▷ Donald Davidson - PhilosophyProfessor.com

Donald Herbert Davidson (1917–2003).

Davidson studied at Harvard, under Alfred North Whitehead, among others, and wrote a dissertation on Plato’s Philebus. His interests at this time were mainly in the “history of ideas,” broadly construed, but under the influence of W. V. Quine, whom he often credits as his mentor, he began to gradually turn toward the more rigorous methods and precise problems characteristic of analytic philosophy.

During the 1950s Davidson worked with Patrick Suppes on developing an experimental approach to Decision Theory. They concluded that it was not possible to isolate a subject’s beliefs and preferences independently of one another, meaning there would always be multiple ways to analyze a person’s actions in terms of what they wanted, or were trying to do, or valued. This result is comparable to Quine’s thesis on the indeterminacy of translation, and figures significantly in much of Davidson’s later work on philosophy of mind.

His most noted work (see below) was published in a series of essays from the 1960s onward, moving successively through philosophy of action into philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, and dabbling occasionally in aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and the history of philosophy.

Davidson was widely travelled, and had a great range of interests he pursued with nearly boundless energy. He had a pilots license, played the piano, built radios, and was fond of mountain climbing and surfing. He was married three times (the last was to the philosopher Marcia Cavell). He served terms as president of both the Eastern and Western Divisions of the American Philosophical Association, and held positions at Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller University, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. From 1981 until his death he was at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

1 Major Books of Donald Herbert Davidson
2 Major Articles of Donald Herbert Davidson
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Major Books of Donald Herbert Davidson

– A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge, 1986
– Agency, in Binkley, Bronaugh, and Marras, editors, Agent, Action, and Reason, 1971
– Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, with Patrick Suppes and Sidney Siegel, 1957
– Essays on Actions and Events, 1980
– The Essential Davidson, 2006
– Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 1984
– Mental Events, in Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson, editors, Experience and Theory, 1970
– Problems of Rationality, 2004
– Semantics of Natural Languages, with Gilbert Harman, 1973
– Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, 2001
– Truth and Predication, 2005
– Truth, Language, and History: Philosophical Essays, 2005

Major Articles of Donald Herbert Davidson

– 1963, Actions, Reasons, and Causes, Journal of Philosophy
– 1967, Truth and Meaning, Synthese
– 1973, Radical Interpretation, Dialectica (republished in Mark Richard, editor, Meaning, 2003)
– 1982, Rational Animals, Dialectica
– 1990, The Structure and Content of Truth, The Journal of Philosophy
– 1991, Epistemology Externalized, Dialectica

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