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Notes
Christensen glosses this expression by referring to Husserl’s idea of perceptual fullness (Fülle) (p. 9).
In fact, the idea that experience has conceptual content (whether it is construed apophantically or aesthetically) is an exception in analytic philosophy today. Apart from McDowell, conceptualism has been defended by Bill Brewer, but he has recently changed his position. The acceptance of non-conceptual content is the standard view among contemporary analytic philosophers (e.g. Tyler Burge, Tim Crane, Jerry Fodor, Christopher Peacocke, Michael Tye).
In an answer to one of his critics McDowell denies a conception of the conceptual “according to which actualizations of conceptual capacities are operations of a pure intellect, independent of ordinary capacities for practical engagement with reality” (McDowell 2006, p. 135).
McDowell specifically warns against the problematic prejudice that Christensen attributes to him, and which requires “words to do all the work of expression by themselves, without help from the lived-in situations in which we speak” (McDowell 2006, p. 135).
McDowell has recently revised his idea that experience has propositional content and now distinguishes between discursive activity with propositional content and experience, which has intuitional, yet still conceptual content (McDowell 2009a, p. 262ff.). This distinction could seem to confirm Christensen’s critique and his attempt to develop a non-propositional conception of experience. McDowell’s change of position, however, does not concern the points that Christensen correctly emphasises in his transcendental arguments but that he wrongly accuses McDowell for having overlooked. McDowell’s conception was, in other words, never rationalistic in the sense Christensen implies, and his new position can therefore not be a retraction of such a conception.
It should be noted that McDowell can hardly be described as a straightforward “analytic philosopher”. His conception of experience is an exception among analytic philosophers today (cf. n 2 above), and his way of articulating his thinking through interpretations of classical authors such as Aristotle, Kant or Wittgenstein seems closer to the approach practiced by continental philosophers like Gadamer or Dieter Henrich than to the standard analytical approach. Crispin Wright has suggested that Mind and World is not a piece of analytic philosophy because of its extensive use of imagery and its failure to define terms and explicate assumptions and theses (Wright 2002, p. 157). In his answer to this critique, McDowell asserts that analytic philosophy is compatible with using imagery, letting “the full import of a term […] emerge gradually in the course of using it” instead of setting down a definition from the start, and deconstructing dominant prejudices and dualisms rather than engaging in constructive philosophy that aims “to compel an audience into accepting theses” on the basis of unquestionable assumptions (McDowell 2002b, p. 291).
Cf. the debate between McDowell and Dreyfus (Dreyfus 2005, 2007a, b; McDowell 2007a, b). Dreyfus is another example of a phenomenological thinker who misconstrues McDowell’s conceptualism in a rationalistic manner and thereby overlooks the phronetic strand in his thinking. McDowell points out this problematic prejudice in his first response to Dreyfus’ critique and explicitly argues that he agrees with Gadamer (and Heidegger) on this issue (McDowell 2007a). Dreyfus acknowledges McDowell’s point and reformulates his critique.
The attempt to characterize McDowell as a contemporary version of a pre-phenomenological philosopher is also made in Crowell (2001). Crowell compares McDowell’s position to that of the Neo-Kantian Emil Lask. He claims that McDowell’s naturalism of second nature is susceptible to an unhappy oscillation between scepticism and dogmatism unless it is supplemented by a transcendental constitution theory drawing its inspiration from Husserl and Heidegger (Crowell 2001, p. 16). Like Lask, McDowell rejects constitutional analyses but without it “McDowell’s Aristotelian conception of nature comes off as little more than a deus ex machina compared with the well-wrought conception of meaningless ‘nature’ established by natural science” (Crowell 2001, p. 17). Unlike Christensen, however, the aim of Crowell’s book is not to reconstruct McDowell but to reinterpret Husserl and Heidegger’s transcendental phenomenology, and his remarks concerning McDowell are therefore meant as an indication of the possible contemporary relevance of such a reinterpretation.
Christensen tries to explain away this link between worldliness and second nature by suggesting that McDowell does not speak about the world—the horizon of our intentionality—but only about “a particular, linguistically mediated social, cultural and traditional world” (p. 309). But as he makes clear elsewhere, McDowell understands Gadamer’s concept of world and world-view to relate to the world and not to a particular (view of the) world (McDowell 2002a, p. 176ff. [(2009b, p. 137ff.)].
Zahavi (2010) criticizes McDowell on this point from the perspective of genetic phenomenology.
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Thaning, M.S. Carleton B. Christensen, Self and World: From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology. Husserl Stud 26, 233–243 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-010-9078-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-010-9078-2