Epistemology

Mind and World

♡+

John McDowell

1994

Mind and World is McDowell's most ambitious philosophical work — a series of lectures that diagnose and attempt to dissolve a persistent oscillation in modern philosophy between two unacceptable pictures of the mind's relation to the world. The first picture (the "Myth of the Given") tries to secure empirical thought by grounding it in bare, unconceptualised sensory impacts — but bare sensory impact, McDowell argues, cannot rationally justify any conceptual claim. The second picture (coherentism) cuts the mind free from external constraint and allows thought to spin in a void, losing its claim to be genuinely about a mind-independent world. McDowell's solution, inspired by Kant and Hegel, is that the conceptual and the sensible are not two separate realms but always already integrated: experience is always already conceptually structured, and our concepts are always already in contact with the world through experience. This position — which McDowell calls "minimal empiricism" — requires abandoning the image of the Given and accepting that nature itself, as it bears on perception and thought, is always already saturated with conceptual form.