This is an excellent collection of essays from one of the most careful philosophers in America today. I highly recommend this, as well as Mind and World.

This collection of articles is essential reading nowdays for philosophy students. McDowell is such a careful and important philosopher. Here are his articles on ancient philosophy, and his work on Wittgenstein (Rule-Following, meaning, etc...). Also, collected here are his articles on ethics and practical reasoning: "Noncognitivism and Rule-following," which is essential reading material. I highly recommend this colelction (now in paperback finally).

This anthology is as exciting and interesting as McDowell's M and W; Stroud's Quest; Crary's The New Wittgenstein; and Brewer's Perception and Reason. This anthology contains new material from some top-flight folks in the field.

M and W is an important text; it engages, as very few contemporary philosophy of mind texts have, the serious and neglected dualisms of conceptual scheme and empirical content; spontaneity and receptivity, which are, needless to say, Kantian concerns. McDowell is a proponent of conceptual content (within the realm of a 'minimal empiricism') and appeals to Kant and Wittgenstein to buttress his descriptive approach to philosophical inquiry. M and W has some brillant and evocative insights (with more than a few expensive obscurities), and some of McDowell's metaphors are splendid indeed, such as the teetering 'seesaw' and the 'sideways on picture.' Of course, it attempts to negotiate Kantian insights concerning human cognition with certain contemporary discussions on the Myth of the Given (Sellars), The Third Dogma (Davidson)and the Tribunal of Experience (Quine), and Rorty's attack on epistemology.

This anthology could offer disenchanted graduate students a reason to complete doctoral studies in philosophy. It is that rich and exciting. I am seriously nervous with glee (nerd alert!).

The most important and interesting articles here are: M. Friedman, "Exorcising the Philosophical Tradition" (previously published); R. Pippin, "Leaving Nature Behind" (on subjectivism); B. Stroud, "Sense Experience and the Grounding of Thought" (always a pleasure to read Barry); R. Brandom, "Non-Inferential Knowledge, Perceptual Experience..."; G. McCulloch, "Phenomenological Externalism" (see A. Brueckner and/or K. Falvey on this topic); H. Putnam, "McD's Mind and McD's World" (also see his Three-Fold Cord on McD and his soon to be released UW lectures from Columbia UP); C. Larmore, "Attending to Reasons."

This is my highest recommendation.

McDowell and Spitz give an incredibly thorough, yet succinct overview of the field of substance abuse. The book is informative, well written, and an interesting read. It will be of great interest to all clinicians who work with substance abuse patients. I personally recommend it to anyone who encounters the problem of addiction, whether it be in a personal or professional realm.

I found this book to be an excellent introduction to the field of substance abuse. It is informative without getting bogged down in too much detail, and makes for interesting reading. The volume is also peppered with fascinating historical tidbits.

Doctors Mc Dowell and Spitz aught to be applauded for their innovative presentation. It should be a permanent fixture in the offices of every therapist as a research guide, and on the bookshelves of patients. It is a wellspring of information for both the layman and the pro. Thank you both.

This is a difficult, but well written text of a series of lectures given by McDowell. Frankly, it required a lot of concentration on my part, but the effort was worth it. McDowell makes good sense of the problems of empiricism. He is also a good stylist.

This text with its new Introduction clearly demonstrates McDowell's prominence in American philosophy. McDowell is certainly one of the most important, careful, and creative minds in the field. Mind and World is crucial reading material on perceptual content, judgment, and experience.

Inspired by Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, McDowell interrogates the notion of a 'logical space of reasons' as having location in the natural world. At times adopting an obscure and abstract prose style, McDowell nevertheless identifies specific anxieties concerning the realtion between mind and world: tensions between a Kantian sensible intuition (or 'minimal empiricism')--how our thoughts are answerable to and directed at the world--and the idea of receiving an impression (or Kantian humility) as a transaction with the world, placing it in a 'logical space of reasons.' So there is a tension between a normative context, that is, how the world 'impinges' on us, which is within the logical space of reasons, and empirical concepts that are supposed to be within the logical space of nature. But if we take Sellars seriously, identifying something as an impression--an economy of logical space of nature 'giving' or 'impinging' on the mind, then we are responsible to characterize just how an 'impinging world' is different from justifying or placing a verdict on empirical descriptions. McDowell's tension is between a 'minimal empiricism'--thought is answerable to a tribunal of experience--and how experience is indeed a tribunal, which attributes verdicts on thoughts.

Along the way, McDowell critiques the Myth of the Given, Davidson's coherentism, and argues for 'direct realism.'
McDowell has a flair for characterizing and 'exorcising' philosophical anxieties between empiricism and naturalism, and he employs creative metaphors that are extremely helpful, such as the 'seesaw' and a 'sideways on view.'

The first three lectures are most important, wherein he discusses conceptual and non-conceptual content. Here he engages the views of Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Evans, and Peacocke.

Mind and World is a masterful example of careful and thorough-going philosophy--at its best.