McDowell and Aquinas: Philosophical Convergences

1 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 80 n. 12. 261 The Thomist 77 (2013): 261-97 MCDOWELL AND AQUINAS: PHILOSOPHICAL CONVERGENCES GAVEN KERR Queen’s University / St. Malachy’s Seminary Belfast, Northern Ireland I N THIS ARTICLE I shall explore the philosophical convergences between the thought of the great thirteenth-entury Dominican theologian St. Thomas Aquinas and that of the twentieth-century analytic philosopher John McDowell. In particular, I shall argue that the philosophical issues motivating McDowell’s closing of the gap between mind and world can be seen to have been anticipated and addressed in a similar fashion by Aquinas. By way of an introduction, and in order to set the context of the ensuing philosophical discussion by indicating the conclusion at which I hope to arrive, we can read the salutary message behind the following text from Mind and World;. In Mind and World McDowell makes the following claim: “Before the modern era, the idea that knowledge is a normative status was not felt to stand in tension with, say, the idea that knowledge might be the result of an exercise of natural powers.”1 The context of this passage is McDowell’s elucidation of his own conception of naturalism. He wants to depict a type of naturalism that does not ‘disenchant’ or disrobe nature of conceptual content, yet he does not want to enchant the natural realm to such an extent that he supernaturalizes it. Within the more general context of his philosophical project, McDowell wants to avoid a conception of the human being as a minded GAVEN KERR 262 2 Following McDowell’s usage, I shall use a capitalized ‘G’ when speaking of the Given as it appears in the myth of the Given, and a lower case ‘g’ when speaking of what is received in sensory experience. For a concise yet helpful account of what McDowell takes the myth to entail, see Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), Essay 14, ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, § 1. The terminology is of course Sellars’s, whose essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (chap. 5 in Science, Perception and Reality [New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963]) is a robust attack on the myth of the Given. entity thoroughly detached from nature, yet with one foot in the natural realm, as it were; he carves out a middle path between bald naturalism and what could be called ‘supernaturalism’. Such a path should be seen as indicative of the more general desire, to the fore in McDowell’s work, of avoiding the myth of the Given.2 McDowell wants to depict the mind/world relationship as one wherein our concepts have empirical content, but not as construed by traditional empiricism. The latter, claims McDowell, falls foul of the myth of the Given, holding the view that mind is thoroughly juxtaposed to sensibility, but acquires empirical content through impingements from a conceptually naked Given. McDowell wants to hold that there is no such dipolarity to the minded individual, that one can be a minded individual living within a natural realm and engaging with the world by means of one’s mental powers. Such a conception of human rational engagement seeks to avoid the entailment of two sui generis spheres, fundamentally distinct, yet somehow interacting so that our concepts can be taken as ‘world involving’ and our perceptions can be taken as ‘concept involving’. As noted, McDowell indicates that in the premodern era the dualistic view of man, having one foot in a natural realm and another in a normative realm, was not envisaged. The premodern view, particularly that influenced by Aristotle, looked at man as part and parcel of the natural world: though man engages with the natural world in a special way, one that is cashed out in terms of his rational agency, he is inherently part of the natural world. Thinkers inspired by Aristotle were not (and are not) beset with anxieties concerning how two sui generis spheres, one of reasons/normativity/justifications and one of nature/laws/facts, could interrelate such that the latter...