Knowledge, Mind And Naturalism

J. McDowell’s philosophy is a kind of empiricism. Empiricism can be a view in epistemology and also be a view in philosophy of mind. McDowell’s philosophy is empiricism in the two senses.The first chapter surveys the main theses of McDowell’s philosophy, where I summarize his philosophy as a system by starting with his diagnosing the anxiety of philosophy and then bringing about his conception of experience and its reasonable condition the second nature.The second chapter summarizes his empiricism whose start point is Sellars’ empiricism that is the improved or non-traditional one in which the transcendental aspects are concerned with the intentionality. The reason for McDowell’s such interpretation of Sellars’philosophy can be viewed as theoretically preparing for his "second nature "and "naturalized Platonism".The third chapter analyses the reason for his denying infant and animals as the possessor of conceptual ability. However, it is true that McDowell cannot completely defend his position, but from the point we can find that his move serves the transcendental argument, namely the objective purport. He emphasizes the relationship between the conceptual ability, object and world, which means that there is no object and world in rational sense in absence of conceptual ability. This is relationship in content between knowledge and minded property.The forth chapter analyses his value realism where pay more attention to his intention of value realism. His end of deliberately considering the essence of value is defending the objectivity of interaction of mind and world. Ethic and esthetic property is not able to be depicted or understood completely without being related to subject’s experience. The second quality, such as color, has the similar feature. He argues that they are objective properties. The part is the important aspect of the relationship of epistemology and philosophy of mind, and the specific explanation of the way in relation of knowledge and mind.The fifth chapter analyses the conception of the second nature, its content and its forming, by which he try to mediate reason and nature so as to achieve a frame of mind in which we will not return to the philosophical anxiety which worries about the question how to settle the mind in nature. The analysis of second nature deposes the McDowell’s frame of the confluence of the theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind. McDowell admits that his theory has the same point with the philosophical Hermeneutics. Gadamer’s language regulating human thoughts and fusion of horizons can echo with McDowell’s forming the second nature in learning language, the boundless of concepts, which is the dialogue between two philosophical traditions. In this chapter we must find the possible base of the dialogue, the common methodology in the position of nominalism.The sixth chapter overall criticizes his philosophy, which follows that in order to make his empiricism reasonable, he has to use a naturalism of second nature for reconstructing the mind which makes the word re-enchanting whose premise is disenchantment. Quince’s philosophy and Davidson’s are the direct philosophical background, and are the important roles in the disenchantment. McDowell’s empiricism is a kind of metaphysics the transform of which is the acceptable form of contemporary philosophy of mind.The seventh chapter makes the claim that the relationship between mind and the external world being not able to provide for the requirements of knowledge the legitimate bases, forms the tense between mind and knowledge, the root of which is in the Cartesian tradition philosophy from which we can draw two questions related each other:one is how mind presents being concerned with world by knowledge, the other is how mind becomes the legitimate requirements of knowledge. If we bring the two questions into analytic philosophy, we can see that Cartesian assumption about mind is potentially criticized by the philosophical questioning on knowledge. According to the main schools of contemporary empiricism, philosophers evidently had the question about empirical knowledge extending into philosophy of mind, which showed a kind of trend of theory of knowledge blending with philosophy of mind. McDowell’s philosophy achieved the blending, which made the traditional philosophical questions, especially questions in German classical philosophy, be researched continually. The return of these questions was a kind of self-criticism in analytic philosophy.