Title: Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, edited by Joseph Schear
Abstract: The debate between John McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus was prompted by Dreyfus’s 2005 American Philosophical Association Presidential Address (‘Overcoming the Myth of the Mental’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , 79 (2005), pp. 47–65) and continued with a set of responses and counter-responses in Inquiry . The two philosophers go head-to-head once more in this book and their debate is continued, contextualized, and broadened by thirteen original contributions — mostly from distinguished experts. The essays bring together topics in philosophy of perception, philosophy of action, phenomenology, history of philosophy, and philosophy of mind, and will reward the efforts of anyone interested in those areas. As is well known, McDowell believes we can avoid traditional problems about how mind and world engage one another if we conceive experience as drawing on the same conceptual capacities that are operative in rational thought. In particular, he believes this conceptualist account allows us to avoid the Myth of the Given. Though Dreyfus wants no truck with the Myth, he holds that McDowell’s conceptualist thesis ignores a more basic mode of everyday experience which is ‘nonconceptual’ (p. 17), ‘unthinkable’ (p. 27), and ‘mindless’ (p. 38). While conceptualism may be a good fit for the kind of experience involved in theoretical cognition, to impose it on our everyday coping practices like opening doors and playing sports would be to endorse an equally pernicious myth: ‘the Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental’. Despite undergoing various permutations since 2005, that claim has remained the central controversy.
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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