Reminder: invitation to a philosophy lecture

The CEU Philosophy Department cordially invites you to a talk (as part of its Departmental Colloquium series) by David Lauer (Freie Universität, Berlin)) on The World in View. McDowell vs. Brandom on the Necessity of Experience Tuesday, 3 February, 2009, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412 ABSTRACT Discussion of John McDowell’s contribution to the philosophy of perception tends to concentrate on his conceptualism - the thesis that the contents of perceptual experience are „conceptual through and through“. However, this astounding claim of McDowell’s is in fact just a corollary of two more basic tenets of his philosophy, namely the rejection of what Sellarsians call the „Myth of the Given“, and a commitment to what McDowell himself calls „Minimal Empiricism“. Therefore, in order to assess the credentials of McDowell’s conceptualism, his reasons for holding on to these tenets should be assessed. I will do so for the latter of the two. Minimal Empiricism is the thesis that we cannot understand our empirical beliefs as being about the world - and therefore, as being beliefs - if experience does not offer us reasons for them. Many commentators have complained that they cannot find a satisfying argument for this thesis in Mind and World. I will try to reconstruct an argument for Minimal Empiricism on McDowell’s behalf, using materials gathered from a series of exchanges between him and Robert Brandom, which revolves around a thought experiment originally introduced by Brandom and known as the story of the chickensexers. Brandom, like Davidson, thinks that we cannot and need not make sense of experience as offering us reasons for belief, and that we can understand the intentionality and world-involvingness of our thought and talk without relying on any theoretical notion of experience altogether. Against this, McDowell defends the claim that casting out experience from the realm of rational relations renders the position of the epistemic subject toward the world unrecognizable and therefore makes intentionality unintelligible. I will reconstruct McDowell as arguing for the idea that without reconstructing intentional world-involvingness as a structural feature of the sensory consciousness of an epistemic subject, as part and parcel of the phenomenology of our being-in-the-world, any attempt to exorcise the Myth of the Given (which unites McDowell with Brandom and Davidson) would remain incomplete. Kriszta Biber Department Coordinator Philosophy Department Tel: 36-1-327-3806 Fax: 36-1-327-3072 E-mail: biberk(a)ceu.hu