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Reason and Nature Lecture and Colloquium in Munster¨ 1999 JOHN MCDOWELL: Reason and Nature Lecture and Colloquium in Munster¨ 1999 Edited by Marcus Willaschek LIT – Verlag Munster¨ Preface John McDowell is one of the most influential philosophers writing to- day. His work, ranging widely from interpretations of Plato and Aris- totle to Davidsonian semantics, from ethics to epistemology and the philosophy of mind, has set the agenda for many recent philosophical debates. In recent years, McDowell’s views have been hotly discussed among students and faculty in Munster,¨ too. Therefore, we were very glad when McDowell agreed to give the third M¨unsteraner Vorlesungen zur Philosophie in 1999. On May 5, McDowell gave a public lecture; on the following two days, he participated in a colloquium where students and faculty from Munster¨ presented brief papers on his philosophy. McDowell listened carefully and responded to questions and criticisms. This volume contains McDowell’s lecture, revised versions of the col- loquium papers and McDowell’s written responses to them. I should like to thank John McDowell for coming to lecture in Munster,¨ for participating in the colloquium, and for putting his re- sponses in writing. Discussing his views with him has been stimulation and pleasure for all of us. Next, I want to thank the participants in the colloquium who worked hard to come up with interesting and chal- lenging presentations. Further, thanks are due to Karsten Wantia and Florian Wessels for putting much effort and time in type-setting and designing this volume. And finally, I want ot thank the Ministerium fur¨ Schule und Weiterbildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung in Nordrhein- Westfalen for funding the 1999 M¨unsteraner Vorlesungen zur Philosophie. Throughout this volume, the abbreviation ‘MW’ is used to refer to John McDowell, Mind and World, Cambridge 1994. Munster,¨ July 2000 Marcus Willaschek Contents I. The Lecture 1 Experiencing the World John McDowell 3 II. The Colloquium 19 Spontaneity and Causality: McDowell on the Passivity of Perception Stefan Heßbruggen-Walter¨ 21 Ontological Troubles with Facts and Objects in McDowell’s Mind and World Christian Suhm, Philip Wageman, Florian Wessels 27 On “The Unboundedness of the Conceptual” Marcus Willaschek 35 Nature and Second Nature in McDowell’s Mind and World Mischa Gubeljic, Simone Link, Patrick Muller,¨ Gunther Osburg 41 Is McDowell confronted with an Antinomy of Freedom and Nature? Sean Greenberg and Marcus Willaschek 51 Platonism and Anti-Platonism Niko Strobach 55 Self-Criticism as a Way of Life Frauke Annegret Kurbacher and Stefan Heßbruggen-Walter¨ 59 Nature or Natures? Notes on the Concept of Second Nature in John McDowell’s Mind and World Christoph Jedan 69 Moral Facts, Values, and World Views Johannes Klaus Kipf and Frank Kohler¨ 73 Secondary Qualities or Second Nature – which Reality for Values? Andreas Deeken, Christoph Halbig and Michael Quante 81 Responses John McDowell 91 Notes on the Contributors 115 Part I The Lecture Experiencing the World1 John McDowell 1. I am going to begin by saying something about the frame in which I want to place a conception of experience as taking in the world. Such an idea has obvious attractions from an epistemological point of view, and that is not irrelevant to my interest in it. But the main purpose to which I want to put the idea is not to reassure ourselves that we can achieve empirical knowledge, but rather to ensure that we are not beset by a difficulty about the capacity of our mental activity to be about reality at all, whether knowledgeably or not. I suggest that we can understand some of the central preoccupations of modern philosophy by making sense of a wish to ask ‘How is empirical content so much as possible?’ That would give expression to an anxiety about how our in- tellectual activity can make us answerable to reality for whether we are thinking correctly or not – something that is surely required if the activ- ity is to be recognizable as thinking at all. The question whether some of our thinking puts us in possession of knowledge cannot even arise unless this prior condition, that our thinking can have empirical con- tent at all, is met. I use the word ‘transcendental’, in what I hope is suf- ficiently close to a Kantian way, to characterize this sort of concern with the very possibility of thought’s being directed at the objective world. And it is in this context of transcendental anxiety that I am primarily concerned with the question how we should conceive experience. It is part of my point that people who are in the grip of the anxiety I am interested in typically do not clearly comprehend what is bothering them. One shape this unclarity can take is that one’s problem strikes one as epistemological rather than transcendental. An unfocused sense of what is in fact a transcendental difficulty need take no more definite a form than a vague inkling that thought’s hold on reality is coming into question. And the image of thought’s hold on reality can easily seem to fit knowledge, as contrasted with, say, guesswork or plausible 1This lecture was conceived as an introduction to the conception of experience recom- mended in my Mind and World (McDowell 1994). I have also drawn on thoughts from my 1997 Woodbridge Lectures (McDowell 1998). 4 Experiencing the World conjecture. This yields a misunderstanding of the difficulty one feels oneself falling into, though ex hypothesi only inchoately. In the misun- derstanding, it seems that one needs a secure foundation for knowledge – as if one could take the contentfulness of one’s empirical thinking for granted, and merely had to reassure oneself as to its credentials. Thus what would be revealed as a transcendental anxiety, if it came into clearer focus, can, through an intelligible unclarity attaching to a merely incipient form of it, underlie the concern with, so to speak, mere scep- ticism that shapes much modern philosophy. So I suggest that making sense of a transcendental anxiety can cast light on more of modern phi- losophy than one might at first suppose. The anxiety in its focused, explicitly transcendental form is perhaps closer to the surface in what Richard Rorty calls ‘impure philosophy of language’ in chapter VI of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979). There he depicts a concern with how language hooks on to reality as a late-coming counterpart to an anxiety about how thought hooks on to reality, which according to Rorty has been a major deform- ing force in modern philosophy. Rorty himself, however, sees the de- forming anxiety as primarily epistemological, rather than epistemolog- ical only in the guise of a defectively understood difficulty that is really transcendental, and that is just what I am resisting. I understand the wish to ask the transcendental question, ‘How is empirical content possible?’, as expressing an attraction to a pair of thoughts whose implication, if taken together, is that empirical content is impossible. The thoughts impose a requirement for there to be em- pirical content, but ensure that it cannot be met. The requirement is that empirical thinking must be subject to what W. V. Quine (in a strikingly Kantian phrase) calls ‘the tribunal of expe- rience’ (Quine 1961, 41). The idea is that we can make sense of intel- lectual activity’s being correct or incorrect in the light of how things are in the world only if we can see it as, at least in part, answerable to im- pressions the world makes on us, as possessors of sensibility. But this felt requirement can easily seem impossible to satisfy. The notion of the world’s making an impression on a possessor of sensibility is on the face of it the notion of a kind of natural happening. As such it can seem to be excluded, on pain of naturalistic fallacy, from the special logical space – what Wilfrid Sellars calls ‘the logical space of reasons’2 – that we 2Sellars 1956. For the image of the logical space of reasons, see pp. 298–299. John McDowell 5 would have to be moving in when we take things to be related as tri- bunal and respondent. Sellars introduces this image of the logical space of reasons in a context in which he is precisely warning against a natu- ralistic fallacy, which he suggests one falls into if one takes it that merely natural happenings can constitute a tribunal. Quine himself seems to succumb to just this pitfall, in trying to conceive experience as a tri- bunal even while he understands experience in terms of irritations of sensory nerve-endings. It can thus come to appear that thought’s being answerable to im- pressions is a condition for there to be empirical content at all, which, however, cannot be met because the idea of an impression does not fit in the logical space of reasons. What follows is the incredible conclusion that there simply cannot be empirical content. This is not a perhaps surmountable difficulty about how there can be empirical content – as if the question ‘How is empirical content possible?’ could receive a re- sponse that started like this: ‘Good question; let me tell you how.’ ‘How is empirical content possible?’, uttered from the frame of mind I am de- scribing, expresses a temptation to believe the premises of an argument whose conclusion is that empirical content is not possible. Given that empirical content is possible, there must be something wrong with the premises. And once we identify a culprit and dislodge it, we shall be freeing ourselves from the frame of mind that seemed to find appropri- ate expression in the ‘How possible?’ question. The result will be, not an answer to the question, but a liberation from the apparent need to ask it.
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