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title: 'another-thesis-intro-attempt'
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+++ date = "2019-02-17T09:38:18Z" title = "Another Thesis Introduction
Attempt"
+++
John McDowell's magnum opus is a book called Mind and World. In it,
McDowell develops an important metaphysics about humans and their place
in the universe. The philosophical movement that McDowell is responding
to in Mind and World is what he calls 'bald naturalism'. If the position
McDowell develops in Mind and World is to be found persuasive, its
arguments have far-reaching consequences for how we picture the
philosophy of the human mind, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of
science. It means we do not have to accept the austere and non-normative
conclusions of the dominant position in analytic philosophy of moral
anti-realist naturalism.
This thesis is a reaction to the metaphysics McDowell develops in Mind
and World. I have found it to be a very refreshing and inspiring
philosophy. This is because it lead me to develop my own philosophy
which takes the structure of Mind and World and radically inflates its
ontology. Mind and World---like the rest of McDowell's later
philosophy---is an uneasy combination of Hegel and the later
Wittgenstein. In some ways Hegel and the Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein are similar philosophers because they both focus on the
role that discursive and interactive human behaviours play in the way
reality is made up for humans. But, ontologically, these two
philosophers are diametrically opposed.
Hegel is an out-and-out conceptual realist and 'Platonist', in the sense
that that latter term is understood in analytic philosophy.
Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is absolutely neither of these
things---the earlier Wittgenstein was much much closer to Hegel on these
issues. Finally, look at the politics of the way these two philosophers
used their theories in the academy. Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations is radically asserted as an anti-philosophy, whereas
Hegel willingly became the philosophical dictator of Prussia and the
academy of the German-speaking world for some decades.
The way McDowell intended his philosophy to be understood was more in
the later Wittgensteinian sense. This is the way most philosophers
sympathetic to McDowell have attempted to defend him.1 On the other
hand, those criticising McDowell, especially people like Crispin Wright
and Simon Blackburn, tend to play up the Hegelian aspects of McDowell's
philosophy. Consider the following passage from Wright:
So---if McDowell is right---not just experience, as a potential
justifier of empirical beliefs, but the real world in turn, as that
which is to be capable of impinging upon us in a way which indeces
experiences of determinate concent, must be thought of as conceptual.
We arrive at a conception of experience not merely as something which
is instrinctically concent-bearing, a passive exercise of concepts,
but as also essentially an "openness to the layout of reality", where
this openness is a matter of conceptual fit between the experience and
the situation experienced. The world, as we must conceive of it, is
indeed the Tractarian world: a totality of facts, where facts are
essentially facts that P. Conceptual content, in McDowell's
metaphysics, belongs to the very fabric of the world.2
This is supposed to be a devastating criticism of McDowell. In this
passage Wright concludes that McDowell's philosophy terminates in
out-and-out Platonism, and for that reason is completely unacceptable. I
completely agree with Wright's treatment of McDowell's philosophy, even
though it completely misses the point of what McDowell is trying to do
in Mind and World. When studied Mind and World, I couldn't help thinking
that an exciting metaphysics of moral philosophy and the philosophy of
science could be developed by removing all attachments it had to
Wittgenstein.
I set out to develop a philosophy which took the form of Mind and World,
and absolutely changed its content. The key way in which I depart from
McDowell in Mind and World is that I interpret his concept of the
'unboundedness of the conceptual'3 to mean that concepts apply at the
level of Fregean reference, and not, as McDowell says, the level of
Fregean sense. McDowell intends the 'openness to the world' that humans
has is merely a discursive or linguistic one, and not a metaphysical or
ontological one:
I can indeed formulate a main point of my lectures in terms of the
Fregean notion of sense, like this: it is in the context of that
notion that we should reflect about the relation of thought to
reality, in order to immunise ourselves against the familiar
philosophical anxieties. This is just another way to put the thought I
express in the lectures in terms of Sellars's image of the logical
space of reasons. Frege's notion of sense operates in the space of
reasons: the whole point of the notion of sense is captured by the
principle that thoughts, potential senses of whole utterances, differ
if a single subject can simultaneously take rationally conflicting
stances towards them ... without thereby standing convicted of
irrationality. If failing to distinguish senses would leave us liable
to have to attribute to a rational and unconfused subject, at the same
time, rationally opposed stances with the same content, then we must
distinguish senses, so as to make possible a description of the
subject's total position that has different contents for the stances,
and so does not raise a question about the position's rationality.4
Indeed McDowell's understanding of the 'unboundedness of the conceptual'
is meant to be a very thin and minimalistic one. I disagree that this
makes for a better philosophy, and I will demonstrate why in my thesis.
Mind and World touches on many aspects of analytic philosophy, like
logic, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and moral
philosophy. What binds it all together is its view of the universe. Mind
and World asserts a radically unorthodox metaphysics that McDowell calls
'relaxed naturalism'. Mind and World does this because it is a reaction
to the way Anglo-American philosophy has developed since the influence
of W. V. O. Quine. McDowell is concerned to demonstrate that the 'bald
naturalism' of anti-realist naturalism in analytic philosophy is wrong
and that we should reject it. I agree.
The reason why we should opt for a strong metaphysical philosophy when
dealing with the issue of 'bald naturalism' is because it does a better
job of what McDowell attempts to do in Mind and World. My philosophy may
ultimately be unsuccessful or unpersuasive, but I argue that it gets a
little further than McDowell in terms of combating 'bald naturalism',
and establishing a 'relaxed naturalism'.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
----------
(2014) 22(2) International Journal of Philosophical Studies 248; Paul
Giladi, 'Hegel's Therapeutic Conception of Philosophy' (2015) 36(2)
Hegel Bulletin 248; David Macarthur, 'Naturalizing the Human or
Humanizing Nature: Science, Nature and the Supernatural' (2004) 61(1)
Erkenntnis 29.
and John McDowell' (2002) 65 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
330, 347.
Experience', above n 43, 218.