Abstract
How is our empirical thinking possible? How can human mind get a grasp of anything conceived to be completely outside of its own realm as empirical world is taken to be? These are initial questions John McDowell, an American post-analytic philosopher reviving a classical German idealism heritage, addresses in his seminal work Mind and World (1994). Such questions he argues are symptomatic to a philosophical anxiety of modern thinking, which stems from an illusory philosophical obligation to bridge a gap between mind and world.
There is no such gap according to McDowell. Our conceptual capacities completely permeate the whole sphere of our experience including sense perception.
In consequence we have to adopt a significant difference between human nature, so called second nature, and the rest of the being. This notion of both our experience and the world as driven by our conceptuality calls for a careful inspection focusing mainly on the proposed isolation of human second nature from the rest.