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John McDowell
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John Henry McDowell

John McDowell in Paris, October 2007

Born
7 March 1942 (age74)[1]
Boksburg, South Africa
Almamater
University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland
New College, Oxford
Era
20th-century philosophy
Region
Western Philosophy
School
Analytic philosophy
Main interests
Metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics,
philosophy of mind, ethics
Notable ideas
Perceptual content is conceptual "all the way down"[2]
Influences
[show]

John Henry McDowell (born 7 March 1942) is a South African philosopher,

formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor
at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on
metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's
most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of
language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award.[3] and is a Fellow of
both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy.
McDowell has, throughout his career, understood philosophy to be
"therapeutic" and thereby to "leave everything as it is", which he understands
to be a form of philosophical quietism (although he does not consider himself

to be a "quietist"). The philosophical quietist believes that philosophy cannot

make any explanatory comment about how, for example, thought and talk
relate to the world but can, by offering re-descriptions of philosophically
problematic cases, return the confused philosopher to a state of intellectual
quietude. However, in defending this quietistic perspective McDowell has
engaged with the work of leading contemporaries in such a way as to both
therapeutically dissolve what he takes to be philosophical error, while
developing original and distinctive theses about language, mind and value. In
each case, he has tried to resist the influence of what he regards as a
misguided, reductive form of philosophical naturalism that dominates the work
of his contemporaries, particularly in North America.
Contents [hide]
1
Career
1.1
Early work
1.2
Value theory
1.3
Mind and World (1994)
2
Collected papers
3
Influences
4
Publications
5
Reviews
6
Honors
7
References
8
Further reading
9
External links

Career[edit]

Early work[edit]
McDowell completed a B.A. at the University College of Rhodesia and
Nyasaland before moving to New College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in
1963.

McDowell's earliest published work was in ancient philosophy, most notably

including a translation of and commentary on Plato's Theaetetus. In the
1970s he was active in the Davidsonian project of providing a semantic
theory for natural language, co-editing (with Gareth Evans) a volume of
essays entitled Truth and Meaning. McDowell edited and published Evans's
influential posthumous book The Varieties of Reference (1982).
In his early work, McDowell was very much involved both with the
development of the Davidsonian semantic programme and with the
internecine dispute between those who take the core of a theory that can play
the role of a theory of meaning to involve the grasp of truth conditions, and
those, such as Michael Dummett, who argued that linguistic understanding
must, at its core, involve the grasp of assertion conditions. If, Dummett
argued, the core of a theory that is going to do duty for a theory of a meaning
is supposed to represent a speaker's understanding, then that understanding
must be something of which a speaker can manifest a grasp. McDowell
argued, against this Dummettian view and its development by such
contemporaries as Crispin Wright, both that this claim did not, as Dummett
supposed, represent a Wittgensteinian requirement on a theory of meaning
and that it rested on a suspect asymmetry between the evidence for the
expressions of mind in the speech of others and the thoughts so expressed.
This particular argument reflects McDowell's wider commitment to the idea
that, when we understand others, we do so from "inside" our own practices:
Wright and Dummett are treated as pushing the claims of explanation too far
and as continuing Willard Van Orman Quine's project of understanding
linguistic behaviour from an "external" perspective.
In these early exchanges and in the parallel debate over the proper
understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following, some of
McDowell's characteristic intellectual stances were formed: to borrow a
Wittgensteinian expression, the defence of a realism without empiricism, an
emphasis on the human limits of our aspiration to objectivity, the idea that
meaning and mind can be directly manifested in the action, particularly
linguistic action, of other people, and a distinctive disjunctive theory of
perceptual experience.
The latter is an account of perceptual experience, developed at the service of
McDowell's realism, in which it is denied that the argument from illusion
supports an indirect or representative theory of perception as that argument
presupposes that there is a "highest common factor" shared by veridical and
illusory (or, more accurately, delusive) experiences. (There is clearly a
distinction between perceiving and acquiring a belief: one can see an
"apparently bent" stick in the water but not believe that it is bent as one
knows that one's experience is illusory. In illusions, you need not believe that
things are as the illusory experiences represent them as being; in delusions,

a person believes what their experience represents to them. So the argument

from illusion is better described as an argument from delusion if it is to make
its central point.)
In the classic argument from illusion (delusion) you are asked to compare a
case where you succeed in perceiving, say, a cat on a mat, to the case where
a trick of light deceives you and form the belief that the cat is on the mat,
when it is not. The proponent of the argument then says that the two states of
mind in these contrasting cases share something important in common, and
to characterise this we need to introduce an idea like that of "sense data."
Acquaintance with such data is the "highest common factor" across the two
cases. That seems to force us into a concession that our knowledge of the
external world is indirect and mediated via such sense data. McDowell
strongly resists this argument: he does not deny that there is something
psychologically in common between the subject who really sees the cat and
the one that fails to do so. But that psychological commonality has no bearing
on the status of the judger's state of mind from the point of view of assessing
whether she is in a position to acquire knowledge. In favourable conditions,
experience can be such as to make manifest the presence of objects to
observers that is perceptual knowledge. When we succeed in knowing
something by perceiving it, experience does not fall short of the fact known.
But this just shows that a successful and a failed perceptual thought have
nothing interesting in common from the point of view of appraising them as
knowledge.
In this claim that a veridical perception and a non-veridical perception share
no highest common factor, a theme is visible which runs throughout
McDowell's work, namely, a commitment to seeing thoughts as essentially
individuable only in their social and physical environment, so called
externalism about the mental. McDowell defends, in addition to a general
externalism about the mental, a specific thesis about the understanding of
demonstrative expressions as involving so-called "singular" or "Russellian"
thoughts about particular objects that reflects the influence on his views of
Gareth Evans. According to this view, if the putative object picked out by the
demonstrative does not exist, then such an object dependent thought cannot
exist it is, in the most literal sense, not available to be thought.

Value theory[edit]
In parallel with the development of this work on mind and language,
McDowell also made significant contributions to moral philosophy, specifically
meta-ethical debates over the nature of moral reasons and moral objectivity.
McDowell developed the view that has come to be known as secondary
property realism, or sensibility or moral sense theory. The theory proceeds via
the device of an ideally virtuous agent: such an agent has two connected
capacities. She has the right concepts and the correct grasp of concepts to

think about situations in which she finds herself by coming to moral beliefs.
Secondly, for such a person such moral beliefs are automatically over-riding
over other reasons she may have and in a particular way: they "silence" other
reasons, as McDowell puts it. He believes that this is the best way to capture
the traditional idea that moral reasons are specially authoritative.
McDowell also here departs from the standard interpretation of the Humean
theory of how action is motivated. The Humean claims that any intentional
action, hence any moral action, is motivated by a combination of two mental
states, one a belief and one a desire. The belief functions as a passive
representation; the desire functions to supply the distinctively motivational
part of the combination. On the basis of his account of the virtuous moral
agent, McDowell follows Thomas Nagel in rejecting this account as
inaccurate: it is more truthful to say that in the case of a moral action, the
virtuous agent's perception of the circumstances (that is, her belief) itself
justifies both the action and the desire. For example, we cannot understand
the desire, as a Humean original existence, without relating it back to the
circumstances that impinged on the agent and made her feel compelled to
act. So while the Humean thesis may be a truth about explanation it is not
true about the structure of justification and it ought to be replaced by Nagel's
motivated desire theory as set out in his The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford
University Press, 1970).
Implicit in this account is a theory of the metaphysical status of values: moral
agents form beliefs about the moral facts, which can be straightforwardly true
or false. However, the facts themselves, like facts about colour experience,
combine anthropocentricity with realism. Values are not there in the world for
any observer, for example, one without our human interest in morality.
However, in that sense, colours are not in the world either, but one cannot
deny that colours are both present in our experience and needed for good
explanations in our common sense understanding of the world. The test for
the reality of a property is whether it is used in judgements for which there are
developed standards of rational argument and whether they are needed to
explain aspects of our experience that are otherwise inexplicable. McDowell
thinks that moral properties pass both of these tests. There are established
standards of rational argument and moral properties fall into the general class
of those properties that are both anthropocentric but real.
The connection between McDowell's general metaphysics and this particular
claim about moral properties is that all claims about objectivity are to be made
from the internal perspective of our actual practices, the part of his view that
he takes from the later Wittgenstein. There is no standpoint from outside our
best theories of thought and language from which we can classify secondary
properties as "second grade" or "less real" than the properties described, for
example, by a mature science such as physics. Characterising the place of

values in our worldview is not, in McDowell's view, to downgrade them as less

real than talk of quarks or the Higgs boson.

Mind and World (1994)[edit]

The later development of McDowell's work came more strongly to reflect the
influence on him of Rorty and Sellars and, in particular, both Mind and World
and McDowell's later Woodbridge lectures focus on a broadly Kantian
understanding of intentionality, of the mind's capacity to represent. Mind and
World sets itself the task of understanding the sense in which we are active
even in our perceptual experience of the world. Influenced by Sellars's
famous diagnosis of the "myth of the given" in traditional empiricism, in which
Sellars argued that the blankly causal impingement of the external world on
judgement failed to supply justification, as only something with a belief-like
conceptual structure could engage with rational justification, McDowell tries to
explain how one can accept that we are passive in our perceptual experience
of the world while active in how we conceptualise it. McDowell develops an
account of that which Kant called the "spontaneity" of our judgement in
perceptual experience, while trying to avoid the suggestion that the resulting
account has any connection with idealism.
Mind and World rejects, in the course of its argument, the position that
McDowell takes to be the working ideology of most of his philosophical
contemporaries, namely, a reductively naturalistic account that McDowell
labels "bald naturalism." He contrasts this view with what he deems to be his
own "naturalistic" perspective in which the distinctive capacities of mind are a
cultural achievement of our "second nature", an idea that he adapts from
Gadamer. The book concludes with a critique of Quine's narrow conception of
empirical experience and also a critique of Donald Davidson's views on belief
as inherently veridical, in which Davidson plays the role of the pure
coherentist.
One of the hallmarks of McDowell's later work is his denial that there is any
philosophical use for an idea that our experience contains representations
that are not conceptually structured, so-called "non-conceptual content."
Given that other philosophers claim that scientific accounts of our mental
lives, particularly in the cognitive sciences, need this idea, this claim of
McDowell's has provoked a great deal of discussion. McDowell develops a
stringent reading of Sellars' diagnosis of a "myth of the given" in perceptual
experience to argue that we need always to separate out the exercise of
concepts in experience from a causal account of the pre-conditions of
experience and that the idea of "non-conceptual content" straddles this
boundary in a philosophically unacceptable way.
While Mind and World represents an important contemporary development of
a Kantian approach to philosophy of mind and metaphysics, one or two of the
uncharitable interpretations of Kant's work in that book receive important

revisions in McDowell's later Woodbridge Lectures, published in the Journal

of Philosophy, Vol. 95, 1998, pp.431491. Those lectures are explicitly about
Wilfrid Sellars, and assess whether or not Sellars lived up to his own critical
principles in developing his interpretation of Kant (McDowell claims not).
McDowell has, since the publication of Mind and World, largely continued to
re-iterate his distinctive positions that go against the grain of much
contemporary work on language, mind and value, particularly in North
America where the influence of Wittgenstein has significantly waned.

Collected papers[edit]

Many of McDowell's papers are collected in four volumes:

Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1998)
Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1998)
Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009)
The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2009)
In 1991 he gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford. A revised version of
these lectures was published as Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1994; reissued with a new introduction, 1996). It is an
influential but difficult work that provides a controversial account of empirical
justification for beliefs, covering some of the same ground as Hegel's critique
of Kant but informed by a deep sensitivity to contemporary modes of scientific
naturalism.

Influences[edit]

His work has been also heavily influenced by, among others, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson, David Wiggins, and, especially, Wilfrid Sellars.
Many of the central themes in McDowell's work have also been pursued in
similar ways by his Pittsburgh colleague Robert Brandom (though McDowell
has stated strong disagreement with some of Brandom's readings and
appropriations of his work). Both have been strongly influenced by Richard
Rorty, in particular Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In the
preface to Mind and World (pp. ixx) McDowell states that "it will be obvious
that Rorty's work is [...] central for the way I define my stance here."
McDowell's own work has been criticized for its "sometimes cryptic prose."[4]

Publications[edit]

"Identity Mistakes: Plato and the Logical Atomists", Proceedings of the

Aristotelian Society lxx (196970), 18195
Plato, Theaetetus, translated with notes (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973)

"Comment" (on a paper by F.B. Fitch), in Stephan Krner, ed., Philosophy of

Logic (Blackwell, Oxford, 1976), pp.196201
(with Gareth Evans) "Introduction", in Gareth Evans and John McDowell,
eds., Truth and Meaning (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976), pp. viixxiii;
translated into Spanish: "Introduccin a Verdad y Significado", Cuadernos de
Crtica 37 (1984)
"Truth Conditions, Bivalence, and Verificationism", ibid, pp.4266
"On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name", Mind lxxxvi (1977), 159
85; reprinted in Mark Platts, ed., Reference Truth and Reality (Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London, 1980), pp.14166, and in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning
and Reference (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), pp.11136;
translated into Spanish: "Sobre el Sentido y la Referencia de un Nombre
Propio", Cuadernos de Crtica 20 (1983)
"On 'The Reality of the Past'", in Christopher Hookway and Philip Pettit, eds.,
Action and Interpretation (CUP, Cambridge,1978), pp.12744
"Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?", Aristotelian Society
Supplementary Volume lii (1978), 1329
"Physicalism and Primitive Denotation", Erkenntnis xiii (1978), 13152;
reprinted in Platts, ed., op. cit., pp.11130
"Virtue and Reason", The Monist lxii (1979), 33150; reprinted in Stanley G.
Clarke and Evan Simpson, eds., Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral
Conservatism (SUNY Press, Albany, 1989), pp.87109
"Quotation and Saying That", in Platts, ed., op. cit., pp.20637
"Meaning, Communication, and Knowledge", in Zak van Straaten, ed.,
Philosophical Subjects: Essays on the Work of P. F. Strawson (Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1980), pp.11739
"The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle's Ethics", Proceedings of the African
Classical Associations xv (1980), 114; reprinted in Amlie Oksenberg Rorty,
ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London, 1980), pp.35976
"Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding", in Herman Parret and
Jacques Bouveresse, eds., Meaning and Understanding (De Gruyter, Berlin
and New York, 1981), pp.22548
"Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following", in Steven Holtzman and Christopher
Leich, eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow A Rule (Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London, 1981), pp.14162
"Falsehood and Not-Being in Plato's Sophist", in Malcolm Schofield and
Martha Craven Nussbaum, eds., Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient
Greek Philosophy presented to G. E. L. Owen (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1982), pp.11534
"Truth-Value Gaps", in Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VI
(North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1982), pp.299313
"Reason and Action, III", Philosophical Investigations v (1982), 3015
(Editor) Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1982)

"Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge", Proceedings of the British Academy

lxviii (1982), 45579; reprinted in part in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Perceptual
Knowledge (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988)
"Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World", in Eva Schaper,
ed., Pleasure, Preference and Value (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1983), pp.116
"Wittgenstein on Following a Rule", Synthese 58 (1984), 325363; reprinted
in Moore, ed., Meaning and Reference, pp.25793
"De Re Senses", Philosophical Quarterly xxxiv (1984), 28394; also in
Crispin Wright, ed., Frege: Tradition and Influence (Blackwell, Oxford, 1984),
pp.98l09
"Values and Secondary Qualities", in Ted Honderich, ed., Morality and
Objectivity (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1985), pp.11029
"Functionalism and Anomalous Monism", in Ernest LePore and Brian
McLaughlin, eds., Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of
Donald Davidson (Blackwell, Oxford, 1985), pp.38798
"Critical Notice: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, by Bernard Williams",
Mind xcv (1986), 37786
(with Philip Pettit) "Introduction", in Philip Pettit and John McDowell, eds.,
Subject, Thought and Context (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986), pp.115
"Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space", ibid, pp.13768
"In Defence of Modesty", in Barry Taylor, ed., Michael Dummett:
Contributions to Philosophy (Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1987), pp.5980
Projection and Truth in Ethics (1987 Lindley Lecture), published by the
University of Kansas
"Comments on T. H. Irwin's 'Some Rational Aspects of Incontinence'",
Southern Journal of Philosophy xxvii, Supplement (1988), 89102
"One Strand in the Private Language Argument", Grazer Philosophische
Studien 33/34 (1989), 285303
"Mathematical Platonism and Dummettian Anti-Realism", Dialectica 43
(1989), 17392
"Wittgenstein and the Inner World" [abstract], Journal of Philosophy lxxxvi
(1989), 6434
"Peacocke and Evans on Demonstrative Content", Mind xcix (1990), 31122
"John Leslie Mackie, 19171981", in Proceedings of the British Academy
lxxvi (1990), 48798
"Intentionality De Re", in Ernest LePore and Robert van Gulick, eds. John
Searle and His Critics (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991), pp.21525
"Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein", in Klaus Puhl, ed., Meaning
Scepticism (De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1991), pp.14869
"Putnam on Mind and Meaning", Philosophical Topics xx (1992), 3548
"Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy", in Peter A.
French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest
Studies in Philosophy Volume XVII: The Wittgenstein Legacy (University of
Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1992), pp.4052

"Knowledge by Hearsay", in B. K. Matilal and A. Chakrabarti, eds, Knowing

from Words (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1993; Synthese Library vol. 230), pp.195
224
"The Content of Perceptual Experience", Philosophical Quarterly xliv (1994),
190205
Mind and World (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994;
reissued with a new introduction, 1996) [also translated into German and
Italian]
"Might there be External Reasons", in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison,
eds., World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard
Williams (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995), pp.6885
"Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotle's Ethics", in Robert Heinaman, ed.,
Aristotle and Moral Realism (University College London Press, London,
1995), pp.20118
"Knowledge and the Internal", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
lv (1995), 87793
"Deliberation and Moral Development in Aristotle", in Stephen Engstrom and
Jennifer Whiting, eds., Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1996), pp.1935
"Two Sorts of Naturalism", in Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and
Warren Quinn, eds., Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory
(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996), pp.14979; translated into German ("Zwei
Arten von Naturalismus"), Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie v (1997), 687
710
"Prcis of Mind and World", in Enrique Villanueva, ed., Perception:
Philosophical Issues, 7 (Ridgeway, Atascadero, 1996), pp.2319
"Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom", ibid, pp.283300
"Reply to Price", Philosophical Books 38 (1997), 17781
"Brandom on Representation and Inference", Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research lvii (1997), 15762
"Another Plea for Modesty", in Richard Heck, Jnr., ed., Language, Thought,
and Logic: Essays in Honour of Michael Dummett (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1997), pp.10529
"Reductionism and the First Person", in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit
(Blackwell, Oxford, 1997), pp.23050
Mind, Value, and Reality (a collection of papers) (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1998)
Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (a collection of papers) (Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998)
"Some Issues in Aristotle's Moral Psychology", in Stephen Everson, ed.,
Companions to Ancient Thought: 4: Ethics (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1998), pp.10728
"Referring to Oneself", in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of P. F.
Strawson (Open Court, Chicago and Lasalle, 1998), pp.12945

"Response to Crispin Wright", in Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith, and Cynthia

Macdonald, eds., Knowing Our Own Minds (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998),
pp.4762.
"Prcis of Mind and World" and "Reply to Commentators", Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research lviii (1998), 3658 and 40331
"The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality: Davidson and Sellars", Crtica xxx
(1998), 2948
"Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality" (The Woodbridge
Lectures, 1997), The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 95 (1998), 43191
"Comment on Hans-Peter Krger's paper", Philosophical Explorations i
(1998), 1205 (comment on Hans-Peter Krger, "The Second Nature of
Human Beings: an Invitation for John McDowell to discuss Helmuth
Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology", ibid 10719).
"Sellars's Transcendental Empiricism", in Julian Nida-Rmelin, ed.,
Rationality, Realism, Revision (Proceedings of the 3rd international congress
of the Society for Analytical Philosophy), Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New
York, 1999, pp.4251.
"Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism", in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The
Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Open Court, Chicago and Lasalle, 1999),
pp.87104
"Comment" on Robert B. Brandom, "Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's
Idealism", European Journal of Philosophy vii (1999), 1903.
"Evans, Gareth (194680)": entry in the new Routledge and Kegan Paul
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
"Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity", in Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and
His Critics (Blackwell, Malden, Mass. and Oxford, 2000), pp.10923
"Experiencing the World" and "Responses", in Marcus Willaschek, ed., John
McDowell: Reason and Nature: Lecture and Colloquium in Mnster 1999 (LIT
Verlag, Mnster, 2000), pp.317, 93117
"Comment on Richard Schantz, 'The Given Regained'", in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research lxii (2001), 1815
"Comments", in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology xxi
(2000), 33043 (a special issue devoted to my work)
"Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism", in Petr Kotatko, Peter Pagin,
and Gabriel Segal, eds., Interpreting Davidson (Stanford: CSLI Publications,
2001), 14354. (This is a shorter version of the paper previously published in
the Davidson LLP volume.)
"L'idealismo di Hegel come radicalizzazione di Kant", in Iride 34 (2001), 527
48. (Translation of the paper I gave at the Venice Hegel conference in May
2001.)
"Knowledge and the Internal Revisited", Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research lxiv (2002), 97105.
"Moderne Auffassungen von Wissenschaft und die Philosophie des Geistes",
in Johannes Fried und Johannes Sssmann, Herausg., Revolutionen des

Wissens: Von der Steinzeit bis zur Moderne (Mnchen: C. H. Beck, 2001),
11635. (Previously published in Philosophische Rundschau.)
"Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism", in Jeff Malpas,
Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, eds., Gadamer's Century: Essays in
Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 173
94.
"Responses" in Nicholas Smith, ed., Reading McDowell: Mind and World
(London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.269305. (Responses to the
contributions.)
"How not to read Philosophical Investigations: Brandom's Wittgenstein", in R.
Haller and K. Puhl, eds., Wittgenstein and the Future of Philosophy: A
Reassessment after 50 Years (Vienna: Holder, Pichler, Tempsky, 2002),
pp.24556.
"Non-cognitivisme et rgles", in Archives de Philosophie 64 (2001), 45777.
(Translation of my old paper "Non-cognitivism and rule-following".)
"Knowledge and the Internal Revisited", Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research lxiv (2002), 97105.
Wert und Wirklichkeit: Aufstze zur Moralphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2002). (Translation by Joachim Schulte, with an Introduction by Axel Honneth
and Martin Seel, of seven of the papers in my Mind, Value, and Reality.)
"Hyperbatologikos empeirismos", Defkalion 21/1, June 2003, 6590.
(Translation into Greek of "Transcendental Empiricism", paper delivered at
the Pitt/Athens symposium in Rethymnon, Crete, in 2000.)
"Subjective, intersubjective, objective", Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research lxvii (2003), 67581. (Contribution to a symposium on a book by
Donald Davidson.)
Mente y Mundo (Spanish translation by Miguel ngel Quintana-Paz of Mind
and World), Salamanca: Ediciones Sgueme, 2003.
"L'idealismo di Hegel come radicalizazzione di Kant", in Luigi Ruggiu and
Italo Testa, eds., Hegel Contemporaneo: la ricezione americana di Hegel a
confronto con la traduzione europea (Milan: Guerini, 2003). (Previously in
Iride for December 2001.)
"Naturalism in the philosophy of mind", in Mario de Caro and David
Macarthur, eds., Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 91105. (Previously published in German translation
as "Moderne Auffassungen von Wissenschaft und die Philosophie des
Geistes", see above.)
"Reality and colours: comment on Stroud", Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research lxviii (2004), 395400. (Contribution to a
symposium on a book by Barry Stroud.)
"The apperceptive I and the empirical self: towards a heterodox reading of
'Lordship and Bondage' in Hegel's Phenomenology", Bulletin of the Hegel
Society of Great Britain 47/48, 2003, 116.

"Hegel and the Myth of the Given", in Wolfgang Welsch und Klaus Vieweg,
Herausg., Das Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht (Mnchen:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), pp.7588.

Reviews[edit]

Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (Times Literary

Supplement, 30 November 1973: unsigned, as was then the custom in
the TLS); reprinted (still anonymously) in TLS 12 (OUP, London, 1974),
pp.217224
John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech
Acts (London Review of Books, 17 April 1980)
Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Times Literary Supplement, 16
January 1981)
Andrew Woodfield, ed., Thought and Object (Times Literary
Supplement, 16 July 1982)

Honors[edit]

Fellow of the British Academy (elected in 1983)[5]

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected in 1992)
[6]

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award,

2010[7]
Honorary degree, University of Chicago, 2008[8]
Delivered the 1991 John Locke Lectures in Philosophy, Oxford
University[9]
Woodbridge Lectures, Columbia University, 1997[10]
Delivered the 2006 Howison Lectures in Philosophy, University of
California at Berkeley[11]
2010 Harvard Review of Philosophy Annual Lecture[12]
2011 Amherst Lecture in Philosophy, Amherst College[13]
2011 Aquinas Lecture, Marquette University[14]

References[edit]
1
2

4
5

Jump up
^ John McDowell Philosophy University of Pittsburgh
Jump up
^ McDowell, J. (2007). "What Myth?". Inquiry. 50 (4): 338351. doi:
10.1080/00201740701489211.
Jump up
^ "Pitt Scholar Honored With Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement
Award, $1.5 Million Grant for Putting Human Nature Back in Philosophy".
Jump up
^ https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23295-reading-mcdowell-on-mind-and-world/
Jump up
^ Directory of Fellows, British Academy. Accessed 2 April 2011

10

11

12

13

14

Jump up
^ List of Fellows, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Accessed 2 April
2011
Jump up
^ Distinguished Achievement Award, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Accessed 2 April 2011
Jump up
^ University to confer five honorary doctorates at Convocation, University of
Chicago Chronicle, 12 June 2008, vol. 27, no. 18
Jump up
^ Past Lecturers, John Locke Lectures, Department of Philosophy, Oxford
University. Accessed 2 April 2011
Jump up
^ Tim Thornton, Review: New books by John McDowell, The philosopher's
magazine, no. 36, 2009. Accessed 2 April 2011
Jump up
^ HOWISON LECTURES IN PHILOSOPHY, Graduate Council Lectures,
University of California at Berkeley. Accessed 2 April 2011
Jump up
^ The Harvard Review of Philosophy Annual Lecture, Harvard University.
Accessed 2 April 2011
Jump up
^ Events (20102011), Department of philosophy, Amherst College.
Accessed 2 April 2011
Jump up
^ News Briefs; February 17, 2011, Marquette University. Accessed 2 April
2011

Further reading[edit]

Sandra M. Dingli, On Thinking and the World: John McDowell's Mind

and World, Ashgate, 2005
Richard Gaskin, Experience and the World's Own Language: A Critique
of John McDowell's Empiricism, Oxford University Press, 2006 (See
review essay by Jason Bridges at http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?
id=8743)
Robert Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell, Blackwell / Polity
Press, 2004
Anne Le Goff & Christophe Al-Saleh (ed.) Autour de l'esprit et le monde
de John McDowell, Paris, Vrin, 2013
Jakob Lingaard (ed.) John McDowell: Experience, Norm and Nature,
Blackwell, 2008
Cynthia MacDonald & Graham MacDonald (eds.), McDowell and His
Critics, Blackwell, 2006
Chauncey Maher, The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy: Sellars,
McDowell, Brandom, Routledge, 2012

Joseph K. Schear (ed.) Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The

McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, Routledge, 2013
Nicholas Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell: On Mind and World,
Routledge, 2002
Tim Thornton, John McDowell, Acumen Publishing, 2004
Marcus Willaschek (ed.), John McDowell: Reason and Nature, Munster:
Lit Verlag, 1999

External links[edit]

John McDowell Philosophy University of Pittsburgh

Summary of Mind and World ch 1
[show]

vte

Analytic philosophy
[show]

vte

Philosophy of mind

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descentWhite South African peopleSouth African emigrants to
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