ABSTRACT
I hardly know where to begin in commenting on John McDowell’s rich and interesting Mind and World. Of course, everything I say stands against a background of massive agreement with the main line of his thinking, and excitement and admiration for his formulations. “Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen”1
indeed, and it was and is a powerful one, which seeps into not only our philosophical thought, but many other domains of our culture. It is a picture of the mind in the world, a dualist one in which, as McDowell shows, the understanding of the world is dominated by a certain modern conception of natural law. This helps to generate a conception of what valid knowing is, which is no small matter in our culture, one of whose underpinnings and most prestigious achievements is science.
