Mind and World [Paperback]

John McDowell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674576101 | ISBN-13: 978-0674576100 | Publication Date: September 1, 1996

Modern Philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.

John McDowell amply illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy--the insidious persistence of dualism--in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable--but surmountable--failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the logical space of reasons" into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ever since Descartes, a lot of the very best philosophers have thought of science as an invading army from whose depredations safe havens have somehow to be constructed. Philosophy patrols the borders, keeping the sciences "intellectually respectable" by keeping them "within...proper bounds." But you have to look outside these bounds if what you care about is the life of the spirit or the life of the mind. McDowell's is as good a contemporary representative of this kind of philosophical sensibility as you could hope to find.
--Jerry Fodor (London Review of Books )

A powerfully impressive book which simply towers over the more routine contributions of current analytical philosophy.
--Simon Glendinning (Radical Philosophy )

McDowell locates an important tension in our thinking about thought, suggests an attractive way of easing the tension, and offers a plausible diagnosis of why the tension is acute...Mind and World is a genuinely provocative book that should be discussed.
--Paul M. Pietroski (Canadian Journal of Philosophy )

About the Author

John McDowell is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674576101
• ISBN-13: 978-0674576100
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #96,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Reading, November 19, 2001

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Flounder (Substitution Instance) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Mind and World (Paperback)

This text with its new Introduction clearly demonstrates McDowell's prominence in American philosophy. McDowell is certainly one of the most important, careful, and creative minds in the field. Mind and World is crucial reading material on perceptual content, judgment, and experience.

Inspired by Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, McDowell interrogates the notion of a 'logical space of reasons' as having location in the natural world. At times adopting an obscure and abstract prose style, McDowell nevertheless identifies specific anxieties concerning the realtion between mind and world: tensions between a Kantian sensible intuition (or 'minimal empiricism')--how our thoughts are answerable to and directed at the world--and the idea of receiving an impression (or Kantian humility) as a transaction with the world, placing it in a 'logical space of reasons.' So there is a tension between a normative context, that is, how the world 'impinges' on us, which is within the logical space of reasons, and empirical concepts that are supposed to be within the logical space of nature. But if we take Sellars seriously, identifying something as an impression--an economy of logical space of nature 'giving' or 'impinging' on the mind, then we are responsible to characterize just how an 'impinging world' is different from justifying or placing a verdict on empirical descriptions. McDowell's tension is between a 'minimal empiricism'--thought is answerable to a tribunal of experience--and how experience is indeed a tribunal, which attributes verdicts on thoughts.

Along the way, McDowell critiques the Myth of the Given, Davidson's coherentism, and argues for 'direct realism.'
McDowell has a flair for characterizing and 'exorcising' philosophical anxieties between empiricism and naturalism, and he employs creative metaphors that are extremely helpful, such as the 'seesaw' and a 'sideways on view.'

The first three lectures are most important, wherein he discusses conceptual and non-conceptual content. Here he engages the views of Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Evans, and Peacocke.

Mind and World is a masterful example of careful and thorough-going philosophy--at its best.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Evolution of the Stone", March 9, 2004

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Jeffrey Rubard (Beaverton, OR US) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mind and World (Paperback)

Logical grammar concerns itself with "functors", devices that transform parts of language into other parts. For example, predicates combine with names of objects to form sentences. One of the less-celebrated functor types is the "subnector", which transforms sentences into terms: returning from the complex to the simple. *Mind and World* is a subnector of a book. The philosophical issues it engages with are central ones, but they are developed against a background of baroque analytical machinery. In other words, you really have to know in quite a bit of detail what several difficult figures had to say before McDowell's own concerns are at all clear.

This should not be surprising, given that the book was originally the 1991 John Locke Lectures at Oxford: these lectures are delivered yearly to professional philosophers who have formalized theories and intricate arguments well in hand, but are looking to re-evaluate the "big picture" of the philosophical enterprise. McDowell accordingly polemically bases his presentation on philosophers he was closely linked to in earlier work, Donald Davidson and Gareth Evans. McDowell has elsewhere spent a great deal of energy defending and refining their ideas, but the emphasis here is on his divergence from them concerning the role of concepts in our experience of the world.

Beginning from Wilfrid Sellars' rejection of givenness, McDowell aims to vindicate a view of experience derived from Kant: that experience requires the exercise of conceptual capacities (such as the ability to discriminate facts about the object which might be true of other objects) and an element corresponding to Kantian "intutions", the influence of independent realities. McDowell argues that both elements are essential to including true, meaningful experience as a core element in our rational thought: misconstruing them as inessentially linked at will or heterogeneous and incapable of mixing leads to the reappearance of many traditional problems of epistemology we could otherwise opt out of.

McDowell then goes on to consider how such conceptual capacities could be part of the repertoire of a natural creature such as a human being, without appealing to an extra-natural "soul". His theory is derived from Aristotle's account of moral formation; Aristotle makes this out to be a matter of "second nature", which McDowell generalizes to cover the development of all "normative" conceptualization of the world, including our sense of action, under the heading of *Bildung* (a concept borrowed from the German pedagogical tradition). He ends his lectures by considering, in this light, Marx on the relationship of man to his world and Gadamer on the importance of tradition for rational thought.

This relates to McDowell's stated intention in the preface, that the whole work serve as a prolegomenon to the reading of Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit*. (In my opinion, the work fails to serve this purpose: the only Hegel quotation in the lectures is tendentiously interpreted, and Hegel's own treatment of *Bildung* in the *Phenomenology* makes it a critical and anti-traditional moment of the development of Spirit.) Those hoping for insight about Marx's relation to Hegel will be disappointed: in fact, as might be expected given his many favorable references to Gadamer, McDowell's own conclusions are in many ways diametrically opposite to those of the "Hegelian Marxists".

The lectures are followed by four postscripts, which expand upon technical disagreements between McDowell and other analytic philosophers mentioned in passing in the lectures. All of these will be of some interest to those who follow analytic philosophy closely, especially the interpretation of Wittgenstein: but there is less "systematic" content in these and the introduction (added for the paperback edition). They contribute to the relative irrelevancy of this book for the interested layman hoping to get a sense of McDowell's program, who would be better served by reading McDowell's paper "Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space" (included in *Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality*).

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars terse and elegant prose, May 1, 2005

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Jennifer R. Howell (Las Vegas, NV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mind and World (Paperback)

John McDowell's insight on how we acquire conceptual knowledge of the external world is brilliant. Basing his argument on the Kantian conception of receptitivity and spontaneity, John McDowell not only eases the philosophical anxiety of acquiring conceptual capacities and the epistemic role experience plays by destroying the need for the anxiety at all. I recommend this for any person interested in philosophy that is constructive and not just a response to someone else's question. McDowell, unlike most philosophers in our age, is not just picking at a niggling point, he is bringing fresh ideas to the philosophical table.