Robert Alan and Kathryn Dunlevie Hayes Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Rice University

Intellectualism, Experience, and Motor Understanding

For Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: the McDowell/Dreyfus Debate, edited by Joseph Schear, Routledge Press, forthcoming.

From the Introduction:

Intellectualism is by definition a vice—the vice of overstating the role of
intellect in experience and action, of seeing reason (or inferences, or concepts)
where they are not. In what follows I find some justification for Dreyfus’ charge
that McDowell’s views are intellectualist in this sense. But my reasons leave me
room to agree with McDowell: our rational capacities also do, in a way,
“pervasively shape” our experience, and this can make it misguided to look for
some “core” of experience we share with sentient creatures that lack them.

© 2020 Charles Siewert. All Rights Reserved.