文档介绍：HUMAN NATURE!
within, or somehow demands nothing beyond the Realm of Law. Set against
both these tendencies would be a view which allows the adequacy of the
8 modern conception of Nature but rejects the idea that Nature is all there is:
an irreductive supernaturalism, as it were - McDowell coins the term Rampant
HUMAN NATURE? Platonism - about our Spontaneity and the norms to which it responds. But it
is the modem conception of Nature which sets up this unattractive, Homeric
choice - between elimination or (quasi-)reduction of meaning, intentionality,
Crispin Wright and normativity, on the one hand, or an obscurantist metaphysical hypostati-
zation of them, on the other - and it is this conception which McDowell aims
to show us how to supersede. We should aim not to solve the difficulties of
locating rational thought and intentional activity within the modem natu-
ralist view, but to finesse them by plishing an improved - "relaxed" -
McDowell's book consists of versions of the six John Locke lectures he delivered conception of what should rank as natural - one which allows us to "take in
in Oxford in 1991, together with a four part "Afterword" elaborating on and stride," without any sense of eeriness or mystification, an acceptance that
defending various of their themes. It displays a level of philosophical ambition Spontaneity is sui generis, by emphasizing the thought that its distinctive
that, in both scale and general direction, is nothing short of Hegelian - indeed concepts capture patterns in our natural way of living4 It is by this -
the author remarks' that he would like to view his text as a prolegomenon to a plishment that we can transcend the most fundamental of modem
reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit. McDowell's agenda, like Hegel's, is philosophy's charactb ristic dualisms: the dualism of mind on one side and a
shaped through and through by the challenge of ing the Kantian legacy ' brutely external