Student Books : Slippery words

John McDowell takes Kant as gospel in Mind and World (Harvard University
Press, £19.95/$32.95, ISBN 0674576098), which is fine, provided you rely
on the logical positivists’ view of verbal constancy. Immanuel Kant—the greatest
philosopher since Aristotle—failed, as does this book, because words slip and
slide, and the most important are also the most subjective and the least
objectively definable.