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Modern philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of place of minds in world. In Mind and World, based on 1991 John Locke Lectures, John McDowell offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. He illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy - insidious persistence of dualism - in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable - but surmountable - failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the logical space of reasons into natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in world.