One of the most interesting aspects of McDowell’s very interesting book is the way in which it locates the problems of late-twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy within the historical development of the Western philosophical tradition. Beginning with an opposition between Coherentism and the Myth of the Given exemplified in recent work of Donald Davidson’s, McDowell proceeds to frame his discussion in terms of the Kantian distinction between concepts and intuitions, understanding and sensibility, spontaneity and receptivity. McDowell’s basic idea is that we can (...) satisfactorily overcome the opposition between Coherentism and the Myth of the Given only by recognizing, with Kant, that concepts and intuitions, understanding and sensibility, must be integrated together in every cognitive act or process—even in the mere intake of experiential content characteristic of sense perception. There is thus no room, according to McDowell, for either unconceptualized sensory input standing in no rational relation to conceptual thought or purely intellectual thought operating independently of all rational constraint from sense experience. (shrink)

The paper seeks to refute Skorupski's claim in _English-Language Philosophy 1750-1945 that Kant's philosophy was consciously antinaturalist. Skorupski has two related views: (1) that Kant consciously recognised steps from naturalism to empiricism and then to scepticism, and rejected naturalism; (2) that the rejection of naturalism issues in a transcendental account of the mind as outside nature. (1) Is vulnerable to the textual point that Kant never associates naturalism explicitly with the argument Skorupski notes. Indeed the textual references to naturalism do (...) not indicate a clear, single, view of that doctrine in Kant. (2) Is vulnerable to the by now well-known objections to such a traditionalist picture of the mind 'making nature' and so being quite distinct from it. The paper shows that such a naive traditionalist account is over-simple. (shrink)