Abstract

Mach’s positivism shares with Husserl’s phenomenology the anti-metaphysical requirement to debunk experience from the categories we have projected in it. However, when it comes to determine its content, are raised issues that, even today, we strive to tackle. Whether Mach is blamed for renewing with the empirical myth of atomically impressions, or he is praised for anticipating the Gestaltpsychologie, it seems to us that the essential point was missed. A contrario, we would like to insist on the radical subversion of the Kantian concept of givenness. In the first place, he distances himself from the representational conception of givenness and frees it from a double myth. In the second place, Mach dissociates givenness from transcendental philosophy and liberates it from the problem of objectivity and of constitution. This deconstruction of the hylemorphic schema enables Mach to deliver a new concept of givenness, construed as the irreducible experience of what happens : thus his post-Kantian empiricism turns out to be singular in the history of occidental philosophy. Neither logical givenness nor operative concept, the meaning of which depends on the global context, for Mach givennness can only be restored once categorically neutralized.