Unbounded Naturalism (John Mcdowell's Mind and World) (Critical Essay‪)‬

INTRODUCTION John McDowell's explicit aim in his seminal work Mind and World is to provide a spirited defense of common sense realism. To go about this, McDowell takes seriously Kant's famous dictum on empirical judgments, 'Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind', in hopes of calling our attention to the inseparability of our conceptual deliverances in all sensible contents. (1) But Kant's fundamental insight, McDowell thinks, is obscured by his 'transcendental story', the story of Kant's concession to the pressure coming from a disenchanted natural world to split rationality off from the sense impressions we receive. (2) It is the story, in other words, of the 'transcendental' Kant's making room for freedom on one side and external constraint on our perceptual episodes on the other while only exacerbating the skeptic's worries concerning how our empirical thinking can have any purchase on external reality when it seeks to reach over the yawning gap now opened up between mind and world. In this context, McDowell's critique of Kant and a few comments he makes throughout the text with regard to the merits of Hegel--a brief statement in the acknowledgement section of the Preface about the work being a 'prolegomenon to a reading of the Phenomenology' (MW, p. ix) and a footnote to the effect that Hegel 'completes' the Kantian critical project (MW, p. 111)--have raised questions over whether McDowell has an accurate view of Kant's transcendental idealism, Hegel's absolute idealism, and Hegel's relation to Kantian critical philosophy.