John Henry McDowell (born 1942 in Boksburg, South Africa) 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 mind and 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. 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's earliest published work was in ancient philosophy, most notably including a translation of and commentary on Plato's Theaetetus. In the 1970s he was active in the Davidsonian project of providing a semantic theory for natural language, co-editing (with Gareth Evans) a volume of essays entitled Truth and Meaning. McDowell edited and published Evans's influential posthumous book The Varieties of Reference (1982).