Gerardo Orlando Téllez Hernández

PhD project

Title: "Zwischen der Heimwelt und dem Nebel der Unbekanntheit. Eine generativ-phänomenologische Antwort auf die Sellarssche Kritik am Mythos des Gegebenen" [Between the home world and the fog of obscurity: a generative-phenomenological answer to Sellars' criticism of the Myth of the Given]

The aim of the dissertation is to show that Husserl's phenomenology - especially his late reflections on generativity - does not succumb to the Myth of the Given, as has recently been claimed in the literature (e.g. Carl Sachs 2014). To this end, I first distinguish between five forms of the given which can be assumed to be "myths" according to Sellars' criticism if one takes a dogmatic fundamentalist position: (1) sensations, (2) concepts, (3) basic sentences, (4) consciousness and (5) pictures of the world. Accordingly, I attempt to demonstrate that we can achieve a generative-phenomenological change of attitude, where we come to realize that (5) our home world is shaped by history and has no unconditional precedence over other worlds. (1), (2) and (3) should be situated in this limited context and even (4) should be re-interpreted as a dimension which is not a final source of knowledge, but rather a process which is constituted by the open interplay of generations.