Abstract
This chapter continues the theme developed in the previous chapter to show that mind and world are metaphysically related in the way laid down by Kant and Hegel. It was Kant who first had shown that the world is structured by the categories of the mind. Hegel gave it a metaphysical grounding by showing that the world itself is an expression of the mind or the spirit.
John McDowell recently has taken up the Kantian and the Hegelian argument further by showing that the world is placed in the space of reasons and that there is no way we can place it beyond the realm of the conceptual because the latter is unbounded in nature. The world is independent of our empirical thought and experience, but it is within the space of reasons. Therefore, the world is empirically independent of the mind but is transcendentally dependent on mind.
McDowell develops a transcendental argument to show that the world and mind cannot be understood within a naturalist framework because naturalism, especially the reductive or bald naturalism, disenchants the mind and the world. The world gets its meaning from its place in the space of reasons; so also the mind being rational in nature is the source of the meanings and reasons.
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Pradhan, R.C. (2019). Mind and World: Naturalism vs. Non-naturalism. In: Mind, Meaning and World. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7228-5_2
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