Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-world — The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate

This collection of fifteen essays brings together a brilliant pair of contemporary philosophers of mind, Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, in a wide-ranging debate about the relationship between conceptual rationality and our embodied rapport with the world. Their two opening essays begin the collection. For McDowell, conceptual rationality is "everywhere in our lives," while for Dreyfus, we are open to something beyond and more basic than the coordinates of objective or conceptual reality. The essays that follow contribute to that debate and are organized into four sections on phenomenology from Kant to its existential variants; intellectualism and understanding; experience, concepts and nonconceptual content; and bodily skills, rationality and self-consciousness. They explore alternative ways to understand our "contact" with the world, a distinctively sensorial actualization of conceptual powers that avoids intellectualism and yet distinguishes between reasonable and instinctive ways of being in the world, a phenomenological way of understanding the absorbed character of thinking that is usually reserved for embodied action, how Dreyfus "over-intellectualizes the intellect," the myth of the given, whether we are essentially rational animals, and mindedness in first-person authority. The contributors are professors of philosophy at American and European universities, including a former professional dancer. Notable contributors include philosophers Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin and Lee Braver. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Joseph K. Schear is University Lecturer in Philosophy and Official Student (Tutorial Fellow) at Christ Church, University of Oxford, UK.