John McDowell

John McDowell ( born March 7, 1942 in Boksburg, South Africa) is a South African philosopher of our time.

Life

He studied at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and at New College, Oxford, where he also taught at University College from 1966 to 1986. Since then, he has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh since 1988 as a University Professor.

He has shown publications in various fields of philosophy (as in epistemology, meta-ethics or metaphysics ). , Where he exerts its greatest effect activity in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language In the 1970s, he was instrumental in the initiated by Donald Davidson project to develop a semantics for natural languages. Here, his philosophy is heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Strawson Frederick, David Wiggins, Gareth Evans and Wilfrid Sellars especially.

In recent years, McDowell has excelled as a defender of externalist theory of mind; he represents here the view that a due respect for the scientific naturalism should not deter us from our mental vocabulary than real - that is, as related to something in the world and this descriptive - to interpret.

Works

Many important writings McDowell are in the collections of essays Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998) summarized. A revised version of his John Locke Lectures in 1994 under the title Mind and World ( Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, re-released and provided with a new introduction in 1996 ) published. In this influential, but also very difficult work McDowell developed a new, since hotly debated approach to empirical justification of our assumptions. Many topics in McDowell's works were taken up in a similar form of his Pittsburgh colleague Robert Brandom and developed. Both turn sat intensively with Richard Rorty. So McDowell writes in his preface to Mind and World ( pp. ix -x): "It will be Obvious did Rorty 's work is [ ... ] central for the way I define my stance here ."