Kursinformation

John McDowell’s Mind and World is one of the great works of twentieth century philosophy. It is concerned with a single question: how are words and concepts related to the things that are given to us through experience -- to the things that we see and hear, for example? At the heart of this question is the idea that things are originally given to us through experience in a non-conceptual and non-linguistic form. We do not originally receive them as this cat, or this cup (for example), but merely as things that we can focus our attention on -- merely as THIS and THAT. And yet, through focussing our attention on them, we can go on to attach words to them, and in so doing bring them into the sphere of language and concepts. Or so it may seem. But McDowell thinks that this is no more than a myth -- what he calls (following Sellars) The Myth of the Given. In this first part of this seminar, we shall work through this myth, and seek to understand both why it is so tempting, and why it is only a myth, by reading work that lies largely in the background of Mind and World. We shall focus on seminal texts by Anscombe, Davidson, Geach, Lewis, and Wittgenstein. In the second part of the seminar, we shall consider Mind and World itself, and explore how it seeks to avoid The Myth of the Given, and whether it satisfactorily deals with the question of how thought and language relate to the experientially given world.

All readings will be made available through Moodle.

Please note that essays can be written in English or in German.