This text examines the difficulties involved in providing a picture of the
place of minds in the world. It proposes a solution that involves returning to
a pre-modern conception of nature, whilst retaining the intellectual advance of
modernity.Modern philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the
place of minds in the world. In "Mind and World", based on the 1991 John Locke
Lectures, John McDowell offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a
cure.; He illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy - the insidious
persistence of dualism - in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we
would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience,
pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell
exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from
Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an
understandable - but surmountable - failure to see how we might integrate what
Sellars calls "the logical space of reasons" into the natural world.; What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain
attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put
aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a
pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of
modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a
fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent
reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally
satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.
