Abstract
In contemporary philosophy, various attempts have been made in relation to placing our minds or mental states in the natural world or nature. In this context, there is a clear divide between naturalism and anti-naturalism, materialism and immaterialism, etc. Driven by the influence of naturalistic turn in philosophy and scientism, many philosophers have tried to put forth various naturalistic accounts of the relationship between mind and natural world. However, many of these accounts are naturalistic based on the modern scientific conception of nature which has been hailed as the dominating conception of nature. John McDowell in his magnum opus Mind and World, while criticizing modern scientific account of the relationship between mind and world, has not resorted back to anti-naturalism. Instead, he has tried to give us certain clues to develop an account of an alternative form of naturalism which is at the same time radically different from both scientific naturalism and mysterious anti-naturalism. In this paper, I will try to search for an alternative naturalism following McDowell and examine to what extent this account is tenable. In this context, we shall discuss various approaches to understand the relation between reason/normativity (which is one of the significant constituting elements of our mind) and natural world.
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Notes
John McDowell Mind and World, p. 86.
McDowell described it as transcendental anxiety. See McDowell, Mind and World.
Ibid., xii.
Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 41.
Wright, “Human Nature?”, p. 140.
Sellars. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, pp. 298–99.
McDowell, Mind and World, xviii.
This is McDowell’s phrase used for scientific naturalism. Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 88.
Ibid., 78.
McDowell, “Responses”, p. 216.
McDowell, Mind and World, p. 82.
Ibid., xxii.
McDowell, The Engaged Intellect, p. 262.
Ibid., 249.
Ibid.,78.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 82.
Wright, “Human Nature?”, p. 153.
McDowell, The Engaged Intellect, p. 261.
McDowell, Mind and World, p. 84.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., p. 84.
Ibid., 87–88.
Ibid., 88. For an elaborate argument in favour of the possibility of integration of normative and natural in the case of moral judgements and moral perceptions, see Panda, M. (2023).
Ibid., 85.
Ibid., 92.
McDowell, “Responses”, p. 216.
Ibid., 220.
References
McDowell, J. (1996). Mind and world, with a new introduction. Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (2008). Responses. In J. Lindgaard (Ed.), Experience, norm and nature. Oxford: Blackwell.
McDowell, J. (2009). Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (2013). The Engaged intellect: Philosophical essays (paperback edition). Harvard University Press.
Panda, M. (2023). Naturalism and normativity in moral judgements and moral perception. In N. N. Chakraborty (Ed.), Morals matter: ethics and human behaviour. Kolkata: The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture.
Quine, W. V. (1951). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 60(1), 20–43.
Sellars, W. (1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Robert Brandom. Harvard University Press.
Wright, C. (2002). Human nature? In N. H. Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell on mind and world. London, New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis.
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Panda, M.K. Placing Mind in the Natural World: In Search of an Alternative Naturalism. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 41, 317–338 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-023-00323-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-023-00323-y