Mind and World: With a New Introduction by the Author

by John McDowell

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Metaphysics, Academic

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

John H. McDowell (MA, Oxford) is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Before coming to Pittsburgh in 1986, he taught at University College, Oxford. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and Princeton University. He was the John Locke Lecturer at Oxford University in 1991. His major interests are Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, and ethics. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Turbulent_Architect · Rating 4 out of 5]

I vividly remember the first day of my very first graduate seminar. We were taking turns awkwardly introducing ourselves and talking about our research interests. One student said that he intended to spend his doctoral studies “trying to understand John McDowell’s project.” The professor, a hard-nosed philosopher of science if ever there was one, grumbled something like, “Good luck. I don’t think John McDowell understands John McDowell’s project.” Incidentally, the student never attended that seminar again.

Whatever McDowell’s project may be, there is no doubt that it finds its most important expression in his landmark Mind and World (1994). His starting point is what he calls the Myth of the Given. Modern epistemology as he conceives it is marked by a “dualism of scheme and content.” The idea is that perceptual experience results from the interplay between concepts and intuitions. The latter are supposed to be non-conceptual bits of experiential content that represent the final court of appeal for our inferences about the world.

According to McDowell, however, non-conceptual content cannot play the justificatory role we attribute to it. If sense-data is non-conceptual, then it imposes itself on us by a process that is purely causal. Where we wanted justifications for our beliefs, therefore, the Myth of the Given gives us only exculpations. Hence McDowell’s controversial thesis of the Unboundedness of the Conceptual: There is simply no such thing as a non-conceptual given in our perceptual experience. Even the receptivity of the senses must draw on our conceptual capacities.

Mind and World is among the most original works published in English-language philosophy in the last fifty years. Of course, there is a lot of truth to the common complaints that McDowell’s prose is obscure and that his theses are underexplained. I also suspect that some of his readings of historical figures are quite wide of the mark. For these and other reasons, I am not sure how convincing I find McDowell's project as a whole—if indeed I or anyone else understands it! Be that as it may, those parts that I do understand are so subtle and brilliant that they almost—almost—make up for the book’s defects.

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like After Virtue and Intention, Mind and World is a modern classic. What is McDowell up to here?

He aims to chart a middle course behind Davidson's coherentism, where beliefs (and propositional attitudes, more generally) only relate to the world causally, rather than rationally; and various versions of the Myth of the Given where the world figures as a non-conceptual ground for beliefs. In McDowell's terms, according to Davidson's view, the world can exculpate but not justify beliefs. Likewise, the Myth of the Given takes it that the world can justify beliefs but leaves this mysterious since it views the world as standing outside of the space of reasons. Both of the accounts view the world as standing outside of the space of reasons, the scope of conceptual activity.

Accordingly to McDowell's view, the world does not stand outside of the space of reasons, and when judgments are true, they do not stop short of the world. In other words, the world falls within the conceptual sphere and this sphere is open to human animals whose second nature enables them to possess the conceptual capacities needed to grasp the world that is encountered through the senses. The same considerations, McDowell argues, are in play when considering rational agency.

McDowell shows that Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, can be read along with Aristotle, in a manner that provides a compelling approach to a range of philosophical problems concerning perception, knowledge, and action. While he has modified some of his claims in later papers, the mainlines of Mind and World are still relevant to contemporary debates.

[kloppy · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the second semester of my junior year of college, I took a graduate class called Kant and the Philosophy of Mind where we had to read a lot of McDowell’s essays and some of his lectures from this book. The first day of class, I sat down and the graduate students were all talking about McDowell (who I had given up reading about a paragraph in) and one of them said something I couldn’t hear. In response, someone else slammed their copy of Mind and World on the table and shouted “There’s nothing sexy about John McDowell!” I’ve watched a few of his lectures since then, and I’m inclined to disagree. But that’s besides the point.

McDowell approaches Mind and World from a “therapeutic” perspective derived from Wittgenstein—he’s not trying to uproot the skeptic from the foundation like Descartes or Kant in the Deduction, but rather dispel the worries that prompted the skeptical question in the first place. Here he’s concerned with the question of how it’s possible that one’s experience can show that an external world exists, and attempts to present a picture that dispels the skeptical question before it’s presented. Sure.

In particular, he returns to a dilemma that he thinks contemporary philosophy is stuck in: on one hand, you can postulate that the content of experience is partly conceptual, and that conceptual capacities are exercised post hoc after receptivity has provided the nonconceptual “data”. McDowell charges theories of this form (represented chiefly by the late Gareth Evans) with falling into the Myth of the Given, which he explains better than I could (p. 52):

The putatively rational relations between experiences, which this position does not conceive as operations of spontaneity, and judgments, which it does conceive as operations of spontaneity, cannot themselves be within the scope of spontaneity—liable to revision, if that were to be what the self-scrutiny of active thinking reccomends. And that means that we cannot genuinely recognize the relations as potentially reason-constituting.

Essentially, we want the relation between our experience of the world and our rational beliefs to be themselves rationally interrogable. We want to say: just because we had x experience, are we justified in having y belief? However, if we conceive of our experience as exclusively the domain of the purely receptive, “primal” parts of our mind, we tie spontaneity’s hands behind its back and prevent it from reaching back to the base of our experience.

The second approach, represented by Donald Davidson, (McDowell takes care to remind us that he really likes both of these guys and agrees with most what they have to say, and they go on a boys’ trip to Ibiza every summer without problems) is to postulate that the relation between our experiences and beliefs is purely causal and not rational. This approach is motivated by a desire to avoid the Myth of the Given, but McDowell finds it dissatisfying because it lacks the sort of skin-to-skin friction that we want between our beliefs and reality. This dilemma produces the problem that McDowell’s picture in Mind and World hopes to solve: is there a view that can accomodate rational interrogation at the very root of experience, without succcumbing to the Myth of the Given?

Here it is: “the content of experience is conceptual.” (p. 45) Or in other words: “receptivity does not make an even notionally seperable contribution to the co-operation [between receptivity and spontaneity].” (p. 9)

One complaint often levied at McDowell is that he’s not clear about what he’s saying. I think this is totally unfair: he repeats the central claim of Mind and World probably a dozen times over the span of ~150 pages. You can easily draw a little picture of the various faculties and see how McDowell’s self-reflection-arrow goes all the way back to receptivity. What’s not at all clear is what “the content of experience is conceptual.” actually means. For this reason, I think the rare excerpts where he discusses his view of human infants and non-human animals are especially important, both because they make his picture much clearer, and they present (I think) one of its most profound problems.

McDowell explains the difference in the experience and capabilities of humans vs. animals in terms of our unique “second nature”. His view is that the capacity for rationality, which then unlocks the conceptuality that transforms human experience, is not a congenital faculty but rather an ability acquired by human Bildung (lit. cultivation/education?) for which only humans have the biological equipment. Since the character of experience is totally transformed for rational vs. non-rational animals, the acquisition of “second nature” is a seismic event; there is no “mid-stage” between animality and humanity. This provides the basis for, I think, the most absurd thing McDowell says in Mind and World: “Human infants are mere animals, distinctive only in their potential.” (p. 123) Instead of the gradual expansion of conceptual capacities that we intuitively imagine for a human child, or for early humans throughout the course of their evolution, or even in the chain of animals from insects to elephants and the like, McDowell gives us a stark discontinuity for which there is no “highest common factor”.

One of the more revealing excerpts here comes in Lecture IV, where McDowell draws an analogy between his “second nature” and Aristotle’s conception of virtue: “The ethical is a domain of rational requirements […] whether or not we are responsive to them. We are alerted to these demands by acquiring appropriate conceptual capacities. When a decent upbringing initiates us into the relevant way of thinking, our eyes are opened to the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons.” (p. 82) The implication here, to me, is that animals are just as blind in experience as they are regarding morality. I’m reminded of an excerpt from Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root, where he argues that all perceiving animals have at least the concept of causality.

Cheselden’s blind man for the first time saw his room with its different objects, he did not distinguish anything, but had only a general impression of a totality consisting of a single piece which he took to be a smooth surface of different colors. It never occured to him to recognize separate things lying behind one another at different distances.

Given that this is presumably the experience of vision before conceptual capacities are operative, is this the picture we’re supposed to have of animal experience?

I think the real issue I have with McDowell here is that I just can’t get behind the premise that he begins with: that the purpose of philosophy is to “leave everything as it is”. His goal throughout the book is to return our view to the one endorsed by “common sense” (which at one point he hilariously invokes verbatim) which leaves him unable to engage in good faith with either philosophical skepticism or Kant’s transcendental idealism, because accepting either would require abandoning the conclusion that he assumes at the outset of his work. I can see why Mind and World has become sort of a sacred text for graduate philosophy departments throughout the country, because it’s given rise to this incredible proliferation of positions regarding conceptualism, disjunctivism, transformative rationality, etc. But given that McDowell himself has repudiated or diluted much of what he said around the time of Mind and World, I’m comfortable rejecting the idea that his work here represents a lasting solution to what he correctly identified as the outstanding problems of contemporary philosophy.

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

McDowell addresses a very fundamental problem in philosophy; he shows that the 'ontological gap' between mind and world is illusory. That gap is the foundation of various seminal philosophical problems, including: How can empirical experience justify knowledge? How can bodily activity be intentional? How can linguistic signs be meaningful?

McDowell addresses all of these questions, and mostly focuses on the first of them. The problem is epistemological in nature. How is knowledge ultimately grounded? If we take any statement, and trace back to the premises that support it, to fully justify this statement we'd need to justify those premises. But then we'd end up with further sets of premises that led to those; and a regress becomes quickly apparent. What is the ultimate ground of knowledge, which would stop this regress?

There have traditionally been two types of responses to this question. One type is embodied in traditional empiricism (e.g., Hume). Such empiricist philosophers hold that in our perceptual receptivity to the world, we receive sensory impressions. Such impressions are supposedly independent of all our knowledge, and ultimately ground all knowledge. But this view is problematic. In order for any sensory impression to be able to justify a judgment, it must be conceptual in form. If an impression had no conceptual articulation whatsoever, it could not be 'plugged into' premises nor justify anything. So empirical experience must be conceptual, if it is to be able to factor into knowledge.

But if empirical experience is conceptual, then it seems like it cannot serve as an ultimate ground of knowledge. Concepts penetrate perception, and these concepts could be ill-formed, so perception cannot be trusted as a source of ultimate justification. This is a grave situation. Now, it seems we are forced to say that the justification of any judgment must be found in other judgements; knowledge is like a vast echo-chamber. If this is truly the case--if there are no external constraints relative to our reasoning capacities--it seems that what we believed to be knowledge isn't knowledge at all. Knowledge is supposed to be factual and justified, and without appealing to any sturdy ground outside of itself, it can be neither.

That it unacceptable. So another possible response is to maintain that knowledge is indeed self-contained, but the natural world serves as a causal constraint on the possibilities of knowledge. We just never personally encounter this natural world, in itself; and we never appeal to it to justify our knowledge. Donald Davidson holds such a view. But that seems unacceptable as well. We clearly appeal to empirical experience in our justifactory practices.

McDowell shows a way out. He focuses on the fact that this entire dilemma presupposes this picture of cognition: we are contained in a 'space of reasons' (e.g. a conceptual world, in which we make claims and justify them), and this space is bounded by another space, the 'space of nature'. The latter stands for the natural world, populated by mind-independent objects. McDowell argues that there is no such cleavage between mind and world. His argument is essentially Kantian.

Everything we can possibly perceive or encounter in the world is already conceptual in nature. Conceptual faculties that we actively use to reason and form judgments are also employed in the synthesis of the phenomenal world. Although perception is indeed receptive, this passive nature does not rule out that conceptual faculties can operate; they do so, without our self-consciously needing to direct such faculties. This view can still be naturalistic. The mind-independent universe is noumenal in nature; we can never access it, but we are within it, and it has some causal constraint on us.

McDowell's view is nonetheless distinct from Davidson's; we can appeal to experience as a source of justification because experience is already conceptual in form. Of course any particular experience cannot serve as the ultimate grounds of justification; but we shouldn't think that we are entitled to such ultimate grounds in any case. Knowledge is never totally absolute, and we humans continually intellectual advancements over our history.

I mainly read this book because of it is frequently referred to by the contemporary literature at large. I didn't learn anything new though. McDowell's points have all been argued for by philosophers like Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty (among other post-Kantian continental philosophers). Sure, McDowell neatly lays out a precise argument targeted at analytic philosophers. But I think Sellars has already done that in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind . One could say that Sellars is notoriously difficult to read, but I think McDowell isn't that much clearer as a writer.

The fame of McDowell's book shows to me that the Anglo-American philosophers McDowell addressed had severe misunderstandings of Kant, and were ignorant of continental philosophical traditions. Only in that case could McDowell's work be so 'groundbreaking'. I'd nonetheless recommend this book to readers interested in Kantian epistemology and Wittgensteinian skepticism.

[Aaron]

I've only been reading philosophy for four years (at the time of writing), so this opinion should be taken with substantial salt, but: this is without a doubt my favorite work of philosophy. I've now read it three (four?) times, each more enlightening and more understandable than the last. McDowell beautifully and brilliantly argues for a picture of our relationship to the world that respects the indisiputable advances of modern science (especially its driving teleology out of the realm of law) without losing grasp on the relevant notions of freedom and intentionality that those advances can seem to threaten. This lays the groundwork for his work in other areas, e.g. metaethics.

The book consists of an introduction, very mildly edited versions of his 1991 John Locke lectures (six chapters, the main body of the book), and a substantial afterword examining the relationship between his thought and Davidson's thought (as well as Rorty's—McDowell is excellent at separating the good points Rorty makes from the fashionable relativism) and expanding on various points from the lectures. Because this is basically the print record of his lectures, various aspects of the writing betray its origin as lectures. This is most noticeable in the degree of repetition. McDowell had to put forth extremely complex ideas orally, with lectures separated by a week between them. McDowell thus spends a lot of time summarizing arguments he's made previously. I find this repetition extraordinarily helpful. Even in print, where re-reading is possible, the ideas are difficult, and having the relevant aspects summarized as they are needed makes it much, much easier to get a grasp on them. Some may find it annoying—I find it one of the book's virtues.

One criticism of the book I've seen and heard with some frequency is this: the writing is too opaque to really present McDowell's ideas clearly. As I've read and re-read the book, I've moved from agreeing with this criticism to understanding it in a detached way without agreeing with it. I find this criticism to be primarily a reflection of the fact that there is a reasonably steep learning curve for understanding both McDowell's ideas and the language in which he presents them. Now that I am acclimated to both, I in fact find that McDowell writes with a crystalline clarity that's very rare in philosophy, both in the sense that he understands the interconnections between relevant issues more clearly than most, and in that he describes these interconnections more lucidly than most. Compare Mind and World to the work of someone like Putnam. Putnam's language may seem clearer, but his ideas often are not, in ways not unrelated to the seeming surface clarity of his writing. Or hell, compare it to Kant or Sellars, two of the giants on whose shoulders McDowell stands. I find him much, much clearer than either, without any loss in profundity.

Return to the philosophical content of the book, I'd like to briefly offer an apologia for some flaws. Because of its origin in lectures, McDowell is unable to address every relevant issue (very understandable), and occasionally glosses far too briefly over an issue that in fact is much more demanding. The clearest example of this in my mind is the discussion, in lecture six, of the issue of fallibility of perception, and the threat that this will lead to skeptical problems. McDowell insists that it does not lead to such problems, and he hints at why. It's possible to see how this hinted at but unpresented argument fits into a form similar to others presented in the book (though McDowell doesn't make this explicit). But the discussion actually present in the book is itself clearly insufficient. And I think there's an extent to which that's simply a feature of the origin in lectures of the book. Elsewhere (Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge), McDowell does tackle the issue (extremely well, I might add). So, in reading the book, I suggest you keep in mind that it's not of a sort that McDowell could address all the relevant issues fully, and at times he does have to merely hint at arguments (he doesn't do this for the most central issues, however). The book cannot stand alone, sufficient by itself. It requires the context of the rest of McDowell's philosophy, which fleshes out implications and provides arguments for key positions that figure in Mind and World, but which are insufficiently defended.

The book is probably really only for the philosophy aficionado, but for such a person it's downright essential.

[Antonia Faccini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difícil, muy difícil, pero después de mucho esfuerzo es indudable lo brillante que es este libro. Creo que lo más interesante es que cada lecture es una conversación con otro autor (Davidson, Evans, Kant, Aristóteles) que sirve para informar la postura conceptualista de McDowell en la que la experiencia es absolutamente conceptual; en sus palabras es “the unboundedness of the conceptual”. Entonces es como leer un poco de historia de la filosofía pero muy mediada por lo que McDowell quiere proponer y es, en ese sentido, su lectura personal de esos autores con los que conversa. Conserva la autenticidad de un lecture de esa forma. El libro también es un revisiting muy juicioso de Kant a través de sus mayores aciertos y desaciertos; lo que plantea McDowell sobre la experiencia como combinación entre receptividad y espontaneidad en los contenidos empíricos mismos no podría subsistir sin las ideas prefiguradas en Kant sobre intuiciones y conceptos. Hay demasiadas cosas allí, el final del libro discute mucho más el rol del ser humano en la naturaleza y su diferencia con criaturas irracionales; es quizá la parte que suele ser más provocativa para algunos.

[Vinicius Apolinario · Rating 4 out of 5]

Não gosto muito de fazer review sobre livros que preciso utilizar na minha pesquisa. Provavelmente terei mudado algumas das minhas ideias daqui a alguns meses. Assim sendo, serei breve.

McDowell, em seu *Mente e Mundo*, tem um grande objetivo em mente: oferecer um panorama intelectual para a tensão filosófica a respeito das relações entre a mente e o mundo, sobretudo no seu aspecto epistemológico. Segundo ele, empiristas e não-empiristas estabeleceram um grande dilema no decorrer do séc. XX, a saber, o "dilema" de como a experiência perceptual funciona como tribunal dos nossos juízos empíricos e, ao mesmo tempo, não demandar aquilo que normalmente se espera de uma justificação epistêmica: um suporte posterior.

Por um lado, empiristas (Ayer, Russell, Carnap - ao menos em certos momentos de suas carreiras) defendiam uma concepção na qual nossos juízos empíricos seriam ultimamente justificados pelo apelo a "episódios perceptivos" básicos, ao ponto de meramente explicitarmos os "dados dos sentidos" que fundamentariam nossos juízos, caso fôssemos questionados a justificar conjecturas empíricas. Por outro, sobretudo a partir da crítica de Sellars, Quine e Davidson à concepção de percepção empirista (como dados dos sentidos), não-empiristas (especialmente coerentistas) buscaram atribuir à percepção um papel meramente causal, no qual nossas experiências perceptuais seriam mecanismos causadores de crenças, essas sim o verdadeiro locus da justificação empírica.

Empiristas supostamente teriam a dificuldade de explicar como episódios "brutos" de contato entre nossos receptores sensoriais e objetos externos justificariam racionalmente nossas crenças, isto é, como esses episódios figurariam como premissas para um argumento. Coerentistas (isto é, não-empiristas, nesse contexto) teriam a dificuldade de explicar como nossos juízos seriam constrangidos pela realidade, já que essa concepção "meramente causal" pouco nos diria que tipo de contato epistêmico nossa percepção teria, em relação a, por exemplo, crenças.

A solução de McDowell: propor uma nova teoria da percepção, com distinções e vocabulário específicos, de modo a superar tal dilema. Sua proposta ficou conhecida como "conceitualismo". O filósofo tem em mente uma concepção empirista que rejeitasse a teoria da percepção baseada em meros "dados dos sentidos" (episódios brutos, no seu jargão): "A ideia de que a experiência deve ser um tribunal mediando a maneira pela qual nosso pensamento é responsável perante o modo como as coisas são, coisa que deve acontecer se quisermos dar sentido ao pensamento enquanto tal" (p. 24). Mas, ao mesmo tempo, McDowell busca rejeitar a concepção "causalista" de autores como Davidson e (talvez??) Sellars.

Sua solução envolve compreender que percepção e crenças, enquanto estados mentais dotados conteúdo, compartilham o mesmo tipo de conteúdo, a saber conceitual. O mesmo tipo de ferramenta que estrutura nossas crenças e pensamentos (isto é, conceitos) estariam operantes na nossa atividade perceptual de modo não explícito, de modo "passivo e automático". Se o conteúdo de nossas experiências são também mediados por conceitos, então nossos episódios sensoriais poderiam figurar como premissas em argumentos. Assim, McDowell acredita combinar o natural (impactos do mundo sobre nossos receptores sensoriais) com o normativo (processos inferenciais que governariam nosso raciocínio sobre o mundo empírico).

Donde uma de suas famosas passagens:

"Da tese segundo a qual receber uma impressão é uma transação no interior da natureza, já não se pode concluir, como fizeram Sellars e Davidson, que a ideia de receber uma impressão deve ser estranha ao espaço lógico no qual funcionam conceitos como o de responsabilidade. As capacidades conceituais, cujas inter-relações encontram seu lugar adequado no espaço lógico sui generis das razões, podem ser operativas não apenas nos juízos – que são os resultados das decisões ativamente tomadas por um sujeito com relação a algo – como também nas transações que, no interior da natureza, são constituídas pelos impactos do mundo sobre as capacidades receptivas de um sujeito adequado" (p. 32-33).

PROBLEMA
Embora sua teoria conceitualista da percepção ofereça um modelo de como nossas percepções e crenças interagem, algumas consequências se tornaram patentes desde sua publicação. A mais séria (na minha opinião) é como explicar a percepção de infantes (crianças em idade pré-linguística) e animais não-humanos e a forma como eles compreendem o mundo ao seu redor. O conceitualismo de McDowell, apesar de achar que é capaz de acomodar essa tensão, não a resolve bem. Essa abordagem torna a experiência um processo super intelectualizado, não fazendo jus à essa forma de contato cognitivo mais 'básica' que chamamos de percepção. Animais não-humanos e crianças parecem perfeitamente capazes de compreender seu meio ambiente, de forma sistemática e racional, e ainda assim não possuírem capacidades conceituais sofisticadas (como parece sugerir McDowell). No conceitualismo, ou nega-se que animais e crianças tenham algum contato racional com o meio ambiente ou aceita-se que eles já possuam as capacidades conceituais que um ser humano linguística e conceitualmente formado possui. Acho inaceitável ambos os resultados. O conhecimento, ou melhor dizendo, a cognição, precisa ter começado com processos bem menos sofisticados que nossos pensamentos linguisticamente expressos. Ao menos assim me parece. Deixarei outras objeções de lado, pois requerem ainda mais contexto de discussão (um ponto ruim em fazer review desse livro).

Em suma, é um livro que me surpreendeu. Apesar de não gostar nem um pouco da solução de McDowell para o problema, acredito que ele tenha feito apontamentos promissores sobre o que deveríamos pesquisar (sobretudo filosoficamente) sobre a percepção e sua relação com o pensamento sofisticado. Além disso, considerando o jargão analítico, Mente e Mundo é um livro relativamente bem escrito (menos quando McDowell resolve fazer exegese de filósofos modernos, porque ele é péssimo nisso), o que torna algumas de suas teses claras.

[Otto Lehto · Rating 3 out of 5]

I disagree with the author, but I must admit the book contains many great insights.

The book revisits the Kantian idea that perception must be shaped by our conceptual capacities (our capacity for reason, freedom, and language). It builds a carefully constructed case by engaging with contemporary authors, but the basic premise is a form of neo-Kantian epistemology. To be clear, I do NOT have an objection to this Kantian project - only to McDowell's formulation of it.

His central claim? That in order to show how perception can ground judgment (e.g. belief), we must be able to say that the same capacities must operate in perception that operate in our "higher" faculties. To sum up: the mind is in touch with reality, which has conceptual form, directly, and this is possible because we are "rational animals" whose faculties are shaped by that rationality.

Towards that Aristotelean conclusion, McDowell combines Kant, Wittgenstein and Hegel.

The Kantian element is obvious and pervasive, since the very notion of conceptual capacities, and the epistemological problematic, derives fundamentally from Kant's 1st Critique.

The Wittgensteinian element is more subtle, but it is reflected in McDowell's aim - to do therapy to bad philosophy by showing that we shouldn't be led astray by false problems - and in his methodology - to refuse doing "positive" philosophy in the sense of formulating new paradigms. He wishes to justify common sense realism, and to show that epistemology is non-problematic. (But this gets more complicated once we combine the Kantian, Hegelian and Davidsonian pictures to it.)

The Hegelian elements are rather underdeveloped. He suggests that "absolute idealism" and "common sense" must ultimately coincide. And his philosophy could be read as "common sense Hegelianism." But these elements are rather suppressed - perhaps because Kant, Wittgenstein and the analytical tradition are foregrounded? But this should not come as a big surprise: it would be difficult to really combine the three into a synthesis where ALL the parts were equally represented.

A McDowell thesis with Hegel foregrounded would look rather different.

In addition, more contemporarily, people like Davidson, Quine, Evans and Rorty form the immediate setting of the argument. McDowell does not write in a vacuum. He engages with living and dead authors.

The book is a competent and, at times, brilliant work, but it has many problems:

1) Since it is based on a lecture structure, it repeats itself WAY too much.
2) The writing is dry, tedious and mostly boring. Not very joyous.
3) Some of his central arguments are way too obscure. There's too much technical jargon.
4) The unholy admixture of Kant, Wittgenstein and Hegel, while interesting, is a bit monstrous.
5) By claiming that he is only doing "therapy" to poor philosophy, he can hide behind a "doctor's" attitude.
6) For an analytical philosopher, his style is often quite hermetic, mysterious, even dogmatic. He rarely justifies his premises.

The seventh and last point I wish to treat separately because it is the most important:

7) The book is permeated with the notion that human beings are not (just) "animals" because we have rationality. By rationality he means the Aristotelean notion that humans are "rational animals" combined with the Cartesian-Kantian notion that the mind (of humans) is essentially an "I think" that posits the world. However, after Darwin, to claim that human beings are ESSENTIALLY superior (in all our perception and thinking) to other animals, because we are "rational animals," is a suspect notion. This would require a whole rebuttal, but suffice it to say that McDowell has serious problems here, since this notion underlies - and motivates - his whole epistemology. This is not a slam-dunk case against him, but it means we perhaps need some modifications, or softenings, to his thesis that human beings are essentially motivated by reasons while animals are motivated by mere environmental inputs (neither of which statement seems self-evident).

I think the book ultimately fails because it is built upon faulty premises. However, this should not blind us to the fact that McDowell is an interesting philosopher.

The proposed project of synthesizing Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytical philosophy is a fruitful one.

I believe, or hope, that if one were to combine his central insights (which are fascinating) with a bit of Freud and Darwin, one would be getting closer to a true rendering of the human experience.

(PS. McDowell's later work addresses some of the shortcomings of this book, but doesn't completely extricate itself from its hyper-rationalist framework of the human mind. At least he is persistent and consistent. I find his later work more plausible, or less obviously wrong. So I would recommend you search out some of his later essays.)

[A. B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a read. Simply thrilling. Last semester, I was so ill-placed to understand this book. This semester, I have thankfully advanced to the level where it makes much more sense.

[Ben Labe · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Mind and World, a printed recreation of John McDowell's 1991 John Locke lectures, McDowell attempts to dissolve one of modern philosophy's most pressing anxieties. Our equally strong desires to grant empirical observation a role in justification and to deny a place for the objects of observation within the space of reasons (the conceptual complex in which human minds operate and consider possibilities freely) have presented us with an apparently serious gap between mind and world.

Until now, modern philosophers have fallen victim to a distressing oscillation, wavering between outright denials of the possibility of empirically grounded justification and more or less veiled appeals to the so-called Myth of the Given. Attempts to bridge this gap have been marked by philosophers positioning themselves on one side of the gap and subsequently trying to build their way to the other to retrieve what cannot acceptably be lost.

McDowell, however, finds this treatment to be misguided. Instead of working from one side of the gap to the other, his aim is to remove it entirely by exposing the faulty dualism that has led us to observe it in the first place. Resurrecting the language of Kant and Wittgenstein, McDowell argues for both sides at once. Empirical observation does not stand outside of the space of reasons, he says, but because observations are received passively, they impinge on that space in such a way as to provide the necessary constraints on our judgments of them to pass as justifications. When we look out into the world (engaging our "receptivity," in the Kantian nomenclature), our conceptual capacities ("spontaneity") are automatically and inevitably summoned. And because we perceive that such and such is the case first within the space of reasons, it does not require any impossible feat of translation for us to place it there in the form of a judgment or belief.

But certainly animals do not possess such a rational framework; we can't consider it natural. So how have humans developed it? McDowell explains this using concepts found in Aristotle. Aristotle defines humans fairly simply as "rational animals." Likewise, McDowell conceives of humans as possessing two natures: the animal and the rational, where our rational nature is actually more like a second nature that we are introduced to through language. While the notion of a second nature is certainly a metaphor that requires some fleshing out, here it seems like an illuminating one.

In Mind and World, McDowell seems to provide an accommodating synthesis of much of modern philosophy. While the book is pedantic, I found his repetitions to be beneficial for a firm understanding of the abstruse views that he means to express. McDowell is a superb mediator. When presenting an opinion, he provides details that are relevant and keeps them within a context that displays exactly where they will fit into his arguments. While some people are not sympathetic to his sort of "quietism," I am, and will hope to apply similar treatments to my own discipline in the future.

[Cara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would never have picked it up if I hadn’t been forced to and even now I wish I hadn’t

[Yalda Ahmadi Moghaddam · Rating 5 out of 5]

معرفی رویکردی به رابطه ذهن و جهان است که ما را به واکنش می دارد.
مکداول بر این باور است که راز زدایی ناشی از انقلاب علمی، با رویکردش در کتاب ذهن و جهان تعدیل می شود و راز را به زندگی ما باز می گرداند. با چفت کردن تجربه گرایی و انسجام‌گرایی و بازتعریف آن در رابطه ذهن و جهان، مکداول تلاش دارد ما را از جهان راز زدایی شده برهاند. جهانی که در آن عینیت علمی وجود دارد و دیگر هیچ؛ و انسان ها به واسطه فردیت خود جایگاهی تعریف شده ندارند. البته این رازآفرینی مانند آنچه که در دوره قبل مدرن وجود داشت نیست، دوره ای که در آن برای جهان و طبیعت قدرتی معرفتی قائل می شدند، چرا که رازی که مکداول برای ما به ارمغان می آورد، رازی مینیمال است که به واسطه یافتن جایگاه درست تجربه گرایی و انسجام گرایی و نقش سوژه برای ما به ارمغان می آید.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although at present I have only read 30% of this book, it seems to me that the basic premise of this work is that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the inner and outer worlds of our experience due to the fact that they are both reliant on the construction of reality through data made available through the senses. This is reminiscent of the argument that Wittgenstein lays out in much of his philosophical work which, in my opinion, received its definitive shape in the Philosophical Investigations, where he essentially refutes the claims made in his earlier philosophy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book he published during his lifetime. In my opinion, his original idea, expressed in the logic of the Tractatus, was that all truth-claims regarding reality were conceived as a composite-picture of discrete points making up the facts of the world. This system was later thrown over for the conception he would advance in the PI, wherein he imagined a conception of reality that was based on a continuous flux in which moments in time would exist simultaneously in an empirically interdependent and non-perspectival way and, most importantly, the notion of time changed from a series of static stages to that of an oscillating present. That is the change in the epistemological order which makes 'the Myth of the Given', a concept that perplexes John McDowell for most of this book such a brutal conundrum. Indeed, as McDowell suggests, the epistemological revolution that took place in the logic of the 20th century places a dividing point between all those philosophers who are able to take the postmodern "plunge" and those that remain unable to renounce the external rational constraints of classical logic. Three stars.

[Blakely · Rating 2 out of 5]

Invocative. Impossible to remember.

[VII · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another annoying writer who rarely uses examples and prefers to stay abstract, which makes him really hard to read. I don't think I care for his constructive philosophy but I learned a lot from his criticism to Davidson, Sellars and Quine.

The familiar problem in epistemology is the conversion of sense contents into concepts. Common sense dictates that all our beliefs are formed from sense contents we get from the empirical world but how, if we accept that the logical space of nature is different from the logical space of reasons. The distinction between those two different spaces however is not a common-sensical one outside philosophy. With science dominating, naturalism also dominates in culture. The common sense position is that this logical space of reasons either doesn't exist (some form of reductionism) or can be described in terms of the logical space of nature (bald naturalism in Mcdowell's terms). But we should make the distinction. The natural space of reasons consists mostly of causal descriptions, while the space of reasons is to have concepts and to form beliefs by using justifications. The first is to view things from the outside while the second if from the inside.

So we need to justify our beliefs using observations from the world but if we accept the distinction and Sellars' myth of the Given, we can't use the observations (the sense contents) to do so. Mcdowell wants to provide a cure for this tension. Bald naturalism denies the myth, while Davidson by accepting it but keeping the conversion causal is led to a coherentism that Mcdowell finds unsatisfying because it loses contact with the empirical world. Mcdowell's solution is to keep the distinction but refuse to equate nature with the familiar scientific (descriptive) talk. He says that something can be natural but still belong to the space of reasons and the key for this is to introduce some kind of second nature to humans. Our second nature is connected with our initiation to concepts during our upbringing, but ultimately it is in our nature. This allows him to say that when we have an experience both our senses and our conceptual machinery work at the same time, refusing to accept there are pure sense contents or pure concepts that are somehow combined. The sense contents have to be infused with concepts at the time of the experience. I have to say I am not convinced by the notion of second nature, as it ascribes humans with something special but also doesn't explain how it happens. Mcdowell knows this and stresses that we shouldn't worry about how it happens. It is a question that can't be answered right now and he doesn't find it very pressing. In a way it is a similar solution to the one bald naturalism offers but more satisfying for him, because it doesn't avoid the question; it recognizes its importance but dispels it. This is the main idea.

My biggest problem with Mcdowell is that he tackles these issues with certain assumptions in place. He wants to find a way to make our common assumptions (the manifest image in Sellarsian terms) intelligible and not to examine the validity of these assumptions. His whole endeavor is to keep certain beliefs that we have for ourselves like rationality and freedom of choice, by finding a way to make them palatable and not too inconsistent with other beliefs that are gaining ground, like naturalism, while keeping some issues outside discourse because they are "unsolvable". He even writes that “philosophy's task is to dislodge the assumptions that make it look difficult to find a place for meaning in the world”, basically because meaning is already part of our lives and our conception of ourselves. This way of doing philosophy seems limited. It is choosing a starting and an end point and trying to find the best route between them but without ever doubting those two points. Ultimately it assumes that our assumptions about ourselves are correct and undoubtable and he is willing to change our conception of nature before changing our conception of ourselves. It is of course (as anything) a viable choice but it is arbitrary.

[Zo · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two major prongs to this book. How much the second depends on the first is potentially a substantive issue.
1) How to conceive the epistemology of perception such that perception leads to beliefs in a way that avoids Sellars's Myth of the Given as well as a Davidsonian coherentism.
2) How to conceive the relationship between reason and nature such that responsiveness to reason does not clash with our understanding of nature.

At this point in time, I am not wholly convinced by the answers McDowell gives to either questions. But I still found this book highly valuable as a way of understanding the conceptual territory, offering intriguing (albeit perhaps flawed) solutions, and thinking through the mission of modern analytic philosophy.

If I hadn't just finished Ned Block's book "The Border Between Seeing and Thinking" I probably would have been much more amenable to McDowell's view that perception is conceptual, but in comparison to Block's highly detailed and empirically based arguments, McDowell's version of things felt awfully hand-wavy. I do think his layout of the problem space is immensely helpful. If we adopt something like Block's view of the split between non-conceptual perception and conceptual perceptual judgment, does that lead us to the Myth? If so, I would like to see it spelled out in more detail exactly where the problem lies. If that does not lead us into the Myth, how should we think about the evidential relationships? Do perceptions justify perceptual judgments, or since perceptual judgments are causally elicited by perceptions are we more in a Davidson style framework? I'm not sure how to answer these questions, and I think there are similar interesting questions that McDowell makes salient for thinking through the prospects of predictive coding, or even for reading Kant (which I'm not sure McDowell does entirely fairly).

The second prong of the book is even more hand-wavy, but perhaps more plausible, and more attentive to what is *the* central modern philosophical question? I don't think McDowell's invocation of "second nature," "Bildung," and Aristotelian ethics are at all spelled out in a way that is explanatory. But, I think that is perhaps the point, and to ask for them to be explanatory posits would miss the direction of McDowell's thought. If so, I don't think McDowell's views are really going much beyond Wittgenstein, or even that different from someone like Daniel Dennett's, but I do think they are a highly attractive meta-ethical view (if one can even deign to call it that). McDowell's presentation of said view is probably less explanatorily convincing than something like Dennett's, and less aesthetically pleasing than something like Wittgenstein's, but does fill somewhat of a happy medium between the two. I found it enjoyable to read. I don't think it will serve to answer someone who is not convinced by an ethical quietism -- the part of myself that is more skeptical does not feel more persuaded. But McDowell's conception works as an elaboration of what I think is one of the better approaches out there.

Lots more could be said about this (consult notes), which I think is the biggest source of value in this book. McDowell's sense of philosophical lineage allows him to delineate problem spaces in a highly fruitful way. I'm not sure any of the "solutions" he comes up with are all that great, his style deservedly receives obscurantist criticism, and his views are far more constructive than he would like to admit. Yet, I am still very glad I read this volume, and it will help inform my thinking about the epistemological, ethical, and meta-philosophical questions he considers. (Of course, there is a part of me that is persuaded by his meta-philosophical convictions, and annoyed with myself for even thinking through the book in the terms I lay out above!)

[Raymond Lam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is McDowell's John Locke's lectures in 1991 on Davidson's scheme and content. Needless to say this work has been a most significant contribution to the discussion since the 90s. The first lecture, McDowell sets up the problem of scheme and content as the question of  whether and how much of the experiential or content intake in empirical experience is already conceptualised. Is empirical experience already conceptually pre-packaged. If it is, does the concept come from things in the external world which would involve the assumption of "the myth of the given" according to Sellars ?  In contrast, one may not incline to accept experiential intake arrives preconceptualised and, hence, holds the scheme or concepts were resulted by the subject's applying his own inner concepts to the experiential content to derive the judgement of that content. McDowell takes the approach that the receptivity of the mind accepts experiential content passively and is in play with spontaneity, the faculty of understanding, operating to process the content intake to arrive at empirical judgement or knowledge. 

In the second lecture,  "the Unboundness of the conceptual", he develops further the notion of a conceptualised experiential content. He suggests there is a phenomenological similarity between an inner experience of a sensation, e.g. being hit in the head, on the one hand, and an outer experience of seeing red from the secondary quality of perceiving  a red object. The concept of red is common in both cases. Hence receptivity operating with spontaneity in recognising an experiential feature fitting a certain concept is boundless in its capacity to process experience regardless of its source. This is so regardless of any formalised concepts in place. A child can make distinction of different shades of colour even if he knows no colour words.

In lecture three, McDowell offers a critique of Gareth Evans view of empirical experience as totally devoid of concepts but only unprocessed information intake. In lecture four, McDowell carefully negotiates how reason fits in nature. He wants to maintain spontaneity in the exercise of reason as sui generis in its normative conceptual framework. It is in the realm of reason. To avoid a supernatural metaphysical claim of the place of reason, he suggests such faculty of reason is naturalistic instantiation of human nature. McDowell invokes such notion of the faculty of reason as "second nature" similar to how Aristotle views moral faculty. It is normative but also part of human nature. In lecture five, McDowell considers how his notion of subjectuvuty and reason cash out in a discussion of the self as persistent object in a stream of consciousness.  Lastly, in lecture six, he considers how humans as rational creatures with self-reflexivity are different from animals that just reacts to happenings in their immediate environment.

McDowell's narrative is clear, precise but also dense. But he often reiterates his ideas throughout, allowing you to check if you understand him.  His insights are penetrating and illuminating, and worth your effort to work through it.

[Joey Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

The positive points of his argument aren’t nearly unclear as others have personally warned me or as other reviews claim, but this absolutely does require being inculcated into a very strange philosophical reading history. It seems that those in a traditional analytic or continental background (though as wary of such a distinction we should be) are the ones to claim McDowell’s obscurity. Despite this, and if you are lucky enough to be in a tradition that blurs these lines, the clarity of argument here is immaculate. If you are not lucky there is at least something very exciting about reading Sellars, Davidson, Evans, Dummett, Strawson, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Gadamer, and Marx in the same register.

[Roberto Loja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seminal work from the end of the 20th century, and required reading for anyone wishing to see what contemporary academic philosophical discourse looks like. Opaque at first, not least because it presumes a deep knowledge of Kant, Aristotle, Davidson, and Sellars. But the fog lifts.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite obviously a classic work of 20th century philosophy. In my view, the book would’ve been much strengthened through an explanation of how ‘Aristotelian second nature’ is in a way more than a reification of Pippin’s social constructivism. It seems to be to be a difference merely in name.

[Ali]

Perfect

[Jon Højlund Arnfred · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth reading multiple times, and slowly. That perception itself is conceptual all the way down is quite an interesting concept to perceive.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

jaden should read

[Kaidi Pan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where would we be without John McDowell?

[Cassidy Brinn]

Much in it is true and insightful, but so stubbornly suggestive - I don't agree that you should stop there! The continuity between the gegenstandsbezogene consciousness and the rational self-consciousness belongs explicated!

Pedagogically stellar. The repetition is no mistake. All novel formulations and important points are plain as day, so no scavengering about in search of McDowell's true intent.

And I just feel good reading it. I'm not sure what it is in a book that gives me this feeling, but I suspect it has something to do with a winning combination of honesty, humility, and competence.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A monumental, brilliant book. I hope to have more to say about it soon.