Donald Davidson 1917 – 2003

Donald Davidson was an American philosopher whose work in the philosophy of action, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind shaped late twentieth-century analytic thought. He defended an event-based account of action, in which reasons are causes, and developed the position of anomalous monism, on which mental events are physical but not subject to strict psycho-physical laws. His program of radical interpretation, indebted to Quine, sought to explain meaning through the systematic assignment of truth conditions to a speaker's utterances. He held chairs at Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller, Chicago, and Berkeley.

Donald Herbert Davidson was born in 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of a book salesman. He took his first degree at Harvard, his doctorate there in 1949 with a dissertation on Plato's Philebus, and after teaching at Queens College, Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller, and Chicago held from 1981 a chair at the University of California, Berkeley.

His philosophical output appears almost entirely as essays, gathered into the volumes Essays on Actions and Events (1980), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001), Problems of Rationality (2004), and Truth, Language, and History (2005). With Patrick Suppes he conducted important empirical work in decision theory in the 1950s.

Davidson's mature philosophy is built around four central theses: that rational action is to be explained by reasons that are causes; that meaning is given by truth conditions in the manner of a finitely axiomatized Tarskian theory of truth; that mental and physical events are token-identical even though no strict laws bridge the two vocabularies (anomalous monism); and that the very intelligibility of interpretation requires a principle of charity that presumes most of the speaker's beliefs to be true. Together they made him one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He died in Berkeley in August 2003.