Donald Davidson (philosopher) explained

Region:Western philosophy
Era:20th-century philosophy
Donald Davidson
Birth Name:Donald Herbert Davidson
Birth Date:6 March 1917
Birth Place:Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
Death Place:Berkeley, California, U.S.
Education:Harvard University (BA, PhD)
School Tradition:Analytic
Neopragmatism[1]
Main Interests:Philosophy of language, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, epistemology, ontology
Notable Ideas:Radical interpretation, anomalous monism, truth-conditional semantics, principle of charity, slingshot argument, reasons as causes, understanding as translation, swampman, events, Davidson's translation argument against alternative conceptual schemes[2] [3] (the third dogma of empiricism)
Influences:Quine, Tarski, Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege, Kant, Goodman, Feigl
Influenced:Colin McGinn, Ernest Lepore, Kirk Ludwig, Richard Rorty, John McDowell, Robert Brandom, Jeff Malpas, Tyler Burge, Mark Bevir, Michael Dummett[4]
Thesis Title:Plato's 'Philebus'
Thesis Url:https://philpapers.org/rec/DAVPP-2
Thesis Year:1949
Doctoral Advisor:Raphael Demos
Donald Cary Williams
Academic Advisors:Willard Van Orman Quine
Doctoral Students:Akeel Bilgrami
Michael Bratman
Kirk Ludwig
Claudine Verheggen
Stephen Yablo

Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and the depth and difficulty of his thought.[5] His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, and most of his influence lies in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.[6]

Personal life

Davidson was married three times. His first wife was the artist Virginia Davidson, with whom he had his only child, a daughter, Elizabeth (Davidson) Boyer.[7] Following his divorce from Virginia Davidson, he married for the second time to Nancy Hirschberg, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later at Chicago Circle. She died in 1979.[8] In 1984, Davidson married for the third and last time, to philosopher Marcia Cavell.[9]

Swampman

Swampman is the subject of a philosophical thought experiment introduced by Donald Davidson in his 1987 paper "Knowing One's Own Mind". In the experiment, Davidson is struck by lightning in a swamp and disintegrated; simultaneously, an exact copy of Davidson, the Swampman, is made from a nearby tree and proceeds through life exactly as Davidson would have, indistinguishable from Davidson. The experiment is used by Davidson to claim that thought and meaning cannot exist in a vacuum; they are dependent on their interconnections to the world. Therefore, despite being physically identical to himself, Davidson states that the Swampman does not have thoughts nor meaningful language, as it has no causal history to base them on.

The experiment runs as follows:[10]

Awards

Bibliography

Filmography

See also

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. https://www.iep.utm.edu/pragmati/ Pragmatism – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. Malpas, Jeffrey. "Donald Davidson," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005.
  3. Davidson, Donald. "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme." Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47(1) (1973–1974): 5–20.
  4. [Michael Dummett]
  5. McGinn, Colin. "Cooling it". London Review of Books. 19 August 1993. Accessed 28 October 2010.
  6. Dasenbrock, Reed Way, ed. Literary Theory After Davidson. Penn State Press, 1989.
  7. Baghramian, Maria, ed. Donald Davidson: Life and Words. Routledge, 2013.
  8. "Nancy Ann Hirschberg, In Memoriam, 1937 - 1979"
  9. "In Memoriam: Donald Davidson "
  10. Davidson. Donald. 1987. Knowing One's Own Mind. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 60. 3. 441–458. 10.2307/3131782. 3131782 . 0065-972X.
  11. Web site: Crane . Tim . Davidson . Donald . Fara . Rudolf . In conversation Donald Davidson . 1997.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Donald Davidson (philosopher)".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2025, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.