Mind and World: With a New Introduction by the Author / Edition 2

by John McDowell

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674576100
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/01/1996
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.60(d)
Lexile:	1430L (what's this?)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Lecture I. Concepts and Intuitions

Lecture II. The Unboundedness of the Conceptual

Lecture III. Non-conceptual Content

Lecture IV. Reason and Nature

Lecture V. Action, Meaning, and the Self

Lecture VI. Rational and Other Animals

Afterword

Part I. Davidson in Context

Part II. Postscript to Lecture III

Part III. Postscript to Lecture V

Part IV. Postscript to Lecture VI

Index

Editorial Reviews

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.

London Review of Books - Jerry Fodor

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.

Canadian Journal of Philosophy - Paul M. Pietroski

Mind and World is, above all, a work of therapy; and, like every good talking cure, it is hard work. But the diagnosis is penetrating, deeply persuasive, and expressed with that ear for the right phrase precisely placed which is the literary equivalent of perfect pitch.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy - Max de Gaynesford

A powerfully impressive book which simply towers over the more routine contributions of current analytical philosophy.

Radical Philosophy - Simon Glendinning

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

A powerfully impressive book which simply towers over the more routine contributions of current analytical philosophy.
— Simon Glendinning

Radical Philosophy

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

Based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures by McDowell (philosophy, U. of Pittsburgh) on empirical thought and the problem of dualism in modern philosophy. McDowell illustrates the pitfalls of conceiving of empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience through the works of philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson, and proposes a return to a pre-modern conception of nature. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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