Mind and World Part 1: The Active and Passive in John McDowell

On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

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.