The Essential Davidson

by Davidson, Donald; Lepore, Ernie; Ludwig, Kirk

• ISBN13: 9780199288861
• ISBN10: 0199288860
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-02-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Essential Davidson compiles the most celebrated papers of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. It distils Donald Davidson's seminal contributions to our understanding of ourselves, from three decades of essays, into one thematically organized collection. A new, speciallywritten introduction by Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, two of the world's leading authorities on his work, offers a guide through the ideas and arguments, shows how they interconnect, and reveals the systematic coherence of Davidson's worldview.Davidson's philosophical program is organized around two connected projects. The first is that of understanding the nature of human agency. The second is that of understanding the nature and function of language, and its relation to the world. Accordingly, the first part of the book presentsDavidson's investigation of reasons, causes, and intentions, which revolutionized the philosophy of action. This leads to his notable doctrine of anomalous monism, the view that all mental events are physical events, but that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical. The second part of the bookpresents the famous essays in which Davidson set out his highly original and influential philosophy of language, which founds the theory of meaning on the theory of truth. These fifteen classic essays will be invaluable for anyone interested in the study of mind and language. Fascinating though they are individually, it is only when drawn together that there emerges a compelling picture of man as a rational linguistic animal whose thoughts, though not reducible to thematerial, are part of the fabric of the world, and whose knowledge of his own mind, the minds of others, and the world around him is as fundamental to his nature as the power of thought and speech itself.

Author Biography

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously Professor at Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller, and the University of Chicago. He was a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(22)
Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig
PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION AND PSYCHOLOGY
1. Actions, Reasons, and Causes (1963)	23	(14)
2. The Logical Form of Action Sentences	37	(35)
with Criticism, Comment, and Defence (1967)	50	(22)
3. How is Weakness of the Will Possible? (1969)	72	(18)
4. The Individuation of Events (1969)	90	(15)
5. Mental Events (1970)	105	(17)
Appendix: Emeroses by Other Names (1966)	119	(3)
6. Intending (1978)	122	(16)
7. Paradoxes of Irrationality (1982)	138	(17)
TRUTH, MEANING, AND INTERPRETATION
8. Truth and Meaning (1967)	155	(16)
9. On Saying That (1968)	171	(13)
10. Radical Interpretation (1973)	184	(12)
11. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (1974)	196	(13)
12. What Metaphors Mean (1978)	209	(16)
13. A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge (1983)	225	(17)
Appendix: Afterthoughts (1987)	238	(4)
14. First Person Authority (1984)	242	(9)
15. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (1986)	251	(16)
Contents List of Volumes of Essays by Donald Davidson	267	(5)
Bibliography	272	(6)
Index	278