Wilfrid Sellars - The Myth of the Given (1956)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
An Implicit Hegelian
Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) is one of the most important analytic philosophers of the twentieth century—and at the same time a secret Hegelian. His essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956) becomes one of the most cited texts in analytic philosophy—although (or because?) it reformulates central Hegelian insights without mentioning Hegel.[1]
The central thesis: there is no myth of the given—no immediate, unmediated experience serving as the foundation of knowledge. Every experience is already conceptually structured, every piece of knowledge presupposes other knowledge claims. There is no “epistemic foundation” from which everything else could be deduced.
The Hegel connection: this is Hegel’s critique of sense-certainty (Phenomenology, first chapter). Sense-certainty believes it grasps the immediate (“this here, now”). But it already articulates itself linguistically—and language is general, not immediate. The “here” is not this concrete here but a category applicable to many places. There is no unmediated certainty—every articulation is already mediation.[2]
Sellars’ formulation: “the space of reasons.” Knowledge is not causal determination by sensory stimuli, but justified assertion within the space of reasons. And reasons are conceptual—they presuppose concepts that are socially shared, learned, embedded in practices.
The transformation: Sellars naturalizes Hegel’s insight. It is no longer about “mind” unfolding itself, but about social practices of giving reasons. But the structure is Hegelian: mediation is constitutive, not accidental. There is nothing unmediated—every experience presupposes conceptual structures.
Significance for the Later Reception of Hegel
Sellars’ essay is fully appreciated only in the 1970s and 1980s—especially by Robert Brandom and John McDowell, who explicitly bring out its Hegelian dimension (Volume III). But already in the 1960s it becomes clear: analytic philosophy cannot do without mediation, conceptuality, social constitution—and hence not without structures that Hegel was the first to make systematically explicit.
Systematic point: Sellars shows that one can think in Hegelian terms without knowing it. His critique of the myth of the given is an analytic reformulation of Hegel’s critique of sense-certainty. This means: Hegel’s insights are not metaphysical but structural—they concern the architecture of knowledge, not its “absolute” ground.