| dc.description.abstract | In Mind and World John McDowell proposes to exorcise ‘some characteristic anxieties of modern philosophy’ that make the relation between mind and world seem problematic. According to McDowell, we are confronted by two strong but contrary intuitions when it comes to explaining the relation between mind and world. On the one hand, we are faced with a coherentism that threatens to leave the mind out of touch with the world, and on the other, we are confronted with the intuition that justification for our beliefs is simply given in experience. However, although McDowell’s book has been at the centre of philosophical discussion since its publication in 1994, there are aspects of his philosophy that seems difficult to fit together, and which, even today, poses challenges for even the most sympathetic reader. How are we to reconcile McDowell’s interesting suggestion that experience is already conceptual, thereby exorcising the apparent problem of mind’s relation to the world, with his quietism? And what is McDowell committed to with his claim that the content of our experience is conceptual? I discuss the first of these questions in essay I, whereas the second – what McDowell takes the debate on nonconceptual content to be about – is addressed in the second essay, distinguishing it from other conceptions in play in an increasingly ramified debate. However, the question that governs McDowell’s inquiry in Mind and World – how the mind is related to the world – is not a new question to McDowell, but runs like a red thread through his philosophical career. In Mind and World the question is addressed primarily in its specific epistemological variant, ‘how can experience justify beliefs?’, but the question of mind’s relation to the world also crops up in his earlier works on semantics. In some of these early, influential articles on semantics, McDowell queries the relation between mind and world by asking how there can be de re senses. My third essay takes a look at McDowell’s reading of Frege and Russell, and how it can be said to constitute an alternative way of dispelling the problems posed by the opposing intuitions, represented by coherentism and the Myth of the Given, in explaining the relation between mind and world. | eng |