ABSTRACT
John McDowell’s Mind and World seeks to expose and thereby to exorcise a line of thinking that leads to a philosophical challenge to the possibility of thought. Theories meant to answer the challenge cannot succeed; the defects of each drive us to an opposed theory, and then back, in endless oscillation. The key to the exorcism is to see how and why we are not forced to choose among the unsatisfactory theories. To be liberated in this way would not be to answer the philosophical question. Ideally, the challenge will simply disappear, or will lose whatever point it had seemed to have.
