ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the various chapters of this book. This book explores several inter-related questions concerning what must be done to have a philosophically adequate conception of intentionality. One criterion imposed on that conception was that it must not fall afoul of the Myth of the semantic Given. The book argues that people need such a conception in order to satisfy the demand for transcendental friction. It shows that not all Givens are Mythic; while Wilfrid Sellars is correct to criticize the Myth of the Given, there is indeed another kind of Given, the perceptuo-practical Given of lived embodiment or what Hanna calls 'the Grip of the Given', which is not a Myth but a genuinely transcendental condition of the possibility of empirical conceptual content. Distinguishing between these different notions of 'Given' is crucial for assessing what analytic pragmatism and existential phenomenology can learn from each other.