Mind and World

“Ever since Descartes, a lot of the very best philosophers have thought of science as an invading army from whose depredations safe havens have somehow to be constructed. Philosophy patrols the borders, keeping the sciences ‘intellectually respectable’ by keeping them ‘within…proper bounds.’ But you have to look outside these bounds if what you care about is the life of the spirit or the life of the mind. McDowell’s is as good a contemporary representative of this kind of philosophical sensibility as you could hope to find.”—Jerry Fodor, London Review of Books

“A powerfully impressive book which simply towers over the more routine contributions of current analytical philosophy.”—Simon Glendinning, Radical Philosophy

“McDowell locates an important tension in our thinking about thought, suggests an attractive way of easing the tension, and offers a plausible diagnosis of why the tension is acute… Mind and World is a genuinely provocative book that should be discussed.”—Paul M. Pietroski, Canadian Journal of Philosophy