I learned yesterday that John McDowell retired earlier this year. There was a celebratory event held at the University of Pittsburgh in April, where Matthew Boyle and Robert Pippin gave a talk each. Boyle spoke about McDowell's philosophical method, and Pippin about his place in the tradition of German Idealism.
I read a transcript of Boyle's talk this morning, and it reminded me of a time when I felt a certain urgency about philosophy. The events of my life at that time had nurtured in me a conviction that there was little more important to do than reconcile the dualisms of self and world, reason and nature, subject and object; little more I could do for the world than commit myself to these problems. I'm unable to grasp the existential import of those questions now, unable to locate once more the substance of those anxieties, but I found myself nevertheless excited by Boyle's talk.
I'm hesitant to discuss it in detail—notice the ever so slight beckoning to come away and do something else—but the gist of Boyle's talk (which, by the way, was full of praise for the singular philosopher that McDowell is) is that McDowell's quietism is ultimately more constructive than he'd like to let on, and its constructive qualities become evident if we come to adopt a Kantian, and then Hegelian, stance towards aporiae, or antinomies. For Boyle (and perhaps for Pippin), McDowell's Mind & World amounts to the Aufhebung of the theses of the autonomy of reason and minimal empiricism.
I'm sitting in the backyard of our new flat in Clapton. There's an apple tree, bursting with unripe green apples, arched over the fence, and it's a pleasant late-tens temperature on a Summer night. Boyle's talk, and my recollection of the space of mind I occupied once, is tempting me to return to philosophy. But for now I have made other commitments, and I must keep them.