David Macarthur

David Macarthur is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney who works primarily on skepticism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, liberal naturalism and philosophy of art (especially film, photography and architecture). He has taken up these and other themes in articles on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

After completing a medical degree (M.B.B.S., 1988) and B.A. (1991, awarded with 1st-class Hons and University Medal) at the University of Sydney, he was awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1999 under the supervision of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam and Warren Goldfarb, with a thesis [https://www.proquest.com/openview/7ca1008f5c659e2bf13c105d2f756dda/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y "Skeptical Reason & Inner Experience: A Re-Examination of the Problem of the External World."] He then taught at Tufts University (1999–2000), before taking up a post-doctoral research fellowship at Macquarie University (2000–2003). Since 2003 he has been a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney.

Together with Mario De Caro, Macarthur has developed a new form of naturalism called liberal naturalism, as an alternative to scientific naturalism – which in one form or another is the orthodoxy within contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Inspired primarily by Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, and Charles Taylor, liberal naturalism attempts to overcome the wholesale Sellarsian elimination or replacement of the manifest image by the scientific image of the world. In order to achieve this aim, Macarthur defends a metaphysically quietist version of liberal naturalism which affirms the viability and importance of non-scientific non-supernatural forms of understanding, especially concerning persons, language, art, artefacts and their various relations to one another.

In the philosophy of art, Macarthur argues against the view that artworks have a fixed and unique meaning or message. He defends an imaginative relational view of art according to which art is meaningful without a meaning. Provided by Wikipedia