Abstract

This article discusses John McDowell’s engagement with the history of philosophy and its relation to McDowell’s Gadamerian views. While McDowell often approaches the great philosophers of the past, and strongly criticizes others for their approach, he rarely reflects on this practice as a method or provides it with philosophical grounds. This lack of account stands out even more in light of McDowell’s appeal to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. While McDowell develops his views as essentially Gadamerian, he does not appeal to Gadamer’s greatest contribution in the study of interpreting texts and past figures. In this article, I suggest a three-layered account of McDowell’s engagement with the history of philosophy, which examines McDowell’s actual approach to the past, reconstructs his conception of such an approach, and ties the two together with McDowell’s Philosophy as Gadamerian. By looking into McDowell’s reading of Wilfrid Sellars, and McDowell’s interpretational dispute with Robert Brandom, I show that the first two layers of practice and theory do not always coincide and argue that this consequently throws new light upon the third grounding layer and challenges some of McDowell’s core views.