Abstract

John McDowell, one of the leading philosophers of our time, has an appealing account of experience that is inspired by Kantian insights. Although he borrows heavily from Kant, he believes the Kantian theory ultimately fails. For McDowell, a successful epistemological account of experience must provide the resources to avoid the "interminable oscillation" between coherentism and the myth of the Given, and he thinks a robust conception of second nature is necessary to escape the oscillation. I suggest that McDowell's criticisms do not make contact with Kant and that Kant is trying to answer transcendental questions that McDowell does not address. ;I divide my reading of Kant's theory into "outer" and "inner" elements. In the chapter on sensation, I spell out the pre-synthetic stage of the interaction between mind and world, viz., the impacts the world makes on the senses. Sensation for Kant is the pre-cognitive stage in the production of experience, where we are supplied with the "raw material" that is subsequently taken up by the synthetic operations of the mind. ;Next I discuss objective representations, intuitions and concepts. Kant thinks that for there to be objective representations, the material provided in sensation must be "run through and held together" by the mind. There are difficulties about how this could work: I give readings of Kant's account of the construction of intuitions by the activity of the mind, and, following some very recent work by Hannah Ginsborg, I suggest a way to understand synthesis as exemplary of empirical concepts. Next, I offer a solution to a problem raised for Kantians by Susan Hurley: She reads Kant as escaping the Myth of the Given only by falling victim to a problem she calls "The Myth of the Giving". I suggest that if his doctrines of synthesis and apperception are properly understood, Kant escapes the problem. ;Finally, I discuss the metaphysics of Kant's theory of experience. I do not try to spell out Kant's metaphysics, but I suggest that the epistemological account of experience does not commit Kant to any unacceptable metaphysical claims