richard,

While I’ve been at this for a long time now, I’ve only caught up with some of the recent developments during my last four years back in the classroom as a half-time student. A lot has happened since my last time in academia.

If you ever get around to the McDowell, he explains how we’ve tried every conceivable way to think straight, and the evidence always outruns us. So he does the equivalent of the logical maneuver of a reductio: what happens when we assume the opposite? What he arrives at is that while our world may not be rational (as Aristotle and the Schoolmen assumed) it is conceptualized. That is, we do not stand over against it and impose concepts on it. It’s mutual and reciprocal. To be ‘worlded’ as we humans are is to have a ‘second’ nature.

All he retains from platonist dualism is the mathematics of it and resists what he calls ‘rampant’ platonism which is supernatural realism.

All he retains of Parmenides’ monism is that since we belong here, we ought to be able to understand what’s going on.

But no satisfactory resolution or replacement of those positions (including that of antirepresentationalism [Rorty is now in the literature department at Stanford, having resigned his status as a philosopher — being president of the national professional association can do that to a guy — and satisfied with fiction rather than fact] and the new metaphysics of ‘possible world philosophy’) has yet reached my reading list.

I think we’re on the way toward a major confluence of the Anglo-American analytic styles and Continental phenomenological styles — if only the politicians can keep us from blowing each other off the Earth while the necessary thinking gets done.

I am a student member of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. At their annual convention in 2004 one workshop was on McDowell. This year there was none. I don’t know if that means McDowell has met his match (I don’t read the journals.) or whether the folks at the U of Colorado (Denver, I think) couldn’t make it this year.