ABSTRACT
McDowell’s powerful and complexly argued book starts from Kant’s central dictum “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”1
McDowell is driving at the Kantian discovery of spontaneity, that specific achievement of subjectivity whose beginning and ground lies not outside but within itself. Of course, this is something the idealist successors of Kant had already focussed on: from Fichte to Hegel, they were convinced that the deepest secret of transcendental philosophy lay in spontaneity, if only the idea were worked out properly.
