16 September 2007

McDowell Papers Online

A nice fellow named Tadayasu Murai, who is a philosophy PnD candidate studying McDowell, Sellars, and Kant in Japan, has alerted me to the fact that Charles Travis's website has a pair of McDowell papers uploaded on it, including "What Myth?". The "Berlin" link is actually McDowell's "Conceptual Capacities in Perception". He also points out that there is a McDowell video lecture available; sadly, it's in RealVideo format, but it might be worth reinstalling RealPlayer for this one.

"What Myth?" is McDowell's response to Dreyfus's APA address, which is available here.

Tadayasu-san has also offered me several McDowell articles which are hard to find nowadays; it'll be nice to finally have "Hegel's Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant" as something more than a footnote entry. I'll pass them on to anyone who's interested once I receive them, since I'm sure Duck will want these, too.

Since I am linking to unlimited McDowell works online, it occurs to me that this kolloquuim is probably new to most McDowell fans; McDowell's opening lecture is all I've read of it, but the opening lecture is pretty great. McDowell is particularly interested in defending his Sellarsian credentials in it; I think McDowell is simply right that he's "a better Sellarsian than some people give [him] credit for."

On a side-note, is "McDowell and His Critics" any good? The Rorty volume was fantastic, and I liked what I read of "Dennett and His Critics" (I thought Dennett's concluding essay was very revealing, especially), but I only recognize Bilgrami and Blackburn among the contributors to this volume.

Update!: I have received the papers, in addition to an interview in German titled "Kant ist der Größte." It would really be nice if I could read German.

e-mail me if you want the papers: dmlindquist at gmail

additional update: Tadayasu would probably prefer it if I didn't spell his name wrong! Error corrected.

Another update: I have also acquired "The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of 'Lordship and Bondage' in Hegel's Phenomenology", following a hat tip by Tadayasu.

10 comments:

Duck said...

I'm sure Duck will want these, too.

You got that right! I've been complaining for some time about McDowell's coyness about his use of Hegel, and my eyes widened at the sight of that paper's title in footnotes. I'll check out the other stuff, plus Travis's website. Have you read his book on Wittgenstein? I've got it but I haven't read it.

The same holds for McDowell and his Critics. I did read Blackburn's piece, and I don't think he's getting it (surprise!). If he's got a point there it's a marginal one. The articles seem to be mostly on those topics in M & W and after which fit comfortably within traditional analytic philosophy (perception, the disjunctive view, etc.), where I wanted to hear more about Hegel and Wittgenstein. This makes sense as the contributors are from that area – traditional analytic mind and epistemology. (Bilgrami was my advisor at Columbia, and Rovane is there too – his wife actually). But again, I haven't really read it.

How do you know Tadayasi-san? Fellow anime otaku?

Daniel Lindquist said...

This is the first I've heard of Travis at all, to the best of my knowledge. I actually confused him with Charles Taylor at first; I couldn't figure out why the description on his faculty page didn't mention any of the areas I knew Taylor was interested in, nor why he was hosting McDowell papers.

It occurred to me shortly after posting this that I could read Bilgrami's piece via Amazon's "Search Inside." So, that is what I am doing.

I would've been quite surprised if Blackburn suddenly "got" something. Though insofar as people who are Consistently Wrong About Things go, he's one of the better ones.

I only know Tadayasu-san insofar as he e-mailed me today to offer me McDowell PDFs and mention that he'd also watched "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya." (This made it one of the best e-mails ever.) I have no idea how he found my blog; I guess I am getting some visitors from random Googling.

(When I went to find Dreyfus's APA address to link to, the first site Google gave me was this blog. The fifth was also me, commenting at Clark's place. Dreyfus's actual APA address was sixth. I appear to be expressing an abnormal level of interest in Dreyfus's APA address and its fall-out.)

Oh, hey, I just got Tadayasu's reply. Time to forward.

Unknown said...

I'll take those papers to. email is the concatenation of `tim' and `pnin' and the at symbol followed by googles email server.

Daniel Lindquist said...

There is such a thing as being too worried about your e-mail address being harvested by spambots.

It's not like GMail's spam filter is lacking, either; I only have to manually delete about one message every two weeks.

I should probably edit this post to indicate that I have the papers now.

Duck said...

Have you gotten to the McDowell article on "Lordship 'n' Bondage" yet? The way he sets up the issue is very revealing w/r/t how he seems to want to make use of Hegel in general.

Daniel Lindquist said...

Not yet. The comment thread over at Kotsko's place recently was eating up the time I usually spend reading new stuff, and since then I've been working through Stern's articles.

I did read the first page or so when I first got it, and it looked quite interesting. I'll get to it once I finish up "Radicalization of Kant"; it seems only proper to go from Kant->Hegel.

Ali Rizvi said...

Does anyone know if McDowell's "Conceptual Capacities in Perception" (mentioned above in the post) is published anywhere? ali

Daniel Lindquist said...

"Having the World in View", essay seven.

Ali Rizvi said...

Thx Daniel.

Ali Rizvi said...

at last the paper is available again online and it a better formatting:

http://lucian.uchicago.edu/workshops/wittgenstein/files/2007/10/McDowell-Conceptual-Capacities-in-Perception-1.pdf