Donald Davidson

Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective is the long-awaited third volume of philosophical writings by Donald Davidson, whose influence on philosophy since the 1960s has been deep and broad. His first two collections, published by OUP in the early 1980s, are recognized as contemporary classics. Now Davidson presents a selection of his work on knowledge, mind, and language from the 1980s and the 1990s. We all have knowledge of our own minds, knowledge of the contents of other minds, and knowledge of the shared environment. Davidson examines the nature and status of each of these three sorts of knowledge, and the connections and differences among them. Along the way he has illuminating things to say about truth, human rationality, and the relations among language, thought, and the world. This new volume offers a rich and rewarding feast for anyone interested in philosophy today, and is essential reading for anyone working on its central topics.

Philosophical Essays Volume 3

Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective

Allen Tate

The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate

Donald Davidson has prepared a new edition of his classic 1980 collection of Essays on Actions and Events, including two additional essays. In this seminal investigation of the nature of human action, Davidson argues for an ontology which includes events along with persons and other objects. Certain events are identified and explained as actions when they are viewed as caused and rationalized by reasons; these same events, when described in physical, biological, or physiological terms, may be explained by appeal to natural laws. The mental and the physical thus constitute irreducibly discrete ways of explaining and understanding events and their causal relations. Among the topics discussed are: freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory. The introduction, cross-references, and appendices emphasize the relations between the essays and explain how Davidson's views have developed.

Philosophical Essays Volume 1

Essays on Actions and Events

Donald Davidson has prepared a new edition of his classic 1980 collection of Essays on Actions and Events, including two additional essays. This seminal work on the nature of human action features influential discussions of such topics as freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory.'a classic in its field.' P. F. Strawson -;Donald Davidson has prepared a new edition of his classic 1980 collection of Essays on Actions and Events, including two additional essays. In this seminal investigation of the nature of human action, Davidson argues for an ontology which includes events along with persons and other objects. Certain events are identified and explained as actions when they are viewed as caused and rationalized by reasons; these same events, when described in physical, biological, orphysiological terms, may be explained by appeal to natural laws. The mental and the physical thus constitute irreducibly discrete ways of explaining and understanding events and their causal relations.Among the topics discussed are: freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory. The introduction, cross-references, and appendices emphasize the relations between the essays and explain how Davidson's views have developed.

The Essential Davidson compiles the most celebrated papers of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. It distils Donald Davidson's seminal contributions to our understanding of ourselves, from three decades of essays, into one thematically organized collection. A new, specially written introduction by Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, two of the world's leading authorities on his work, offers a guide through the ideas and arguments, shows how they interconnect, and reveals the systematic coherence of Davidson's worldview. Davidson's philosophical program is organized around two connected projects. The first is that of understanding the nature of human agency. The second is that of understanding the nature and function of language, and its relation to the world. Accordingly, the first part of the book presents Davidson's investigation of reasons, causes, and intentions, which revolutionized the philosophy of action. This leads to his notable doctrine of anomalous monism, the view that all mental events are physical events, but that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical. The second part of the book presents the famous essays in which Davidson set out his highly original and influential philosophy of language, which founds the theory of meaning on the theory of truth. These fifteen classic essays will be invaluable for anyone interested in the study of mind and language. Fascinating though they are individually, it is only when drawn together that there emerges a compelling picture of man as a rational linguistic animal whose thoughts, though not reducible to the material, are part of the fabric of the world, and whose knowledge of his own mind, the minds of others, and the world around him is as fundamental to his nature as the power of thought and speech itself.

The Essential Davidson

Donald Davidson presents a new edition of the 1984 volume which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation has been a central point of reference and a focus of controversy in the subject ever since, and its influence has extended into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. This new edition features an additional essay, previously uncollected. The central question which these essays address is what it is for words to mean what they do. Davidson argues that a philosophically instructive theory of meaning should acknowledge the holistic nature of linguistic understanding, in that it should provide an interpretation of all utterances, actual and potential, of a speaker or group of speakers; and that it should not rely upon the concepts it attempts to explain, in that it should be verifiable independently of knowledge of the detailed propositional attitudes of the speaker. Among the topics covered in the essays are the relation between theories of truth and theories of meaning, translation, quotation, belief, radical interpretation, reference, metaphor, and communication.

Philosophical Essays Volume 2

Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation

A decade and more has passed since the first publication of Still Rebels, Still Yankees. During that time the book has become recognized as a classic affirmation of the necessity of tradition in conserving cultural order. Donald Davidson, a major figure in the Agrarian Movement, summed up the intent of the work this way: “The general theme that binds the essays—no matter what their specific subjects—is the conflict between tradition and anti-tradition that characterizes modern society, with tradition viewed as the living continuum that makes society and civilization possible and anti-tradition as the disintegrative principle that destroys society and civilization in the name of science and progress. The South, which has suffered most in its devoted defense of tradition, naturally offers me examples for consideration; but this is not a book about the South as such. It is as near as I can come, in essay form, to defining what I would conceive to be the true American position.” In a brilliant and graceful style, Davidson pursues his theme in a rich variety of subjects: poetry, myth, and folklore; and in the complex rivalries between nation and region, the free citizen and the Leviathan state, the values of religion and the facts of science. Order, sanity, and fullness of life are cornerstones of the tradition against which he appraises writers like Hardy and John Gould Fletcher, the historiography of Toynbee, and the social reporting of W. J. Cash.

Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays

A posthumous country music novel on the conflict between commerce and art. Hillbilly singer Danny MacGregor must decide whether to sing commercials or devote himself to folk music, like his sweetheart. The time is 1949, the setting North Carolina and the novel analyzes a problem that is still with us, the destruction of genuine folk music by urbanization and commercial folk music.

The Big Ballad Jamboree

The Philebus is hard to reconcile with standard interpretations of Plato’s philosophy and in this pioneering work Donald Davidson, seeks to take the Philebus at face value and to reassess Plato’s late philosophy in the light of the results. The author maintains that the approach to ethics in the Philebus represents a considerable return to the methodology of the earlier dialogues. He emphasizes Plato’s reversion to the Socratic elenchus and connects it with the startling reappearance of Socrates as the leading voice in the Philebus.

Plato's Philebus (RLE: Plato)

The Philebusis hard to reconcile with standard interpretations of Plato’s philosophy and in this pioneering work Donald Davidson, seeks to take the Philebus at face value and to reassess Plato’s late philosophy in the light of the results. The author maintains that the approach to ethics in the Philebus represents a considerable return to the methodology of the earlier dialogues. He emphasizes Plato’s reversion to the Socratic elenchus and connects it with the startling reappearance of Socrates as the leading voice in the Philebus.

Plato's Philebus

Until recently, to be in a public place meant to feel safe. That has changed, especially in cities. Urban dwellers sense the need to quickly react to gestural cues from persons in their immediate presence in order to establish their relationship to each other. Through this communication they hope to detect potential danger before it is too late for self-defense or flight. The ability to read accurately the informing signs by which strangers indicate their relationship to one another in public or semi-public places without speaking, has become as important as understanding the official written and spoken language of the country.In Relations in Public, Erving Goff man provides a grammar of the unspoken language used in public places. He shows that the way strangers relate in public is part of a design by which friends and acquaintances manage their relationship in the presence of bystanders. He argues that, taken together, this forms part of a new domain of inquiry into the rules for co-mingling, or public order.Most people give little thought to how elaborate and complex our everyday behavior in public actually is. For example, we adhere to the rules of pedestrian traffic on a busy thoroughfare, accept the usual ways of acting in a crowded elevator or subway car, grasp the delicate nuances of conversational behavior, and respond to the rich vocabulary of body gestures. We behave differently at weddings, at meals, in crowds, in couples, and when alone. Such everyday behavior, though generally below the level of awareness, embodies unspoken codes of social understandings necessary for the orderly conduct of society.

Donald Davidson

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