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.