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.
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