Mind and World

Rating:
Summary: "Evolution Of The Stone"
Review: Of all the books which dominated the discussion of analytic philosophy in the 90s, John McDowell's *Mind and World* was actually the one which most nearly brought home the prize of great philosophy without naughty bits: and this most nearly in the form of an inversion of Lukacs "Reification and the Consciousness of the Professoriat". His early Oxgaffes having been forgotten, McDowell was here free to offer an "unpolitical" account of contemporary thought drawing heavily from classic works. But if the result is not quite Robert Brandom's linguistic Leninism, the reader ends up getting a story about "who's to be master" that has a little too much excitement squeezed into McDowell's oscillating queries.

Much as Brandom makes a hash of the relationship between formal semantics and "inferentialism", McDowell's account of Hegel's relationship to (...) does not even crib Gadamer's (...) as a corrective to his "uncritical" eudaemonism (those interested in Hegel's intellectual relationship to Aristotle would do well to look at Alfredo Ferrarin's book instead) -- and the excitement one is forever waiting on with respect to Sellars is pressed into service for a thoroughly unserviceable treatment of Hegel's remark "in thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other" -- very much the product of Stoic philosophy, and very much militating against the "therapeutic" story about non-conceptual content directly following (with apologies rendered to Peacocke for his rather more serviceable story).

Is any of this that objectionable? No, and although McDowell's work was very much "in a vogue" for a while (i.e., served upon you according to his lecture specifications) this (as well as his essays) is fine reading concerning stylistics with respect to thoughts of the form "whereof we cannot speak..." But none of it is as thoroughly "Wittgensteinian" as presented, and if McDowell can still coherently be accused of rendering a disservice to that philosopher this heavily syncretist work must be counted as one such. I expect this is not the case, however, and as such cannot in good conscience recommend this book to interested readers: if you are in the grip of a worry, perhaps you should stay there, and if you feel differently perhaps being notified of your pseudo-problems will not help overmuch. Something of a lecture-stuffer.

Rating:
Summary: Not a history of philosophy textbook but brilliant still...
Review: The last reviewer, if I was able to correctly glean any substantive criticism through his opaque, ostentatious, unneeded name-dropping prose, correctly suggested that McDowell does not do *historical* justice to some of the historical ideas he treats in M&W. Fortunately, this doesn't matter one bit. McDowell's methodology in this book is to illustrate a general strategy for relieving a dialectic between polemical philosophical positions. The historical references are used to set up the dialectic, not to solve it. If McDowell is right, then if you plug the perfect historical account of Hegel into a dialectic with some naive empiricist (or 'bald naturalist') then you'll get the same tension and the same method will relieve it. This general strategy of McDowell's does bear very strong affinities to the methodology central to the later work of Wittgenstein. But, again, the point of the book is not to present a historically perfect account of Wittgenstein's later thought but strike out into new territory, since McDowell obviously isn't saying 'here is the historical view of the later Wittgenstein and here is how it deals with all this junk that Sellars, Davidson and Peacocke have been going on about'. It's more like, one can draw methodological insight X from Wittgenstein and, oh my, look at the light this sheds on the issue of conceptual content! Indeed, for those who have engaged in the discipline of working out a tenable and historically correct version of the later Wittgenstein you know that if it is possible (and I suggest it is not) it is not a matter to be tackled as a casual preface to another philosophical project. On these grounds it should be clear that charges against the merit of McDowell's historical commentary in M&W simply miss the point. This is a intricate and interesting piece of philosophy that I encourage anyone with a serious interest in philosophy to read and evaluate on its own terms.

Rating:
Summary: Essential Reading
Review: 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.