David Macarthur

David Macarthur is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is known for his work on skepticism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, liberal naturalism, and the philosophy of art, particularly concerning film, photography, and architecture. He has explored these themes in relation to the philosophies of Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Macarthur completed a medical degree (M.B.B.S., 1988) and a B.A. (1991) at the University of Sydney before earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1999. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, and Warren Goldfarb, was titled "Skeptical Reason & Inner Experience: A Re-Examination of the Problem of the External World." Following his Ph.D., he taught at Tufts University (1999–2000) and held 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. In collaboration with Mario De Caro, Macarthur developed "liberal naturalism" as an alternative to scientific naturalism. This approach seeks to reconcile the manifest image of the world with the scientific image, emphasizing the importance of non-scientific forms of understanding, particularly concerning persons, language, art, and artifacts. Macarthur advocates for a metaphysically quietist version of liberal naturalism. In the philosophy of art, Macarthur challenges the idea that artworks have a fixed meaning. He proposes an "imaginative relational view of art," where art is meaningful without having a singular message, intimating rather than asserting.