Back to Nature: Human Subjectivity and the Possibility of Empirical Knowledge through Education
Humanities
Phil 190, Senior Seminar
According to contemporary philosopher John McDowell, the commonly held philosophical assumption that human beings are unable to grasp objective reality in thought stems from an impoverished view of nature. The view of nature that McDowell calls “rampant platonism” is a reductive form of naturalism that equates ‘the natural’ with the subject matter of the hard sciences. On this view, human beings fall within the natural realm only insofar as they fit into a mechanistic world governed by the laws of physics. This, however, leaves no room for free thought and action (intentionality and spontaneity) and renders morality, choice, and responsiveness to reasons mysterious and inexplicable phenomena. To dissolve the gap allegedly separating man from nature, McDowell follows Immanuel Kant in recognizing spontaneity, or the contributions of the codependent, coeval faculties of perception (the senses) and reason (inner mental processes) to empirical knowledge. In doing so, McDowell appears to have no choice but to accept the Kantian conclusion that human judgments cannot transcend the merely phenomenal appearances that conceal reality, i.e. to accept the mind–world gap. In Section I of this paper, I contextualize McDowell’s response to this philosophical problem through an examination of Wilfrid Sellars’ conceptual holism and rejection of "Epistemological Givenness." In Section II, I elaborate on McDowell’s readings of Kant and Aristotle to explain McDowell’s critical theory of second nature, which loosely corresponds to ‘human nature’. Finally, In Sections III and IV, I explain how second nature puts human beings back into contact with the natural realm and renders human subjectivity capable of grasping the objective factive states of the mechanistic material world.
