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.