John McDowell's "Mind and World"

John McDowell is widely considered to be the most important living philosopher; and "Mind and World" is widely considered to be the most important philosophy book published in the last 40 years. Strong claims! I am not sure I agree with either of these statements; and I am also not sure that it is even a good idea to ask a question like "who is the most important living philosopher". But nevertheless, the fact remains that this is an important book by a very important philosopher.

• In this meetup we will be reading "Mind and World" but we will also be reading a book about McDowell called: "John McDowell" (second edition) by Tim Thornton
• And I will also ask everyone to read Paul Abela's "Kant's Empirical Realism", a wonderful book about Kant which emphasizes those aspects of Kant which are most relevant for an understanding of McDowell.

See below for the reading schedule and pdf copies of the texts. 👇👇👇

McDowell's philosophy can be compared to several other better known philosophies, and each of these better known philosophies can be used as an entry or gateway into McDowell. It can be helpful to compare McDowell to Wittgenstein. The Thornton book emphasizes this connection between McDowell and Wittgenstein.

It can also be helpful to compare McDowell to Hegel. After all, his philosophy is sometimes identified as a part of "Pittsburgh Hegelianism". There are several good books and articles emphasizing the complex relations between McDowell and Hegel. I will recommend some as the meetup progresses.

It can also be helpful to compare McDowell to Aristotle. I myself tend to emphasize this particular gateway into an understanding of McDowell.

However in this meetup I will ask everyone to read "Kant's Empirical Realism" by Paul Abela (even though we will probably not talk about this book as much as it deserves). There are many excellent Kant meetups at the Toronto Philosophy Meetup and so we can reasonably expect that many participants in this McDowell meetup will be well versed in Kant. By reading the Paul Abela book, we will be in a good position to use our collective knowledge of Kant as an entry into McDowell.

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 10-12 pages from each book before each session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading (and this includes the Paul Abela book). In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read "Mind and World" by McDowell as well as the Tim Thornton book and the Paul Abela book. It seems to me that we should either do McDowell properly or not do him at all; I just do not think there is any point in doing McDowell in a half-hearted way. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read all three of the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful — no argument there! But you still have to do the reading in all three books if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: I want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

This is a 3 hour meetup. For the first two hours we will discuss "Mind and World". For the last hour we will discuss Tim Thornton's book about McDowell. Every once in a while we will devote a session to discussing Abela's "Kant's Empirical Realism". As a rough approximation maybe every second month we will devote a session to reading and discussing passages from Abela and using them to illuminate our understanding of McDowell. An unusual way to proceed I know, but I think it will work out well.

I would encourage people who are new to philosophy to give this meetup a try. I will do the best I can to make "Mind and World" (hereafter M+W) accessible and interesting. I honestly believe that the best way to "introduce" yourself to philosophy is to start with the most challenging stuff and struggle with it. As Peter Strawson once said: "In philosophy, there is no shallow end of the pool".

Here is the reading schedule:

For the first session (May 22):

• In M+W please read from page vii to page xxiv (in other words, read the Preface and Introduction).
• In "John McDowell (second edition)" by Tim Thornton please read up to page 21.
• In Paul Abela's "Kant's Empirical Realism" please read up to page 14

For the second session:

• In M+W please read from page 3 to page 13.
• In Thornton please read from page 22 to page 36.
• In Abela please read up to page 23.

For the third session:

• In M+W please read from page 13 to page 23.
• In Thornton please read from page 36 to page 53.
• In Abela please read up to page 32.

After that, the readings will be posted.

PDF copies of the texts available below:

• McDowell's Mind and World (1994)
• Thornton's John McDowell (2nd edition)
• Abela's Kant's Empirical Realism

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About the text (from the publisher):

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, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.

John McDowell amply 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.