ourselves. And, as we saw in Section II, this view, however free
of transcendental idealist connotations, is a version of the myth of the categorial
Given.
C. Why is Manifest-Image Categorial Givenness Problematic?

Yet, why is a commitment to this specific version of the categorial Given phil-
osophically problematic? What is ultimately problematic with thinking that the
manifest-image categorial structure of the life-world can reflect the fundamental
general categorial structure of the world independently of any changes or re-
finements of the descriptive and explanatory resources of the scientific image—
especially if we take into account the fact that, on this view, any particular
empirical belief within the manifest-image framework can be subject to revision
as a result of scientific advancements?
Briefly put, I take it that, from a Sellarsian point of view, the main problem
with this view is that it wrongly assumes that the manifest-image categorial
framework is “(scientific) theory-free,” that is descriptively and explanatorily au-
tonomous, independently of the postulation of unobservable entities and processes
by the descriptive and explanatory resources of the scientific image. Yet, in fact,
scientific theorizing is a continuation of a dimension of discourse which already
exists (in a crude, vague, and schematic form) in the “pre-scientific” stage of the
life-world. That is to say, ordinary explanations within the life-world (of the
22
“habitual” behavior of lifeworldly entities, and of deviations thereof) are already

implicitly “theoretical” or “postulational” in the sense that, for example exactly
like more sophisticated scientific explanations, they are expressions of the attempt
to explain why things which are similar in their observable properties differ in
their causal properties, and why things which are similar in their causal properties
differ in their observable properties.52
However, at this point, a “lifeworld” phenomenologist could object that even if
it is granted that, in some sense, scientific postulational explanations are “contin-
uous” with ordinary “lifeworldly” explanations (e.g., in that both may be under-
stood as theoretical or “postulational” explanations), it does not follow that
lifeworld explanations are deficient or deprived of their autonomy with respect to
scientific ones. However theoretical or “postulational” it may be, the categorial
framework of the life-world, with its distinctively “morphological” (i.e., non-
ideal), inexact (by nature approximate) and “intuitive” explanations,53 can well be
descriptively and explanatorily self-sufficient—for example due to the status of
those “lifeworld” explanations as essentially non-ideal, non-exact and “intuit-
able,” as opposed to scientific explanations which are ideal, exact and “non-intu-
itable” as a matter of principle.54 And, from this point of view, unobservable
objects and properties postulated by science could be understood as “calculational
devices,” the value and status of which consist in their systematizing and heuristic
role with respect to confirmable generalizations (i.e., occurrences of actual and
possible experiential phenomena) formulated in more originary “lifeworldly”
terms. (This is indeed Husserl’s position in the Crisis. It is essentially a version of
scientific instrumentalism and it is based on what Sellars calls a “positivistic”
conception of science55.)
Yet, this response is eminently problematic—at least from a Sellarsian point
of view, and, I would argue, from the point of view of sound philosophy. It can be
argued that the descriptive resources of the scientific image offer better explana-
tions of the world and ourselves than those couched in lifeworld terms. The reason
for this is that the scientific image is precisely the framework that arises out of the
52
53
Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 27; Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 130–32.
54
Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 127–29.
55
Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, §43. It has been argued that Husserl’s position
here can be understood as a sophisticated version of scientific anti-realism along the lines of Van
Fraassen’s constructive empiricism -which, among other things, is agnostic about the existence of
“in principle” unobservable entities such as lithium atoms, ionized particles and the like (see e.g.,
Harald A. Wiltsche, “What is Wrong with Husserl’s Scientific Anti-realism?,” Inquiry 55(2)
(2012): 105–30.) I will not here dispute whether this interpretation better captures Husserl’s posi-
tion on this issue; suffice it to say that our Sellars-inspired arguments used below in support for
scientific realism can be equally levelled against van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism.
23
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
life-world itself in order to account for phenomena which, from the standpoint of
the life-world, constitute irreducible explanatory anomalies.
We can better appreciate Sellars’ argument here if we first stress two very
basic views of his: (1) Lifeworld terms are essentially “schematic,” individuated
in vague, open-textured and inexact, but relatively “stable,” ways by their percep-
tual, practical and inferential functional role (expressed in the counterfactually
robust—that is lawlike and essentially non-monotonic56 —inferences in which a
“lifeworld” descriptive term appears) within a complex system of social norms
and practices.57 Yet, our conception of what materially realizes this functional
56
To say that the inferences in which a “lifeworld” term appears are essentially non-monotonic is to
say that the goodness of the inference among other things depends on having a view about which
possible additional collateral premises or auxiliary hypotheses would, and which would not, defeat
it. Chestnut trees produce chestnuts -unless they are immature of blighted. Dry, well made matches
strike -unless there is no oxygen. That is, the inferences in question are surrounded by a nimbus of
unspoken ‘unless’es (potential defeasors) which though essential for the determination of the
goodness of the inference, are essentially open-ended and not antecedently surveyable (see e.g.,
Brandom, From Empiricism to Expressivism, 141–42, 164). This is, I think, the key for under-
standing the precise way in which, for Sellars, lifeworld terms can be relatively stable/determinate
and vague, open-textured and inexact at the same time.
57
In Husserlian terminology, this Sellarsian line of thought about the content of lifeworld terms ex-
presses their essential “morphological” structure. This term gives expression to the fact that, un-
like scientifically described ideal structures (e.g., of mathematical physics), the concrete structure
of ordinary “cultural” objects such as knives, pens, glasses or natural objects such as birds, trees
and stones is characterized by configurations that are essentially vague and are directly seized
upon on the basis of sensuous intuition. This means that the circumstances and consequences of
application of lifeworld concepts are essentially fluid, although, it is also true that this fluidity is
“stabilized” by the fact that those circumstances and consequences of application specify the rules
(the counterfactually robust -that is lawlike- inferences in which a lifeworld term appears) which
determine the range of circumstances under which lifeworld phenomena behave “normally” (as
they are expected to behave given their “nature” and properties) or “abnormally.” Husserl seems to
think that this essential fluidity or “indeterminacy” of lifeworld concepts and phenomena is a
framework condition of any determinacy (including the “ideal” determinacy bestowed by scientif-
ic-image concepts). On the other hand, Husserl himself concedes that the life-world is intrinsically
underdetermined in many respects. For example, despite our default lifeworldly assumption of
universal causal regularity, the events within the life-world are marked by incomplete explainabil-
ity (a lack of causal closure). This gives rise to the tricky problem of specifying the (descriptive
and explanatory) limits of the life-world, and it is precisely here, I contend, that Sellars would press
this point against the Husserlian conception of the life-world.
24
role can be subject to revision, improvement, becoming thereby less “schematic”

and more determinate.58 (2) Empirical generalizations formulated in manifest-im-
age “lifeworld” terms turn out to be unstable (non-lawlike), that is subject to ob-
servationally unpredicted variation.59 That is, “lifeworldly” generalizations, by
failing to be lawlike (counterfactually robust) under certain conditions, are defec-
tive in their own terms—as the drawing of an “intuitively” clear distinction be-
tween inductive generalizations that do and those that do not support
counterfactuals, being essential for the determination of the projectibility of our
everyday inductions, is a need (and, hence, a demand) that arises out of the life-
world itself. Moreover, it turns out that it is only on the basis of the postulated
unobservable entities and processes of the scientific image that we are in a posi-
tion to explain the conditions under which lifeworld generalizations hold lawfully
and the conditions under which they fail to hold. In other words, the descriptive
resources of the scientific image are needed to explain why the inductive general-
izations formulated in “lifeworldly” terms hold (are lawlike, counterfactually ro-
bust, supported by manifest-image subjunctive conditionals) only within certain
boundary conditions.60 That is to say, in the last analysis, the unobservable enti-
ties and laws couched in scientific-image terms are indispensable because they
explain why “lifeworldly” observational/experiential generalizations about the
behavior of persons or worldly objects are violated (i.e., they explain why life-
worldly entities under certain conditions do not behave as they are expected to do
if their behavior had indeed been governed by the observational generalizations
58
For example, it might be thought that “water” is picked out as “whatever stuff causes certain ef-
fects.” In this case it would be a schematic (manifest-image) sortal which would really be a place-
holder for less schematic (scientific-image) sortals. And the latter, less schematic scientific-image
sortals, in turn, would be the expression of the normative ideals built into our manifest-image
concept of “water” -that is of what ideally ought to be the case for something to count as “water.”
That is to say, scientific-image sortals would be justified by their superior explanatory power in
accounting for explanatory anomalies of manifest-image observable “water” phenomena. Note
that the sortals that identify and individuate intentional states and episodes are similarly
schematic.
59
Wilfrid Sellars, “Phenomenalism,” in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge, 1963)
60–105.
60
Wilfrid Sellars, “The Language of Theories,” in Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science, eds.
Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961) 57–77.
25
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
couched in lifeworldly terms).61 Note also, importantly, that by performing the

aforementioned explanatory task—that is, by restoring the lawful character of
hitherto unstable empirical “lifeworldly” generalizations-, the postulational scien-
tific-image framework becomes indispensable for generating new testable life-
wordly generalizations, that is novel predictions, incapable of being anticipated
and conceptualized as such within the categorial framework of the life-world. The
above discussion therefore suggests that the scientific realist claim to the effect
that scientific-image descriptive vocabulary ultimately better explains what from
the point of view of manifest-image “lifeworld” vocabulary (in its descriptive and
explanatory dimension) seems to be brute, non-lawful, random behavior (experi-
entially unpredicted variation) of the empirical generalizations couched in mani-
fest-image “lifeworld” kind terms, makes perfect sense. It seems then that,
ironically, the supposed categorial autonomy or “insulation” of the manifest-im-
age framework is undermined by explanatory ideals built-in in its own descriptive
and explanatory principles. The descriptive and explanatory resources of the life-
world contain, so to speak, the epistemic seeds of their ontological destruction.
D. Life-World and Science: A Dialectical Relation

If the above analysis is in the right direction, Husserl’s most mature conception of
phenomenology as a “science” of the life-world is ultimately untenable (even if it
is purged of its transcendental idealist/solipsist connotations). Pace Husserl, the
distinctions between observational and postulational terms, “intuitive” and
61
Note, for example, that if empirical generalizations are understood as having exclusively manifest
experiential content then the observed fact to the effect that for example gases do not obey the
Boyle-Charles empirical law at very high pressures does not follow lawfully from past observa-
tional generalizations if we are restricted to the conceptual resources of the “manifest” observa-
tional framework alone, and can only be conceived as a brute anomalous fact whose behaviour
obeys no law (Wilfrid Sellars, “Is Scientific Realism Tenable?,” Proceedings of the Philosophy of
Science Association Vol. II (1976): 307–34). Hence, the empirical generalizations formulated
within the life-world framework, being strictly speaking non-lawlike (accidental), cannot even be
inductively confirmed by their instances, that is by the particular observational facts that fall
within their purview (since induction always involves going beyond one’s evidence from actual
cases to counterfactual ones and accidental generalizations are precisely not counterfactually ro-
bust). By contrast, if we use the conceptual resources of the scientific postulational framework, the
instability of the behaviour of gases in very high pressures virtually disappears and, given the
theoretical framework of the kinetic theory of gases (with its unobservable entities, properties and
the laws that relate them), the behaviour of gases is considered again normal, lawful and only to be
expected. At the same time, given the theoretical framework of the kinetic theory of gases, we can
explain why empirical generalizations couched in “lifeworldly” terms (the Charles-Boyle empiri-
cal law) are violated: this violation is ultimately an appearance (it only seems to be a violation) of
a deeper (lawful) reality, whose entities, properties and laws are in a position to account for the fact
that it presents itself to us as appearance (i.e., as usually obeying and occasionally violating the
Charles-Boyle law).
26
“non-intuitive” explanations, or, in general, between an essentially “non-objecti-

fied” life-world and an “objectified” theoretical science, are ultimately method-
ological, not substantive. The difference concerns how we know about something
(non-inferentially and through our unaided senses in the former cases, by means
of inference and technological aids in the latter), not the kind of thing we know
about.62 That is, the cash value of the above distinctions is epistemological, not
categorial-ontological. Moreover, it can be argued that, viewed from a histori-
cal-developmental point of view,63 the distinction between the manifest and the
scientific image can itself be understood as essentially dialectical: scientific-im-
age unobservable entities postulated to explain anomalies (observationally unpre-
dicted variations, both about the “external” and the “internal” world) in the
original manifest image can be subsequently incorporated to our perceptual and
practical engagements with the world, and thus become features of a new concep-
tually transformed manifest image, enabling us again to be manifestly “open”—
albeit in novel categorial and observational terms—to the world and ourselves.
Unfortunately, Husserl, throughout his career, remained blind to this possibil-
ity of establishing a “dialectical” relation between the lived experience as it is
lived through and conceptualized within the manifest image and the
62
And from this it follows that the status of an object as theoretical (unobservable) or observable is
not fixed and can change over time. For example, the existence of Mendelian genes was initially
postulated as an explanation of observationally unpredicted variations in the hereditary character-
istics of pea plants; yet, later, Mendelian genes became able to be observed on the basis of (theo-
retically-driven) predictions about where to look as well as the use of better microscopes. More
importantly, recall here that, according to Sellars, even intentional states such as thoughts, desires,
intentions, beliefs, or non-intentional states such as sensations, were also initially theoretical (un-
observable) entities postulated to explain behavioural anomalies, and only later became observa-
tional, i.e. obtained a reporting role (see Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, §
46–63).
63
Of course, this is not the only way to view the relation between the manifest and the scientific
image. The latter can be also understood as “ideal types,” that is as “idealized” completed catego-
rial frameworks. Sellars, for his purposes, usually emphasizes the idealized (rather than the histor-
ical-dialectical) dimension of the manifest and the scientific images. And this is no accident. Note,
for example, that this idealized dimension of the images is precisely what enables us to notice the
similarity of the manifest image with the Husserlian concept of the life-world (itself an idealized
philosophical construction), to criticize the latter (as an absolutization of the manifest-image) and
to propose an alternative account of explaining worldly phenomena and ourselves (the scientific
image, with its radically different categorial structure), which, taken as an idealized whole, can, in
principle, replace the manifest-image categorial framework in its perceptual-inferential-practical
role. Yet, for the purposes of our argument in this section, we shall highlight the historical-devel-
opmental dimension of the Sellarsian images.
27
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
theoretical-postulational explanatory framework of the scientific image.64 Even if

Husserl himself missed this possibility, it could perhaps be suggested that the key
for overcoming the myth of the Given in all its forms for “lifeworld” phenomenol-
ogists would lie in their willingness to de-absolutize and effectively “dialecticize”
(without, of course, completely erasing) the distinction between the life-world
and the sciences. Yet, although I think that there is some truth in this suggestion,
I also believe that it comes with a significant cost for the phenomenologist. For it
can be suggested that, in this way, phenomenology would be free of the myth of
the Given only at the cost of blurring the boundaries between “phenomenologi-
cal” and non-phenomenological (non-descriptive) philosophical standpoints. In
this case, phenomenology would have to work with a very different “de-phenom-
enologized” conception of the transcendental, and, at best, it would end up being
a radically different kind of phenomenology, while, at worst, what would be left
over would not be recognizable as “phenomenology” any more.65
6 4
Here, it must be noted that Husserl explicitly held that although science is grounded in the life-
world, it constantly flows back into it constituting thereby one of its parts. As he puts it “We have
two different things: [concrete] lifeworld and objective-scientific world, though of course they are
related to each other. The knowledge of the objective-scientific world is “grounded” in the self
evidence of the lifeworld. The latter is pre-given to the scientific worker, or the working commu-
nity, as ground; yet, as they built upon this, what they built is something new, something different”
(Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 130–31). Hence, it seems that Husserl allows the possibility
that through the course of history, spheres of scientific experience can constitute new layers of
significance upon the life-world. Yet, even if we conceive the life-world in this extended sense as
something capable of historical development, in which scientific experience can flow back into the
life-world enriching it, the fact remains that the life-world is one and the same categorially at the
primordial level. (See also Panos Theodorou, “A Solution to the ‘Paradoxical’ Relation between
Lifeworld and Science in Husserl,” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2010): 143–65.) Its “pri-
mordial” categorial structure is insulated from the historically developing categorial structures
that the scientific experience builds out of it. This is also shown by the fact that, for Husserl, the
life-world is the “ground” of the scientific world not just in a methodological sense (as it is for
Sellars), but in a much more robust -semantic, and even “ontological”- sense. And this means that
Husserl is in no position to conceive the relation between the life-world and science as a dialectical
one, even if he adds a historical-developmental dimension to the former.
65
Of course, here one could object that even if our claim above is true for Husserl’s brands of tran-
scendental phenomenology, it does not apply for example to Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty, as they
both radically depart from Husserl’s transcendental methodology while at the same time remain-
ing recognizably “lifeworld” phenomenologists. This may well be true. I do not claim that the
present critique of “lifeworld” phenomenology can be applied to all conceivable versions of the
latter. Suffice it to say, however, that our critique does apply to those versions of “lifeworld” phe-
nomenology that transcendentally privilege the “intuitive” categorial structure of the life-world
over that of the scientific image, irrespectively of the level (apperceptive or non-apperceptive) in
which they take the lifeworldly correlation between the “self” and the “world” to be established,
or the method (phenomenological reduction or e.g., transcendental-hermeneutical method) through
which they arrive at this view.
28
V. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Let us conclude this paper with some thoughts on what remains of the transcen-
dental after the rejection of the myth of the “phenomenological” Given and the
adoption of a Sellarsian scientific naturalism. The nominalistic (metalinguistic,
normative) interpretation of the transcendental and the resolute rejection of the
myth of the Given makes Sellarsian naturalism a distinctive non-phenomenolog-
ical version of what might be called “transcendental nominalistic naturalism”
which can provide an alternative to Husserlian transcendental phenomenology—
both in its “correlationist” and “life-world” versions. The deepest divide in the
philosophical encounter between Sellarsian naturalism and Husserlian transcen-
dental phenomenology seems to lie in their corresponding interpretation of the
transcendental and their very different attitudes toward scientific realism: Sellars
construes the transcendental in a scientific-realist-friendly way, namely as some-
thing devoid of phenomenological-qualitative structure, as not involving privi-
leged access to a special domain of pure descriptions of the “immanent contents”
of consciousness or to the “intuitable” categorial structures of the life-world.
Indeed, with Sellars, we can suggest that the transcendental is indeed “pure,” but
its “pureness,” devoid as it is of phenomenological or “intuitive” content, far from
being a barrier in principle to the possibility of radical reconceptualization of the
descriptive and explanatory resources of our existing categorial framework (the
manifest image), actually makes room for exactly this kind of in principle possi-
bility. But this is a story for another occasion.
University of Athens, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
29

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SELLARS’ NATURALISM, THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN AND

II. SELLARS’ SCIENTIFIC NOMINALISTIC NATURALISM

methodological naturalism is understood as the claim that the descriptive and

III. SELLARS’ NATURALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE

role) within a historically evolved categorial framework transmitted though lan-

is contents which appear in consciousness “spontaneously, without being inferen-

of the categorial Given and endorsing a naturalistically oriented philosophy in

even a “transcendental,” phenomenological or “conceptual-grammatical” one),

scientific or philosophical postulational/theoretical explanations of the world and

IV. DOES HUSSERL’S TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY AVOID

A. Husserl’s Noesis-Noema Correlation

theories, it is only as a first step in a general critique of the whole framework of

B. Husserl’s “Life-World” as a Delineation and Absolutization of the

of practical utility (for predicting the future course of lifeworld phenomena).

“Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”48—with the welcome addition to

consciousness, which the mind, transcendentally considered as the modalities of

C. Why is Manifest-Image Categorial Givenness Problematic?

“habitual” behavior of lifeworldly entities, and of deviations thereof) are already

role can be subject to revision, improvement, becoming thereby less “schematic”

couched in lifeworldly terms).61 Note also, importantly, that by performing the

D. Life-World and Science: A Dialectical Relation

“non-intuitive” explanations, or, in general, between an essentially “non-objecti-

theoretical-postulational explanatory framework of the scientific image.64 Even if

University of Athens, Department of History and Philosophy of Science

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