An Interview with John McDowell on his 2013 Agnes Cuming Lectures (UCD), ‘Two Questions About Perception’

Abstract

In 2013 John McDowell, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, delivered the Agnes Cuming Lectures that are hosted annually by the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin, on the topic: ‘Two Questions about Perception’ (23–24 April). The following lightly edited interview with McDowell (JM) by O’Shea (JOS) (https://youtu. be/fSXw2mJTF-Y) occurred after the first of his two lectures, which were entitled: ‘Can Cognitive Science Determine Epistemology?’ (https://youtu. be/m8y8673RmII), and ‘Are the Senses Silent?’ (https://youtu.be/ fBQHEGg5JSo). Each talk carried further some important debates about the fundamental nature of perceptual knowledge that McDowell has continued to have with, in the first case, Tyler Burge (cf. Burge 2003, 2005, 2011, 2022; McDowell 1982, 1994, 2008, 2010, 2011; Burge 2011), and in the second case with Charles Travis (McDowell 2009, 2013; McDowell 2018; Travis 2004, 2013, 2018; McDowell 2018 see also Gersel et al. 2018). In the first lecture McDowell argued against Burge that cognitive science, while doing significant work on the problems with which it is concerned, does not address in its terms some of the most important problems in epistemology concerning the nature of perceptual knowledge. In the second lecture McDowell responded to Travis’s influential 1994 paper, ‘The Silence of the Senses’ by arguing in light of insights from both Kant and Wilfrid Sellars that the senses are not ‘silent’ in the way that Travis contends, which concerns the nature and role of sensibility in our perceptual knowledge of given environmental realities. The interview contains discussion of the topics raised in both of the lectures. Of particular interest in the interview is how each of them relates to McDowell’s well-known embrace and development of Sellars’s famous critique of the ‘myth of the given’ (Sellars 1956), including some of the ways in which McDowell has found it necessary to