Mind, Value, and Reality

by John McDowell

This volume collects some of John McDowell's influential papers, written at various times over the last two decades. One group of essays deals mainly with issues in the interpretation of the ethical writings of Aristotle and Plato. A second group of papers contains more direct treatments of questions in moral philosophy that arise naturally out of reflection on the Greek tradition. Some of the essays in the second group exploit Wittgensteinian ideas about reason in action, and they open into the third group of papers, which contains readings of central elements in Wittgenstein's difficult later work. A fourth group deals with issues in the philosophy of mind and with questions about personal identity and the special character of first-personal thought and speech.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

410 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

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

[Don Tontiplaphol · Rating 5 out of 5]

McDowell has been charged with an opaque writing style and a recalcitrance to scientific outlooks. Both charges are justified; but perhaps, too, are his motives. I think his writing, while difficult, is deeply suggestive (his debt to Wittgenstein is overt, not only in content, but often in style, I'd say) in the way that ``analytic'' philosophy so often is said to lack. And his resistance to what he calls ``scientism,'' i.e., the view that the assumptions justified in naturalist-scientific practice are justified in other modes of inquiry, seems amenable.

His book is a collection of previously-written essays. There are four sections, the latter two of which I haven't looked at, since they concern Wittgenstein exegesis and the philosophy of mind, respectively. The first two sections, however, concern Greek ethics and contemporary issues in value theory. The section on Greek ethics is remarkable for giving detailed accounts of some general issues in Aristotelian ethics. If one wants a look into some interesting theses about what Greek ethics amounts to, in contradistinction to modern outlooks, then this is a great place to start.

Widely influential is his essay ``Virtue and Reason,'' in which McDowell tries to set out the view of seeing ethics from inside the view of the virtuous person. What this cuts against is the view that ethics can be conducted from some vantage point outside a proper upbringing, external to a correct shaping of one's character and perceptual capacities (where perception is not just about colors and textures and tastes and smells, but also about how human situations are either noble or base, virtuous or vicious, valuable or worthless). Against the idea that we can do ethics from a position of neutrality--imagine the prospects for convinving Himmler that the relief of human suffering is a good to be achieved and pursued in one's actions and dispositions--McDowell argues that ethics, at least to be complete and satisfying, is akin to repairing a leaking and sinking boat while you're in it: there's no drydock or rocky shore to use as an anchor while you plug the hole and scoop out the water. And there's no neutral or non-cultural or refined standpoint from which one can build a moral theory.

What we can do is use the resources which our various cultural forms give us to see the world aright, where the cultural forms that beset us are exactly what allows us to see the world aright at all. Some cultural forms may mislead us and cause us to go astray--to see the moral world in the wrong light or to describe it in the wrong terms--but the fact that _some_ cultural forms are necessary to seeing the world illuminated and well-described makes no mark against the presence of cultural forms per se. There is no viability in doing ethics if one swears off the kinds of cultural formation which makes us capable of discerning that _this act here_ is an act of courage, and that courage is a virtue, while _that act there_ is an act of cowardice and human disfigurement. We cannot come up with a decision procedure that will tell us the difference between a courageous and a cowardly act, unless that decision procedure will make reference to the way our minds see the world that they do. And our minds see the world aright only if they are shaped by the upbringing that inculcates certain moral outlooks through cultural forms. So: to say of someone that her belief X is formed by her cultural upbringing is no mark against the truth of X; for her belief in X may be true exactly because her upbringing shaped her perception in just the right way.

[Michael Kenan Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and important philosopher; disappointing and incompetent writer.

[Abdulwausay Ansari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an impressive collection of some of the best essays from one of the greatest living philosophers. In this collection, we see a versatile mind grappling with a variety of issues, from issues in meta-ethics to issues in practical reason, exegesis of Aristotle, and philosophy of perception. Despite these diverse areas of interest, however, McDowell's thinking about all these issues is unified in terms of a single concern, and the concern can be stated as follows. How can we anthropomorphize the world and value without the world and value losing its grandeur? In other words, can we conceive of the world and of values as relative to human nature without landing head first into skepticism about either?

McDowell can be a horribly dense writer, and it often isn't clear what exactly he is arguing for. But this collection is worth wading through regardless.

[univocity · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too rarely is contemporary philosophy considered as a genre of literature, and when it is so, it is intended dismissively. In this work, though, using allusive, elaborate sentences McDowell creates and refracts insights, summons and dismisses problems, and gathers them into densely referential paragraphs, 'therapeutically' turning tightly wound exegetical (eudaimonia, rule-following) and meta-ethical issues into broad, practical solutions. A profoundly reasonable defense against many brands of naturalism, emotivism and nihilism and deserving of its 'Philosophy' shelf space beside Boethius and Averroes.

[Blakely · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think what I like about McDowell is that he approaches philosophical problems structurally, like Stroud. The views he ends up proposing are not necessarily always so virtuous, however.