Donald Davidson (philosopher)
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. 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.
Donald Davidson | |
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Portrait by photographer Steve Pyke in 1990. | |
| Born | Donald Herbert Davidson 6 March 1917 |
| Died | 30 August 2003 (aged 86) Berkeley, California, U.S. |
| Education | Harvard University (BA, PhD) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic Neopragmatism |
| Thesis | Plato's 'Philebus' (1949) |
| Doctoral advisor | Raphael Demos Donald Cary Williams |
| Other academic advisors | Willard Van Orman Quine |
| Doctoral students | Akeel Bilgrami Michael Bratman Kirk Ludwig Claudine Verheggen Stephen Yablo |
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 (the third dogma of empiricism) |