Encyclopedia > John McDowell

  Article Content

John McDowell

John McDowell (1942-) is a contemporary philosopher, formerly at Oxford and now at the University of Pittsburgh. McDowell's most noted work has been in the philosophy of mind and language. In the 1970s he was active in the project of semantics for natural language that had been initiated by Donald Davidson. His work is also heavily influenced by Wilfrid Sellars[?], P. F. Strawson, and Gareth Evans. In more recent years he has advocated an externalist theory of mind, and contends that a due respect for scientific naturalism should not preclude our treating mentalistic vocabulary as real--as actually referring to and describing the world. He has also written on Wittgenstein, Kant, Ancient Philosophy, and ethics.

McDowell's John Locke lectures at Oxford are reprinted in Mind and World. Many of his papers are collected in Mind, Value, and Reality and Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Canadian Music Hall of Fame

... 1981 Joni Mitchell 1982 Neil Young 1983 Glenn Gould 1986 Gordon Lightfoot 1987 The Guess Who[?] 1989 The Band 1990 Maureen Forrester[?] 1991 Leonard ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 49 ms