O'Brien, Dan Jayes
Dr. Dan O’Brien is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University at Birmingham, and teaches at Birmingham, Keele and the Open University. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Birmingham.
2007 0-7734-5266-4This book aims to provide arguments to substantiate that John McDowell’s rejection of an approach to the philosophy of the mind which he, in his Mind and World, termed ‘bald naturalism,’ which is an attempt to construe mental relations in terms of the law-like structure of nature. The first part of the book defines the bald naturalist position distinguishing between to forms of the philosophy with regards to their acceptance or criticism of folk psychology. In the second part of the book, a more sophisticated bald naturalism is considered in relation to a study of the practice of interpretation utilized to reveal features integral to the structure of mind. Having demonstrated that the rational constraints on interpretation are open-ended, it becomes apparent that bald naturalism, which is unable to deal with this fact, is unable to properly understand interpretation or the mind.
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