In this final episode of a three part series on John McDowell's Mind and World, I take a look at McDowell's Transcendental Argument. I feel his transcendental argument comes up a bit short in making McDowell's case and neither does it seem to hold the same gravitas as other transcendental arguments like Kant's. Basically, the conclusions sound a lot like the premises. But, McDowell makes another interesting claim namely that there is nothing unnatural about our role as conceptualizers and judgement-makers in carving out the epistemic content of our worldviews. Our normative nature is, well, natural. Natural to us anyway. And, if we acknowledge this, then we see that there is not some divorce or separation of us from the world when we apply concepts to our perception of the world. Our way of seeing is no less natural than a cat's way of seeing. It's just unique to us. And, to fill out how we might understand how the rational and social can be fully natural, we need to look at Aristotle's ethical theory. Which we will. In the episode.

In this second episode of a 3 part series on the work of John McDowell, I look at McDowell’s epistemic distinction between the active and the passive. When we perceive the world, are we soaking up empirical data like a dull sponge or actively sorting fuzzy, impressionistic content into familiar categories? For McDowell, perceptions are conceptual through and through. Despite this, we can make sense of the idea of the contributions of our conceptual apparatus in coloring our perceptions even if we can’t sharply cleave the boundaries. We even get reminders of the unconceptualized world behind our experiences when we make perceptual mistakes or have some sort of perceptual confusion. Squinting, for example, reminds us when we struggle to make our concepts fit the world that opens itself up to us. All that, and McDowell’s answer to the skeptic and his transcendental argument for realism. P.S.: for some reason, when I say ‘veridical’, it sounds like vertical and it looks like I’m not going to solve it any time soon, so please allow your ears to make the appropriate adjustments.

In this first episode of a three part series on John McDowell, I talk a bit about the splash that McDowell's Mind and World made on the philosophy scene when it was published in 1994. Then, I get into and onto the work of McDowell's philosophy itself. Mind and World is quite the apt name as McDowell focuses on the meta-epistemological question of how the mind can know about the world. I look at McDowell's take on the history of philosophy particularly his debt to the work of Immanuel Kant, in developing his theory about how our minds connect to their environment. I attempt to show how McDowell establishes his unique view of how minds connect to the world through the lens of traditional correspondence and coherence theories and how he feels these two approaches fall short in providing accounts of how our brains produce accurate information about our environment. I focus on two dichotomous concepts that McDowell borrows from Kant: the active and the passive and how our epistemic direction towards the world can be understood through this dichotomy. McDowell says that there is no notion of pure experience that is delivered to us. The world, even in our passive intake of it, comes wrapped up in concepts and to look for something preconceptual in experience is a fools errand. All this et plus.