The preceding chapter first appeared in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, edited by Nicholas H. Smith (2002). McDowell responded individually to each of the essays in the collection, and the Cambridge University Press referees for this manuscript all suggested that I make use of this occasion to write a response to that response. I respond at some length (quite a bit more than the three pages of McDowell's rejoinder) because the theme of this book – the persistence of the difficulty in understanding what it is to be the subject of thought and of action and the importance of the post-Kantian struggle to understand that issue – comes up in an important way in McDowell's recent work in general and in these rejoinders, and I hope to make use of this occasion to try to clarify some controversial issues.

I try first to summarize McDowell's counters. There are five points. First, since much of “Leaving Nature Behind” (LNB) argues that one of McDowell's worries, “subjectivism,” should, when properly understood, not be seen as a danger and that there is no good reason to drag “nature” into the discussion, McDowell first complains that I am inflating his use of such an appeal in order to complain about it. “Bald naturalists” are the worry.