John C Mcdowell
Biographic Data
| ID | 1142578 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John C Mcdowell |
| GIVEN NAMES | John C |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcdowell |
| SIGNATURE | MCDOWELL J C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Divinity |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1106-7687 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Materially Dispossessing the Troubled Theologian
Linn Tonstad's paper, '(Un)wise Theologians', identifies a theological approach that puts pressure on its ability to handle its materiality sufficiently in a number of ways. However, following the trajectory of Tonstad's discovery of "the deformations to which theology is susceptible in the university" and elsewhere, a supplementation is required to specify where its thesis needs more rigorous development. Firstly, the paper's argument locates wh…
Category Mistake 101
A considerable and growing body of literature has engaged in a critical reading of the nature and substance of shifts in not only the business practices, but the conditions for the very raison d'ėtre or telic identifiability of universities under current strategic political arrangements. Moving beyond the practices of academic economy in the business of higher education that reduce the intellectual worker to academic labourer enduring multiple fo…
Conversing with Barth
Thoughtfulness and Hospitality
The paper is constructed around the issues involved for the critical interrogation of the instrumental rationality generating political thoughtlessness in the following claim: "Humanity is in crisis-and there is no exit from that crisis other than solidarity of humans". [Zygmunt Bauman] To even interrogate this as a crisis requires a depth-analysis of the hegemony of subject-formation, and this occurs in two markedly different ways. The first tak…
Disney’s Reel Doubling of Violent Desire in J. J. Abrams’ Mimetic The Force Awakens
Abrams’ spectacularly distended infantilising manipulation of the saga embeds a form of cognitive resonance with a state of perpetual war and a politically thanatising mythos fitted out as a politically containing moment within what cultural commentators are referring to as “post-9/11 American cinema”, a form of cinema reacting to a cultural trauma and that normalises a hegemonic political reactivity in a perceived ‘clash of civilizations’ in “th…
En/Gendering Trouble with J. J. Abrams’s Rey in The Force Awakens
Episode VII: The Force Awakens follows a trend in disrupting the privileging of the heroic protagonist as male, refusing to frame women by enforcing a particularly male self-projected binary for popular consumption. Yet this article argues in the first place that this turn is less transgressive of hegemonic gendered norms than might appear to be the case to the inattentive viewer of the saga. An important reason for this, and second in the logic …
Wars Not Make One Great”
Recently George Lucas approved animation series, Clone Wars, has rekindled the imaginations of the youngest generation to immerse itself in not merely the excitement of the Lucas-inspired visual materials, the Star Wars saga, but also in the expensive consumption of a wide-range of merchandise. Aggressive lightsaber battles can again be seen taking place on the streets, and consequently concerns about the relation of this saga and violence are wo…
“Openness to the World”
What is at stake in accounts of “prayer” is reflection on a practice that cannot be readily spoken of free from the most important considerations of God, world, human identity and the shape of its performance. Instead, if prayer “is not to become a harmless game and an endlessly babbling chatter” (Karl Rahner), attention needs to be paid to the god or gods that practices of so‐called “prayer” encounter, and it may be that much of what moves in th…
Preventing Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing
The COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis was a reminder, if any were needed, that criminal creativity thrives in times of chaos, exploiting people’s fears. Unsafe face masks, counterfeit drugs, and suspect medical equipment flooded the market, touted as miracle cures against the coronavirus by unscrupulous actors wanting to turn a quick profit. Companies with no record in health won big government contracts and, as people’s situation deteriorated, organ…
The Politics of a Mel-placed Passion and Displaced Bodies
Gibson’s Christ has a body, and a body of hope at that. However, this Christ is little more than a bare body, a body made naked without its without a full covering of life (or rather it is a body reduced to barest life), and therefore a body that lacks the multiple extensions in space and time that characterise bodies and their being available to and for other bodies. This paper seeks to trace Gibson’s series of losses and their political implica…
Reply to Danielle Macbeth
Reply to Maximilian de Gaynesford
Theology as Conversational Event
This essay deals with a commonly voiced concern with Barth's theology as expressed in the form that his theology illegitimately secures itself from critique, polices its narrow location assiduously and only lets in a few carefully vetted others when convinced that they can be useful. In contrast, through exploring John Milbank's distinction between dialogue and conversation it becomes possible to critique James Barr's and Clark Pinnock's understa…
Comment on Hans-Peter Krüger’s paper
In my Mind and World I appeal to second nature, which, according to Hans-Peter Kru ̈ger, plays a central role in Plessner's philosophical anthropology. But I think this convergence is less significant than Kru ̈ger suggests.This note differentaties my purpose–to disarm the temptation to think perceptual experience, natural as it is, could not figure in what Sellars called “the space of reasons”–from Plessner's, which is to disarm the temptation t…
The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality
The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality: Davidson and Sellars
Falsehood and not-being in Plato's Sophist
For me, G. E. L. Owen's ‘Plato on Not-Being’ radically improved the prospects for a confident overall view of its topic. Hitherto, passage after passage had generated reasonable disagreement over Plato's intentions, and the disputes were not subject to control by a satisfying picture of his large-scale strategy; so that the general impression, as one read the Sophist, was one of diffuseness and unclarity of purpose. By focusing discussion on the …
Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding
Category Mistake 101
A considerable and growing body of literature has engaged in a critical reading of the nature and substance of shifts in not only the business practices, but the conditions for the very raison d'ėtre or telic identifiability of universities under current strategic political arrangements. Moving beyond the practices of academic economy in the business of higher education that reduce the intellectual worker to academic labourer enduring multiple fo…
Wars Not Make One Great”
Recently George Lucas approved animation series, Clone Wars, has rekindled the imaginations of the youngest generation to immerse itself in not merely the excitement of the Lucas-inspired visual materials, the Star Wars saga, but also in the expensive consumption of a wide-range of merchandise. Aggressive lightsaber battles can again be seen taking place on the streets, and consequently concerns about the relation of this saga and violence are wo…
Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding
Falsehood and not-being in Plato's Sophist
For me, G. E. L. Owen's ‘Plato on Not-Being’ radically improved the prospects for a confident overall view of its topic. Hitherto, passage after passage had generated reasonable disagreement over Plato's intentions, and the disputes were not subject to control by a satisfying picture of his large-scale strategy; so that the general impression, as one read the Sophist, was one of diffuseness and unclarity of purpose. By focusing discussion on the …
Comment on Hans-Peter Krüger’s paper
In my Mind and World I appeal to second nature, which, according to Hans-Peter Kru ̈ger, plays a central role in Plessner's philosophical anthropology. But I think this convergence is less significant than Kru ̈ger suggests.This note differentaties my purpose–to disarm the temptation to think perceptual experience, natural as it is, could not figure in what Sellars called “the space of reasons”–from Plessner's, which is to disarm the temptation t…
The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality
The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality: Davidson and Sellars
Theology as Conversational Event
This essay deals with a commonly voiced concern with Barth's theology as expressed in the form that his theology illegitimately secures itself from critique, polices its narrow location assiduously and only lets in a few carefully vetted others when convinced that they can be useful. In contrast, through exploring John Milbank's distinction between dialogue and conversation it becomes possible to critique James Barr's and Clark Pinnock's understa…
Reply to Danielle Macbeth
Reply to Maximilian de Gaynesford
The Politics of a Mel-placed Passion and Displaced Bodies
Gibson’s Christ has a body, and a body of hope at that. However, this Christ is little more than a bare body, a body made naked without its without a full covering of life (or rather it is a body reduced to barest life), and therefore a body that lacks the multiple extensions in space and time that characterise bodies and their being available to and for other bodies. This paper seeks to trace Gibson’s series of losses and their political implica…
“Openness to the World”
What is at stake in accounts of “prayer” is reflection on a practice that cannot be readily spoken of free from the most important considerations of God, world, human identity and the shape of its performance. Instead, if prayer “is not to become a harmless game and an endlessly babbling chatter” (Karl Rahner), attention needs to be paid to the god or gods that practices of so‐called “prayer” encounter, and it may be that much of what moves in th…
Preventing Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing
The COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis was a reminder, if any were needed, that criminal creativity thrives in times of chaos, exploiting people’s fears. Unsafe face masks, counterfeit drugs, and suspect medical equipment flooded the market, touted as miracle cures against the coronavirus by unscrupulous actors wanting to turn a quick profit. Companies with no record in health won big government contracts and, as people’s situation deteriorated, organ…
Wars Not Make One Great”
Recently George Lucas approved animation series, Clone Wars, has rekindled the imaginations of the youngest generation to immerse itself in not merely the excitement of the Lucas-inspired visual materials, the Star Wars saga, but also in the expensive consumption of a wide-range of merchandise. Aggressive lightsaber battles can again be seen taking place on the streets, and consequently concerns about the relation of this saga and violence are wo…
Disney’s Reel Doubling of Violent Desire in J. J. Abrams’ Mimetic The Force Awakens
Abrams’ spectacularly distended infantilising manipulation of the saga embeds a form of cognitive resonance with a state of perpetual war and a politically thanatising mythos fitted out as a politically containing moment within what cultural commentators are referring to as “post-9/11 American cinema”, a form of cinema reacting to a cultural trauma and that normalises a hegemonic political reactivity in a perceived ‘clash of civilizations’ in “th…
En/Gendering Trouble with J. J. Abrams’s Rey in The Force Awakens
Episode VII: The Force Awakens follows a trend in disrupting the privileging of the heroic protagonist as male, refusing to frame women by enforcing a particularly male self-projected binary for popular consumption. Yet this article argues in the first place that this turn is less transgressive of hegemonic gendered norms than might appear to be the case to the inattentive viewer of the saga. An important reason for this, and second in the logic …
Thoughtfulness and Hospitality
The paper is constructed around the issues involved for the critical interrogation of the instrumental rationality generating political thoughtlessness in the following claim: "Humanity is in crisis-and there is no exit from that crisis other than solidarity of humans". [Zygmunt Bauman] To even interrogate this as a crisis requires a depth-analysis of the hegemony of subject-formation, and this occurs in two markedly different ways. The first tak…
Conversing with Barth
Category Mistake 101
A considerable and growing body of literature has engaged in a critical reading of the nature and substance of shifts in not only the business practices, but the conditions for the very raison d'ėtre or telic identifiability of universities under current strategic political arrangements. Moving beyond the practices of academic economy in the business of higher education that reduce the intellectual worker to academic labourer enduring multiple fo…
Materially Dispossessing the Troubled Theologian
Linn Tonstad's paper, '(Un)wise Theologians', identifies a theological approach that puts pressure on its ability to handle its materiality sufficiently in a number of ways. However, following the trajectory of Tonstad's discovery of "the deformations to which theology is susceptible in the university" and elsewhere, a supplementation is required to specify where its thesis needs more rigorous development. Firstly, the paper's argument locates wh…
Philosophy (12 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Theology (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works)