O contraste entre o espaço das razões e o reino da lei ao qual Sellars implicitamente apela não estava disponível antes dos tempos modernos. Os filósofos modernos não sentiram uma tensão entre a ideia de que o conhecimento tem um status normativo e a ideia de um exercício de poderes naturais. Porém, a ascensão da ciência moderna tornou disponível uma concepção de natureza que faz a advertência de uma falácia naturalista na epistemologia inteligível. Por isso o contraste que Sellars traça (...) pode estabelecer uma agenda para a filosofia hoje. Eu quero distinguir duas maneiras de empreender tal projeto. A ideia é a de que a organização do espaço das razões não é, como Sellars sugere, estranha ao tipo de estrutura que a ciência natural descobre no mundo. Pensar e conhecer são parte de nossa maneira de ser animais. Para mostrar isso, vou distinguir entre dois tipos de naturalismo: um naturalismo restritivo e um naturalismo liberal. Quero sugerir que o argumento de Millikan em favor de um naturalismo restritivo ao criticar a semântica fregiana está contaminado pela adesão a um cartesianismo residual. Esse é o resultado de uma troca familiar; o preço de descartar o imaterialismo cartesiano, enquanto se permanece no interior do naturalismo restritivo, é o de que a parte que se escolheu da natureza não é mais especial o suficiente para ser creditada com poderes de pensamento. Vou argumentar que o lugar próprio à ideia de “apreender sentidos” está em descrever padrões em nossas vidas – nossas vidas mentais, nesse caso – que são inteligíveis somente em termos das relações que estruturam o espaço das razões. Essa padronização envolve racionalidade genuína, não apenas “racionalidade mecânica”. O naturalismo liberal não precisa nada mais, para fazer a ideia de “apreender sentidos” não-problemática, do que uma insistência perfeitamente razoável em que tais padrões realmente moldam as nossas vidas. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 377-381, June 2012.

In recent work, John McDowell has urged that we resurrect the Kantian thesis that concepts without intuitions are empty. I distinguish two forms of the thesis: a strong form that applies to all concepts and a weak form that is limited to empirical concepts. Because McDowell rejects Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, he can accept only the weaker form of the thesis. But this position is unstable. The reasoning behind McDowell’s insistence that empirical concepts can have content only if they (...) are actualizable in passive experience makes it mysterious how the concepts of pure mathematics can have content. In fact, historically, it was anxiety about the possibility of mathematical content, and not worries about the “Myth of the Given,” that spurred the retreat from Kantian views of empirical content. McDowell owes us some more therapy on this score. (shrink)

This book addresses one of the fundamental topics in philosophy: the relation between appearance and reality. John Yolton draws on a rich combination of historical and contemporary material, ranging from the early modern period to present-day debates, to examine this central philosophical preoccupation, which he presents in terms of distinctions between phenomena and causes, causes and meaning, and persons and man. He explores in detail how Locke, Berkeley and Hume talk of appearances and their relation to reality, and offers (...) illuminating connections and comparisons with the work of contemporary philosophers such as Paul Churchland and John McDowell. He concludes by offering his own proposal for a 'realism of appearances', which incorporates elements of both Humean and Kantian thinking. His important study will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the history of philosophy, the history of ideas, and contemporary philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Reconstructions of Kant are prominent in the contemporary debate over naturalism. Given that this naturalism rejects a priori principles, Kant's anti-naturalism can best be discerned in the “critical turn” as a response to David Hume. Hume did not awaken Kant to criticize but to defend rational metaphysics. But when Kant went transcendental did he not, in fact, go transcendent? The controversy in the 1990s over John McDowell's Mind and World explored just this suspicion: the questions of the normative force (...) of reason and of the ontological “space of reasons” vis- -vis the world. “Bald naturalism” appears to “extrude” rationality both ontologically and epistemologically from the natural world. Kant sought to discriminate a transcendental middle ground, safe from either extrusion. But was Kant's notion of the autonomy and spontaneity of reason as metaphysically innocent as McDowell's critics would have it? Situating Hume and naturalism in the eighteenth-century German context can help us understand the “critical turn” more accurately. While Hume recognized procedural proprieties for reflection, he did not believe in their a priori necessity. Initially, Kant shared that view. What assimilating Leibniz and Locke in the late 1760s garnered for Kant—the simultaneous spontaneity and self-transparency of reason—seemed to provide a means for overcoming Hume's skepticism and establishing a new foundation for metaphysics. Accordingly, all of the efforts of modern Kantianism notwithstanding, there is more than a whiff of the transcendent in Kant's transcendentalism. (shrink)

Part 1 argues that, despite rhetorical appearances, McDowell accepts a standard version of epistemic externalism. Moreover, epistemic externalism plays an important role in McDowell’s response to skepticism. Part 2 argues that, contra McDowell, epistemic externalism is necessary for rejecting skepticism, and content externalism is not sufficient for rejecting skepticism.

This paper explores a familiar skeptical problematic and considers some strategies for responding to it. Section 1 reconstructs and disambiguates the skeptical problematic, distinguishing between some importantly different lines of skeptical reasoning. Section 2 distinguishes two kinds of anti-skeptical strategy. “Cooperative strategies” accept the conditions on knowledge that are laid down by a target skeptical argument, and argue that those conditions can be satisfied in a relevant domain. “Critical strategies” respond to a skeptical argument by rejecting some condition on knowledge (...) that the argument supposes. It is argued that critical strategies readily present themselves against the skeptical problematic once it is disambiguated as in Section 1. Section 3 looks at an interesting anti-skeptical strategy from Ram Neta and Duncan Pritchard on behalf of John McDowell. Here I argue that, initial appearances to the contrary, no plausible cooperative strategy is available to the internalist. (shrink)

Quine (1960, Word and object. Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. ‘Rabbit’ might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous ‘argument from below’ to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the matter (...) as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine’s claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans 1975; 1975, Journal of Philosophy, LXXII(13), 343–362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), Gareth Evans: Collected papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.), and various patches have been suggested (e.g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), A companion to the philosophy of language (pp. 397–426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as ‘rabbit’ divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine’s rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine’s rabbit-slices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

Being dedicated to the memory of the great Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who died in the month it was given, this Aquinas lecture begins with some reflections on the relationship between the anti-scientistic, anti-Cartesian position argued for by Anscombe and her teacher Wittgenstein, and the outlook of Thomas Aquinas. It then proceeds to explore the familiar Thomistic idea that philosophical reflection provides the means to establish the existence of God. Drawing in part on Aquinas, but also and perhaps unexpectedly on (...) the idealism of Berkeley and on the semantic intuitionism of Michael Dummett (a former student of Anscombe), I argue that theism follows both from the assumption of realism and from the assumption of anti-realism, and that this fact reveals something of the complexity involved in the claim that God both creates and knows the world. Finally, I examine the relationship between Aristotelian-Thomistic pluralistic realism and the attempt by John McDowell to fashion a position that lies between Platonism and reductive naturalism. (shrink)

In my book God’s Call1 I gave an historical account of the debate within twentieth century analytic philosophy between moral realism and expressivism. Moral realism is the view that moral properties like goodness or cruelty exist independently of our making judgements that things have such properties. Such judgements are, on this theory, objectively true when the things referred to have the specified properties and objectively false when they do not. Expressivism is the view that when a person makes a moral (...) judgment, she is expressing emotion or desire or will. I used the term ‘orectic’ to refer to these mental states, because we do not have in English a sufficiently general term. In God’s Call, I started with a moral realist whom I called a ‘platonist’, G. E. Moore, and then I traced the argument through the emotivists, A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson, and the prescriptivist, R. M. Hare, and Iris Murdoch, whom I called a ‘humble platonist’, and J. L. Mackie’s ‘error theory’, and John McDowell, whose theory I call ‘disposition theory’, and David Brink, the ‘new-wave realist’, and Allan Gibbard, who calls his own theory ‘ norm expressivism ’. My project was to collect together the concessions that the two sides of the debate have made to each other over the course of this history, and then to construct a position which molds these concessions into a single coherent theory. I called this theory ‘prescriptive realism’. (shrink)

Hernández Betancur, Juan Pablo. “Racionalidad y acción no reflexiva. El debate Dreyfus-McDowell.” Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía [Ciudad de México, UNAM], 47.140 (2015): 43-63.

This chapter treats Hubert Dreyfus’ account of skilled coping as part of his wider project of demonstrating the sovereignty of practical intelligence over all other forms of intelligence. In contrast to the standard picture of human beings as essentially rational, individual agents, Dreyfus argued powerfully on phenomenological and empirical grounds that humans are fundamentally embedded, absorbed, and embodied. These commitments are present throughout Dreyfus’ philosophical writings, from his critique of Artificial Intelligence research in the 1970s and 1980s to his rejection (...) of John McDowell’s conceptualism in his 2005 APA Presidential Address. The present chapter articulates Dreyfus’ proposal for a contentless, non-mentalistic form of intentionality by contrasting his position with that of his U.C. Berkeley colleague John Searle and defending it as a plausible alternative to the so-called “Standard Story” of intentional action as the effect of an agent’s mental states. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ engagement with Thomism in “Being and Being Known” is examined, specifically for his reformulation of the thesis that the mind in its mental acts is in some sense identical in form to the object known. Borrowing the notion of “isomorphism” from modern set theory, Sellars describes an identity of form between mind and world that is non-intentional in the “Realm of the Real,” while confining all questions of meaning and truth to the “Realm of the Intentional.” John (...) McDowell’s response to Sellars’ reformulation is then examined. McDowell is critical of Sellars’ “blind spot” on the normativity of truth, and argues for the embedding of the intentional in the Realm of the Real under the guise of truth. This paper notes difficulties with both authors’ discussions. Both authors are misled in their discussions of Aquinas by an overemphasis upon the “mental word” as described by Peter Geach. In addition it is proposed that Sellars’ notion of “isomorphisms” has the additional problem of adequately distinguishing various types of mental statements as neural states in the Realm of the Real. The paper concludes by arguing for a deep affinity between McDowell and Aquinas on the normativity of truth. (shrink)

In the face of pluralism, moral constructivists attempt to salvage cognitivism by separating moral and ethical issues. Divergence over ethical issues, which concern the good life, would not threaten moral cognitivism, which is based on identifying generalizable interests as worthy of defending, using reason. Yet this approach falters given the inability of the constructivist to provide us a sure path by which to discern generalizable interests in difficult cases. Still, even if this approach to constructivism fails, cognitivist aspirations may not (...) be defeated if we can continue discursively in a project of identifying and appreciating the interests of others. Grasping the interests of others may require a transformation of moral sensibility such that agents recognize values they have not acknowledged before. This view calls for external moral discourse—that is, moral discourse that makes no appeal to an agent's present interests or desires but rather engages in description of the moral situation in hopes of bringing about a change in moral sensibility. (shrink)

John McDowell has argued that for human needs to matter in practical deliberation, we must have already acquired the full range of character traits that are imparted by an ethical upbringing. Since our upbringings can diverge considerably, his argument makes trouble for any Aristotelian ethical naturalism that wants to support a single set of moral virtues. I argue here that there is a story to be told about the normal course of human life according to which it is no (...) coincidence that there is agreement on the virtues. Because we are creatures who arrive at personhood only by learning from others in a relation of dependency, we cannot help but see ourselves as creatures for whom non-instrumental rationality is the norm. Those who train others in personhood must view the trainee's interests as having a value independent of their interests and must imbue the trainee with a sense of that value. Extending and preserving the sense of self-worth that we must acquire if we are to acquire personhood requires we see ourselves as creatures who need something like the virtues. (shrink)

I review this fine collection of articles on ancient ethics ranging from the Presocratics to Sextus Empiricus. Eight of the nine chapters are published here for the first time. Contributors include Charles H. Kahn on "Pre-Platonic Ethics," C. C. W. Taylor on "Platonic Ethics," Stephen Everson on "Aristotle on Nature and Value," John McDowell on "Some Issues in Aristotle's Moral Psychology," David Sedley on "The Inferential Foundations of Epicurean Ethics," T. H. Irwin on "Socratic Paradox and Stoic Theory," Julia (...) Annas on "Doing Without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies," and Susan Sauvé Meyer on "Moral Responsibility: Aristotle and After." There is also an introductory essay by the editor, Stephen Everson. I summarize and then critique each chapter in this rather lengthy review. (shrink)

The essays are arranged in two sections of ethical topics and a section on philosophy, evolution, and the human sciences that includes the title essay, “Making Sense of Humanity.” In World, Mind and Ethics, excellent pieces by Elster, Sen, Jardine, Hookway, McDowell, Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, Altham, and Hollis range even more widely: over ethics, political philosophy, and epistemology, reflecting some of the breadth of Williams’s interests.

The essays are arranged in two sections of ethical topics and a section on philosophy, evolution, and the human sciences that includes the title essay, “Making Sense of Humanity.” In World, Mind and Ethics, excellent pieces by Elster, Sen, Jardine, Hookway, McDowell, Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, Altham, and Hollis range even more widely: over ethics, political philosophy, and epistemology, reflecting some of the breadth of Williams’s interests.

Nuestro interés en el contenido mental no-conceptual es, principalmente, la articulación de una versión sustantiva (no-trivial) de esta clase de contenido en la experiencia perceptual. El debate acerca del contenido no-conceptual ha girado, en su mayor parte, alrededor de su existencia; y los argumentos que se han ofrecido en su favor abogan por una versión no sustantiva según la cual el contenido no-conceptual es aquel que no satisface ciertos requisitos conceptuales. Así, para desarrollar una versión sustantiva del contenido mental no-conceptual (...) hemos apelado a la versión de la experiencia perceptual de propiedades espaciales ofrecida por Evans (1982 cap. 6). A partir de esto desarrollamos un nuevo argumento a favor del contenido no-conceptual de la experiencia perceptual que lo vincula a la actividad característica de la experiencia perceptual. Por último, exponemos uno de los ataques de McDowell (1996) a la noción de contenido no-conceptual y presentamos nuestras réplicas a este ataque, mostrando su insuficiencia. Al mostrar que la crítica de McDowell no es exitosa, consideramos que podríamos tener una versión del contenido no-conceptual de la experiencia que es inmune a esta línea de argumentación. (shrink)

This slim volume derives from the John Locke Lectures delivered in Oxford in 1991 and expands and develops the themes presented there and in a series of influential articles published during the last decade and a half. McDowell offers the prospect of "re-enchanting" a world laid bare by reductive "bald" naturalism, drawing support in this effort from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Sellars. Others who feature prominently are Donald Davidson, Gareth Evans, Richard Rorty, and Sir Peter Strawson.

This paper defends a neo-Aristotelian conception of practical wisdom as a virtue that enables human agents to reflect on and direct their lives toward virtuous ends over time. This view is sometimes assumed to require a commitment to an intellectualist Grand End or blueprint view. On that view, practical wisdom would require philosophical insight and an implausibly well worked out set of weighted preferences. In this paper, I aim to show that particularists can and should take on much of what (...) was thought to belong to the Grand End view. I argue for a conception of practical wisdom as a virtue of extended action that accounts for overarching ends without the need to appeal to an unrealistic, intellectualized blueprint for life. Further, on the view advocated here, as in Aristotle, practical wisdom is a virtue of substantial rationality and a different capacity from instrumental rationality in that it requires reflection on what constitutes a good human life. This is not high-minded philosophical reflection and is, in fact, something rather mundane that draws on the same rational capacities we deploy to assess the goodness of actions. (shrink)

John McDowell's contribution to philosophy has ranged across Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. His writings have drawn on the works of, amongst others, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson. His contributions have made him one of the most widely read, discussed and challenging philosophers writing today. This book provides a careful account of the main claims that McDowell advances in a number of different areas of philosophy. The interconnections between the (...) different arguments are highlighted and Tim Thornton shows how these individual projects are unified in a post-Kantian framework that articulates the preconditions of thought and language. Thornton sets out the differing strands of McDowell's work prior to, and leading up to, their combination in the broader philosophical vision revealed in "Mind and World" and provides an interpretative and critical framework that will help shape ongoing debates surrounding McDowell's work. An underlying theme of the book is whether McDowell's therapeutic approach to philosophy, which owes much to the later Wittgenstein, is consistent with the substance of McDowell's discussion of nature that uses the vocabulary of other philosophers including, centrally, Kant. (shrink)

Review of McDowell, John. Mind and World.

John McDowell is one of the most widely read philosophers in recent years. His engagement with a philosophy of language, mind and ethics and with philosophers ranging from Aristotle and Wittgenstein to Hegel and Gadamer make him one of the most original and outstanding philosophical thinkers of the post-war period. In this clear and engaging book Tim Thornton introduces and examines the full range of McDowell's thought. After a helpful introduction setting out McDowell's general view of philosophy Thornton introduces (...) and explains the following topics: • Wittgenstein on philosophy, normativity and understanding • value judgements • theories of meaning and sense • singular thought and Cartesianism • experience, knowledge and openness to the world • Mind and World and idealism • action and the debate with Hubert Dreyfus on conceptual content and skilled coping. This second edition has been significantly revised and expanded to include new sections on: McDowell's work on disjunctivism and criticisms of it; a new chapter on McDowell's modification of his account of perceptual experience and conceptual content and criticisms by Charles Travis; and a new chapter on action and McDowell's engagement with Hubert Dreyfus and the debate concerning skilled coping and mindedness. The addition of a glossary makes John McDowell, second edition essential reading for those studying McDowell, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology, as well as for students of the recent history of analytical philosophy generally. Tim Thornton is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health at University of Central Lancashire, UK. He is author of Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry (2007), Wittgenstein on Language and Thought (1998), co-author of the Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (2006), and Tacit Knowledge (2013) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (2013). (shrink)

John McDowell has set the philosophical world alight with arevolutionary approach to the subject, illuminating old problemswith dazzling particularity. In this welcome introduction to hiswork, Maximilian de Gaynesford puts writing within comfortablereach of non-specialists. The guiding argument of the book is that the variety of McDowell'sinterests disguises a core concern with a single basic goal:'giving philosophy peace'. Since the dawn of the subject,philosophy has struggled with the question: can our experience ofthe world give rational support to what we think (...) and say; and ifso, how? McDowell claims that philosophy has itself to blame ifthese questions seem problematic, and this book's animating purposeis to see what sense can be made of this notorious claim. InMcDowell's view, the illusion that our fundamental relations withthe world are truly problematic is traceable to false views aboutnature. We should give proper weight to a natural fact about theworld: that human beings are of a kind that is naturally placedwithin the natural order. De Gaynesford analyses McDowell's densely argued and meticulouswork in a lucid, balanced and engaging way, that will proveinvaluable for all students and scholars of McDowell andphilosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that John McDowell’s approach to perception in terms of “openness”remains problematically vulnerable to the threat of scepticism. The leading thought of the openness view is that objects, events and others in the world, and no substitute, just are what is disclosed in perceptual experience. An account which aims to defend this thought must show, therefore, that the content of perceptual experience does not “all short” of its objects. We shall describe how (...) McDowell defends the openness view with reference to the disjunctive analysis of appearances (sections II and III); argue that his defence includes features which are both inconsistent with and unnecessary for the openness view (section IV); and show how those features call into question the success of McDowell’s route of response to sceptical arguments (section V). Finally, we sketch an alternative approach to openness and conclude that the explosive effect of letting loose the conception of experience advanced by the openness view has yet to be felt in the English‐speaking world (section VI). (shrink)

_John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature_ combines original essays by leading contemporary philosophers with point by point responses by McDowell himself to explore the central themes of one of the most innovative philosophers of our day. Provides original and critical essays examining McDowell’s reading and appropriation of Sellars, Kant, and Hegel in his own philosophy Explores McDowell’s notions of perceptual experience and his proposed rethinking of our conception of nature in light of the challenges that reason and normativity introduce Includes (...) an original essay by McDowell that includes significant developments of his conception of perceptual experience Offers thorough and penetrating responses by McDowell to his critics. (shrink)

John McDowell's philosophical ideas are both influential and comprehensive, encompassing philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and the history of philosophy. This book is a much-needed systematic overview of McDowell's thought that offers a clear and accessible route through the main elements of his philosophy. Arguing that the world and minded human subject are constitutively interdependent, the book examines and critically engages with McDowell's views on naturalism of second nature, the inner space model, intentionality, personhood and (...) practical wisdom. The book presents novel discussions on the debates between McDowell and other key philosophers, including Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Brandom, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Immanuel Kant, amongst others. Demonstrating a thorough understanding of McDowell's work, Tony Cheng makes connections to both the phenomenological tradition and cognitive sciences to show the wider relevance of McDowell's philosophy. In doing so, he sheds light on how influential McDowell's thought is to the analytic tradition. -/- . (shrink)

_John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature_ combines original essays by leading contemporary philosophers with point by point responses by McDowell himself to explore the central themes of one of the most innovative philosophers of our day. Provides original and critical essays examining McDowell’s reading and appropriation of Sellars, Kant, and Hegel in his own philosophy Explores McDowell’s notions of perceptual experience and his proposed rethinking of our conception of nature in light of the challenges that reason and normativity introduce Includes (...) an original essay by McDowell that includes significant developments of his conception of perceptual experience Offers thorough and penetrating responses by McDowell to his critics. (shrink)