Quine and Davidson are among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Their influence on contemporary philosophy is second to none, and their impact is also strongly felt in disciplines such as ...linguistics and psychology. This book is devoted to both of them, but also questions some of their basic assumptions. Hans-Johann Glock critically scrutinizes their ideas on ontology, truth, necessity, meaning and interpretation, thought and language, and shows that their attempts to accommodate meaning and thought within a naturalistic framework, either by impugning them as unclear or by extracting them from physical facts, are ultimately unsuccessful. His discussion includes interesting comparisons of Quine and Davidson with other philosophers, particularly Wittgenstein, and also offers detailed accounts of central issues in contemporary analytic philosophy, such as the nature of truth and of meaning and interpretation, and the relation between thought and language.
Donald Davidson was one of the 20th century’s deepest analytic thinkers. He developed a systematic picture of the human mind and its relation to the world. At its center is an idea of minded ...creatures as essentially rational animals. The combination of a rigorous analytic stance with aspects of humanism so distinctive of Davidsonian thought finds its, maybe, most characteristic expression when this central idea is brought to bear on the relation of the mental to the physical: Davidson defended the irreducibility of its rational nature while acknowledging that the mental is ultimately determined by the physical. Davidson made contributions of lasting importance to a wide range of topics—from general theory of meaning and content over formal semantics, the theories of truth, explanation, and action, to metaphysics and epistemology. His writings almost entirely consist of short, elegant, and often witty papers. These dense and thematically tightly interwoven works present a challenge to the reader. This book provides an introduction to all the main elements of Davidson’s philosophy. It places the theory of meaning and content at the very center of his thought. By using interpretation, and the interpreter, as key ideas it brings out the underlying structure and unified nature of Davidson’s work.
Donald Davidson Joseph, Marc
2004, 20141218, 2014-12-18
eBook
Donald Davidson's work has been of seminal importance in the development of analytic philosophy and his views on the nature of language, mind and action remain the starting point for many of the ...central debates in the analytic tradition. His ideas, however, are complex, often technical, and interconnected in ways that can make them difficult to understand. This introduction to Davidson's philosophy examines the full range of his writings to provide a clear succinct overview of his ideas. The book begins with an account of the assumptions and structure of Davidson's philosophy of language, introducing his compositionalism, extensionalism and commitment to a Tarski-style theory of truth as the model for theories of meaning. It goes on to show how that philosophical framework is to be applied and how it challenges the traditional picture. Marc Joseph examines Davidson's influential work on action theory and events and discusses the commonly made charge that his theory of action and mind leaves the mental as a mere 'epiphenomenon' of the physical. The final section explores Davidson's philosophy of mind, some of its consequences for traditional views of subjectivity and objectivity and, more generally, the relation between minded beings and the physical and mental world they occupy.
Donald Davidson has been one of the most influential figures in modern analytic philosophy and has made seminal contributions in a wide range of subjects: philosophy of language, philosophy of ...action, philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics and the theory of rationality. His principal work, embodied in a series of landmark essays stretching over nearly 40 years, exhibits a unity rare among philosophers contributing on so many diverse fronts. Written by a distinguished team of philosophers, this volume includes chapters on truth and meaning, the philosophy of action, radical interpretation, philosophical psychology, knowledge of the external world, other minds and our own minds, and the implications of Davidson's work for literary theory. This book, first published in 2003, is a comprehensive introduction to the full range of Davidson's work, and as such it will be of particular value to advanced undergraduates, graduates and professionals in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literary theory.
An approach to understanding religion that draws on both humanities and natural science but rejects approaches that employ simple monisms and radical dualisms. In Beyond Heaven and Earth, Gabriel ...Levy argues that collective religious narratives and beliefs are part of nature; they are the basis for the formation of the narratives and beliefs of individuals. Religion grows out of the universe, but to make sense of it we have to recognize the paradox that the universe is both mental and material (or neither). We need both humanities and natural science approaches to study religion and religious meaning, Levy contends, but we must also recognize the limits of these approaches. First, we must make the dominant metaphysics that undergird the various disciplines of science and humanities more explicit, and second, we must reject those versions of metaphysics that maintain simple monisms and radical dualisms. Bringing Donald Davidson's philosophy—a form of pragmatism known as anomalous monism—to bear on religion, Levy offers a blueprint for one way that the humanities and natural sciences can have a mutually respectful dialogue. Levy argues that in order to understand religions we have to take their semantic content seriously. We need to rethink such basic concepts as narrative fiction, information, agency, creativity, technology, and intimacy. In the course of his argument, Levy considers the relation between two closely related semantics, fiction and religion, and outlines a new approach to information. He then applies his theory to discrete cases: ancient texts, modern media, and intimacy.
When DC Comics reissued Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing in 2009, reviewers hailed the series as "an undeniable classic of modern comics." Swamp Thing introduced Moore to US readers two years ...before his most highly regarded and influential work, Watchmen, which critics have argued precipitated the comic book industry's creative shift from the so-called Bronze Age to what readers variously term the Dark or Modern Age. Given the parallels in their works, Moore's readership may have included Donald Davidson, one of the most influential philosophers of the last fifty years. Though it is impossible to determine influence, Davidson's thought experiment appears at least as pop-cultural as philosophical.
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