6 Varieties of Philosophical Skepticism - John McDowell's Mind & World

In this sixth lecture, James Conant continues to discuss the Kantian problematic, and does so by discussing the work of John McDowell. He particularly focuses on the case of perception and then of action and intentions. In the case of perception, the problem involves avoiding the myth of the Given without thereby falling into an empty kind of coherentism or idealism.

In this series of lectures on varieties of philosophical skepticism, James Conant distinguishes between two forms of philosophical skepticism: Cartesian skepticism and Kantian skepticism. He discusses their general structure and shows how they're related. This sheds light on issues in various different areas, including within the philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Some of the philosophers discussed throughout this course include Wittgenstein, Sellars, Hilary Putnam, Kripke, C.I. Lewis, John McDowell, and Stanley Cavell.

This series of lectures was given in 2005 at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. Note, the audio has been slightly edited and improved.

"When Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity, that reflects his view of the relation between reason and freedom: rational necessitation is not just compatible with freedom but constitutive of it. In a slogan, the space of reasons is the realm of freedom. But if our freedom in empirical thinking is total, in particular if it is not constrained from outside the conceptual sphere, that can seem to threaten the very possibility that judgements of experience might be grounded in a way that relates them to a reality external to thought. And surely there must be such grounding if experience is to be a source of knowledge, and more generally, if the bearing of empirical judgements on reality is to be intelligibly in place in our picture at all. The more we play up the connection between reason and freedom, the more we risk losing our grip on how exercises of concepts can constitute warranted judgements about the world. What we wanted to conceive as exercises of concepts threaten to degenerate into moves in a self-contained game." McDowell

"The idea of the Given is the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere." McDowell

00:00 Introduction
07:33 Perception
49:05 Action

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00:00 Introductory Remarks
07:33 Perception
49:05 Action