Finitude Redux

Realism, Antirealism, and Speculative Materialism

Lucas Samaras, “Mirrored Room”, 1966 (https://twistedsifter.com/2015/08/lucas-samaras-mirrored-room-installation/)

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In his masterwork Mind and World, John McDowell came up with a pithy metaphor for the predicament of Modern Philosophy and the problems that flow from the Subject/Object dichotomy: the idea of a sideways-on perspective on reality. In the words of Tim Thornton in his monograph on McDowell:

There is no prospect of adopting a “sideways-on” perspective (Mind and World p.34) that charts the relation of language and thought, on the one hand, and an extra-conceptual world, on the other, from outside both language/thought and the world. (Tim Thornton, John McDowell, p. 12)

McDowell’s project, in Mind and World, is to try to recover both language/thought and the extra-conceptual world without relying on a “sideways-on” view, without falling into antirealism or idealism (“a frictionless coherentism”) or metaphysical realism (“rampant Platonism”). Mind and World interpenetrate each other, and it is only through this interpenetration that they can be distinguished from each other, as correlates that are unintelligible without their opposite numbers. Mind inevitably is causally related to the natural world, since minds are part of nature, part of that world. But mind becomes rationally related to the natural world through humans acquiring a cognitive “second nature” through intentional engagement with…