Wednesday, December 05, 2007

No fool of a Took

You may have heard about Robert Pippin's recent exchange with McDowell in the European Journal of Philosophy. Well now Professor P. has put the relevant pdf's on his website, including the Postscript to "Leaving Nature Behind" (his contribution to Reading McDowell) which is his response to McD's response in that book. So it goes
1. P: "Leaving Nature Behind" in Smith 2002
2. M: "Responses" in Smith 2002
3. P: "Postscript"
4. M: "On Pippin's Postscript"
5. P: "McDowell's Germans"
6. M: "Oh yeah? Sez you! (Pbbbbbt!)"
Okay, I made that last one up. Some heady stuff there! You may want to skim the B Deduction first. (There's an oxymoron for you: "skim the B Deduction".)

Here's a taste from #4, where McDowell lays it on the line:
The result of [what he's just been saying] is no longer Kantian in any but the thinnest sense. But that is no threat to anything I think. My proposal — whose shape I took from Pippin — was that we can understand at least some aspects of Hegelian thinking in terms of a radicalization of Kant. The radicalization need not be accessible to someone who would still be recognizably Kant. It is enough if there is a way to arrive at a plausibly Hegelian stance by reflecting on the upshot of the Deduction. It is no problem for this that, as I am suggesting, this reflection undermines the very need for a Transcendental Deduction — provided such a result emerges intelligibly from considering what is promising and what is unsatisfactory in Kant’s effort.
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3 comments:

  1. Ben WThu Dec 06, 05:39:00 PM EST

    Pippin's postscript also appears in, and was written for, his collection The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, CUP 2005. (Since you're providing bibliographic material for the first two.)

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  2. Ben WThu Dec 06, 05:41:00 PM EST

    (Just went to Pippin's page: how bizarre that he has scans from TPoS, and deliberately didnt' include the postscript!

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  3. DuckThu Dec 06, 07:30:00 PM EST

    Actually, the version of "Leaving Nature Behind" on the site is the original one from Smith 2002 (which I have right here, so I'm sure; plus it has his name on it, which the TPoS version surely doesn't). Thanks for the book reference for the postscript, which I should have provided (he mentions something about "the theme of this book" and it would help to know which book that is).

    As of last week, in fact, the postscript was missing, so I emailed him (!) to "complain" (nicely), and he said he would put it up too. The original article was already there. (It's labeled as being from TPoS, but it's actually Smith.)

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