The South-African Grice

Speranza

We are considering philosophers influenced BOTH by Grice and, say, Dummett.

John Henry McDowell was born 1942 in Boksburg, a city in South Africa.

He is a 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 language.

McDowell has, throughout his career, understood philosophy to be "therapeutic" and thereby to "leave everything as it is", which McDowell understands to be a form of philosophical quietism (Though it should be noted that McDowell does not consider himself as 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.

McDowell quotes extensively from Grice in various works, but notably in the festschrift for Strawson who was coincidentally edited by another South-African philosopher: Van Straaten, and entitled after an acronym for Peter Strawson:

P S Philosophical Subjects Peter Strawson

PGRICE Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends -- a better acronym for ya.

Think of an acronym, while you're at it, for

M A E Dummett

My Aunt Exists Deeply?