Kursinformation

In this course, we will read John McDowell’s "Mind and World", a classic of contemporary philosophy. The book deals with issues in epistemology (centrally, the question how we can acquire knowledge through perception), but at the same time addresses issues in other areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. For McDowell argues that in order for sensory knowledge to be possible, we must conceive of both mind and world in a specific way: the world must itself be conceptually articulated, as our perceptual judgements are. As background, we will read texts by some of McDowell's most important interlocutors in analytic philosophy, e.g. Davidson, Quine, and Sellars.