Abstract

Joseph Schear provides us with a much-needed compilation of this whole “battle of myths” that began when Hubert Dreyfus presented a challenge to John McDowell’s theory of perception with his 2005 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association. Although, back then, the terms of the debate were presented in the context of McDowell’s reading of Aristotle and phronēsis, they have since been taken up in their own right. Dreyfus claims that conceptual capacities cannot be pervasive in perceptual experience as McDowell maintains because, if so, conceptual content will crowd out those areas in which skillful embodied coping betrays a nonconceptual interaction with the world.Schear not only collects essays from highly distinguished scholars on this issue, but also manages to include never-before-published essays from both McDowell and Dreyfus. These essays are, to be sure, essentially restatements of what the two philosophers already maintain and have written. However, I find th ..