Abstract
The concept of nature plays a key role in John McDowell’s philosophical thinking. According to his diagnosis, a number of significant contemporary philosophical problems result from an – implicit or explicit – commitment to a specifically modern conception of the natural. Consequently, considering anew the insights of an Aristotelean naturalism may be part of the therapy. McDowell initially develops his naturalism of second nature in Mind and World (1994) in an epistemological context. Therefore, this article will start with a discussion of Aristotelean naturalism in McDowell’s theoretical philosophy. In the second section we shall investigate its application to the philosophy of action, while section three deals with McDowell’s cognitivist ethics, also deeply influenced by Aristotelean motives.
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Notes
- 1.
“The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.” (Sellars 1997, 76)
- 2.
This Kant-inspired terminology is frequently used by McDowell: “spontaneity can be simply a label for the involvement of conceptual capacities” (McDowell 1994, 9). The faculty of spontaneity can be identified with human abilities that belong to the logical space of reasons, i.e. with conceptual or rational capacities.
- 3.
McDowell explains (1994, 10): “Of course this is not to deny that experiencing the world involves activity. Searching is an activity; so are observing watching, and so forth […] But one’s control over what happens in experience has limits: one can decide where to place oneself, at what pitch to tune one’s attention, and so forth, but it is not up to one what, having done all that, one will experience.”
- 4.
Aristotle says: „The virtues therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature; nature gives us the capacity to receive them, and this capacity is brought to maturity by habit.” (Aristotle 2009, NE II 1, 1103a)
- 5.
The connection between morality and sensibility is of course common in Aristotle: “Prudence deals with the ultimate particular thing, which cannot be apprehended by Scientific Knowledge, but only by perception: not the perception of the special senses, but the sort of intuition whereby we perceive that the ultimate figure in mathematics is a triangle.” (Aristotle 2009, NE VI 9, 1142a)
- 6.
McDowell allows for the possibility of non-rational animals who develop a second nature without the logical space of reasons becoming relevant in any sense. A dog’s acquired ability to follows someone’s commands may well count as part of its second nature. But “apart from how it originates, the second nature of dogs is just like their first nature.” (McDowell 2000, 98)
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Matthiessen, H.O. (2020). Perception and Action: John McDowell’s Naturalism of Second Nature. In: Hähnel, M. (eds) Aristotelian Naturalism. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37576-8_9
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