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	Donald Davidson [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		Donald Herbert Davidson was a 20th century American philosopher whose most profound influences on contemporary philosophy were in the philosophy of mind and action.
		Davidson’s argument that mental phenomena can’t be captured by strict, deterministic scientific laws as they are normally understood, depends upon his treatment of propositional attitudes, attitudes of hoping that p, or fearing that p, or believing that p, where p is some proposition.
		Donald Davidson was born on March 6, 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
	www.utm.edu /research/iep/d/davidson.htm (4461 words)

	Encyclopedia: Donald Davidson (philosopher)
		Donald Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher and the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
		Davidson argued that the fact that the expression of a reason was not so precise, did not mean that the having of a reason could not itself be a state capable of causally influencing behaviour.
		Davidson argues that because the language is compositional, it is also holistic: sentences are based on the meanings of words, but the meaning of a word depends on the totality of sentences in which it appears.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Donald-Davidson-(philosopher) (1254 words)

	Donald Davidson (philosopher) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Davidson's most noted work began in 1963 with an essay, Actions, Reasons and Causes, which attempted to refute the prevailing orthodox view, widely attributed to Wittgenstein, that an agent's reasons for acting cannot be the causes of his action.
		Many philosophers throughout history had, arguably, been tempted to reduce two of these kinds of belief and knowledge to the other one: Descartes and Hume thought that the only knowledge we start with is self-knowledge.
		Davidson claims that even though in isolated cases a speaker might be mistaken about the state of objective reality (for example, the German speaker might utter “Es regnet” even though it is not raining), this doesn’t undermine the entire project.
	www.wikipedia.org /wiki/Donald_Davidson_(philosopher) (2096 words)

	Donald Davidson (philosopher) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Davidson argued that such a reduction would not be necessary to an identity thesis: it is possible that each individual mental state or event just is the corresponding brain state or event, without there being laws relating kinds of mental states to kinds of brain states—such as those in the above example.
		It is not possible, on Davidson's view, for a person to have only one of these three kinds of mental content; Anyone who has beliefs of one of the kinds must have beliefs of the other two kinds.
		Davidson's work is well noted for its unity, he has brought a similar approach to a wide variety of philosophical problems.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Donald_Davidson_(philosopher) (2096 words)

	Donald Davidson (philosopher) Details, Meaning Donald Davidson (philosopher) Article and Explanation Guide
		Donald Davidson (March 6, 1917-August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher and the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
		Davidson's most noted work began in the 1963 with an essay, Actions, Reasons and Causes, which attempted to refute the prevailing orthodox view, widely attributed to Wittgenstein, that an agent's reasons for acting cannot be the causes of his action.
		Davidson argued that the fact that the expression of a reason was not so precise, did not mean that the having of a reason could not itself be a state capable of causally influencing behaviour.
	www.e-paranoids.com /d/do/donald_davidson__philosopher_.html (1508 words)

	Naturalism (philosophy) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Many philosophers of science define scientific investigation in a manner which limits it to studying and explaining the natural world, not least because of the basic requirement that science be testable.
		The ideas and assumptions of philosophical naturalistism date to the Ionian pre-Socratic philosophers of the 4th century BCE; see, e.g., Jonathan Barnes's introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin), which describes them as subscribing to principles of empirical investigation that strikingly anticipate naturalism.
		During the Enlightenment, a number of philosophers including Francis Bacon and Voltaire outlined the philosophical justifications for removing appeal to supernatural forces from investigation of the natural world.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Philosophy_of_naturalism (1407 words)

	Donald Davidson
		Davidson treats the connection between reason and action (where the reason is indeed the reason for the action) as a connection that obtains between two events (the agent's believing and desiring on the one hand and her acting on the other) that can be variously described.
		Davidson claims that the way to achieve this is through the application of the so-called ‘principle of charity’ (Davidson has also referred to it as the principle of ‘rational accommodation’) a version of which is also to be found in Quine.
		Davidson emphasises the holistic character of the mental (both in terms of the interdependence that obtains between various forms of knowledge as well as the interconnected character of attitudes and of attitudes and behaviour).
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/davidson (7917 words)

	09.04.2003 - Renowned UC Berkeley professor and philosopher Donald Davidson dies at 86
		Davidson was recognized as one of the most influential philosophers of his generation.
		Davidson came to UC Berkeley in 1981, after holding positions at Queen's College in New York, Princeton University, Rockefeller University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University.
		Nagel described Davidson as having a "huge appetite for life." He and his wife traveled extensively with Davidson and his wife, Marcia Cavell, who is also a philosopher and occasionally teaches philosophy courses at UC Berkeley.
	www.berkeley.edu /news/media/releases/2003/09/04_davidson.shtml (1001 words)

	Donald Davidson (philosopher) (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Donald Davidson (March 6, 1917 - August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher and the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
		Davidson's most noted work began in the 1963 with an essay, Actions, Reasons and Causes, which attempted to refutethe prevailing orthodox view, widely attributed to Wittgenstein, that an agent's reasons for acting cannot be the causes of his action.
		Davidson arguedthat the fact that the expression of a reason was not so precise, did not mean that the having of a reason could not itself be astate capable of causally influencing behaviour.
	www.therfcc.org /donald-davidson-philosopher--3439.html (1406 words)

	Guardian Unlimited \| Obituaries \| Obituary: Donald Davidson
		Donald Davidson, who has died aged 86, was one of the greatest philosophers of the late 20th century.
		With what might at first appear inconsistency, Davidson accepted both that any particular cause is an instance of a precise, exceptionless law, and that our ordinary ascriptions of causes, embedded as they are in a wider framework of reasons and beliefs, cannot achieve such stringent exceptionlessness.
		Davidson was urging us to try and construct in a deliberate, laborious way what we do instinctively and immediately, so as to analyse how we do it.
	www.guardian.co.uk /obituaries/story/0,3604,1035161,00.html (1334 words)

	Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Ideas / Out of the Matrix
		Nowadays many philosophers make fun of the suggestion that the mind is a private place in which an inner eye watches scenes unfolding on the screen of an inner theater, scenes that may have nothing to do with what happens outside, in the real world.
		The two philosophers who did the most to persuade us not to take this suggestion seriously were the brilliant and eccentric Viennese Ludwig Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson, a professor of philosophy at Berkeley and elsewhere who died on Aug. 30 at the age of 86.
		Davidson would reply that Cartesian skeptics are misusing the expression "really real." It makes sense to say that the people I encounter in my dreams, or the things I see after taking hallucinogens, are not really real.
	www.boston.com /news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/10/05/out_of_the_matrix (1570 words)

	Donald Davidson
		Davidson studied at Harvard, under Alfred North Whitehead, among others, and wrote a dissertation on Plato's Philebus.
		This result is comparable to Quine's thesis on the indeterminacy of translation, and figures significantly in much of Davidson's later work on philosophy of mind.
		Davidson was widely travelled, and had a great range of interests he pursued with nearly boundless energy.
	www.philosophyprofessor.com /philosophers/donald-davidson.php (413 words)

	Donald Davidson :: Ephilosopher :: Philosophy News, Research and Philosophical Discussion
		DOUGLAS MARTIN: "Donald H. Davidson, a philosopher whose complex but penetrating insights into topics like linguistic analysis and the nature of truth influenced a generation of thinkers, died on Aug. 31 in Berkeley, Calif. He was 86.
		Davidson's answers, expressed almost entirely in short, crisp but intellectually dense papers rather than books, made him "certainly one of the most important philosophers of the postwar period," Dr. Nagel said on Tuesday.
		Davidson was a student and intellectual disciple of W. Quine, considered one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century for his theory of language, among other important insights.
	www.ephilosopher.com /article594.html (358 words)

	JAC Online: 13.2 (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Davidson insists that understanding is possible in such a situation because we have the capability of developing a "passing theory" to make sense of the other.
		What Davidson posits instead is a far more fluid world in which every communicative situation--some only slightly, others more radically--provokes in the interpreter a new passing theory, a provisional understanding (or heuristic assumption) of what the speaker or writer means by his or her words.
		Davidson thus introduces a new twist to the long argument between those who emphasize a mastery of received usage ("current traditionalists" in the currently traditional jargon) and those who see such an emphasis as preventing the development of the individual's own voice.
	www.cas.usf.edu /JAC/132/dasen.html (2523 words)

	SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Metro -- DONALD DAVIDSON
		Professor Donald H. Davidson, a philosopher whose complex but penetrating insights into topics such as linguistic analysis and the nature of truth influenced a generation of thinkers, died Aug. 31 in Berkeley.
		Davidson was a student and intellectual disciple of W.V. Quine, considered one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century for his theory of language, among other important insights.
		Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6, 1917, in Springfield, Mass., and spent his early boyhood bouncing from city to city as his father, an engineer, pursued various jobs.
	www.signonsandiego.com /news/metro/20030909-9999_1m9davidson.html (798 words)

	Donald Davidson and History
		But not only was nothing in Davidson’s book useful for a historian, as far as I can tell nothing in it could possibly have been so, and in fact it seems that the goal of being useful that way had been formally ruled out almost from the beginning.
		The enforcement of work rules by the philosopher’s union is apparently very strict, because nothing Davidson writes about agency, events, or reasons ever even mentions any actual, non-hypothetical action, event, or reason (which are all presumably controlled by the psychologist’s union and historian’s union).
		The role of the analytic philosopher is thus rather like that of the Vatican censor in charge of making sure that all writing is consistent with church doctrine.
	www.idiocentrism.com /davidson.htm (748 words)

	Naturalism (philosophy) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism, that do not distinguish the supernatural from nature.
		Since it conflicts with established language in an already-complex philosophical topic, it introduces confusion.
		Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued that evolutionary naturalism is incoherent[9].
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Philosophical_naturalism (1407 words)

	[No title]
		In duels with the best among his peers, with Donald Davidson, Hillary Putnam or Daniel Dennett, he was a constant source of the subtlest, most sophisticated arguments.
		Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues - and not only them - over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations.
		A philosopher and sociologist, he is professor emeritus at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and the leading representative of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
	www.signandsight.com /features/1386.html (1238 words)

	Amazon.com: Truth & Predication: Books: Donald Davidson (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Davidson was a distinguished philosopher, and the first three chapters of this book constitute his principal statement about the concept of truth.
		Donald Davidson was most recently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
		Davidson's views on these matters are projections of folk-syntax, and are a source of annoyance to anyone who (unlike Davidson) gives any credence to the work of Chomsky and other depth-grammarians.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674015258?v=glance (1229 words)

	Open Court: The Philosophy of Donald Davidson
		Although Donald Davidson is considered an analytic philosopher, his thought straddles many areas of philosophy.
		One of his greatest contributions is the development of a philosophical system based on his theory of mind and language, but he has also worked on theory of action, philosophy of language, decision theory, psychology, epistemology, ethics, the concept of truth, and the concept of objectivity.
		Davidson is a former Carus Lecturer who has held more than twenty distinguished lectureships and research fellowships at universities in this country and abroad, including Queens College, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Peru.
	www.opencourtbooks.com /books_n/donald_davidson.htm (180 words)

	Donald Davidson
		After Hirschberg's death, Davidson felt he had little reason to remain in Chicago, and it was the Berkeley department's good fortune to persuade him to join it rather than one of his many other suitors.
		Cavell, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, left her position at the State University of New York at Purchase to come to Berkeley, where she taught courses from time to time in the Department of Philosophy.
		After Davidson's mandatory retirement from Berkeley in 1987, he continued to hold the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professorship, to which he had been appointed in 1986, and he remained very active both in teaching and in departmental affairs, even as outside demands on his time burgeoned.
	www.universityofcalifornia.edu /senate/inmemoriam/davidsond.htm (1025 words)

	ipedia.com: Donald Davidson (philosopher) Article (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Donald Davidson was an American philosopher and the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California,...
		In Mental Events Davidson advanced a form of the "identity thesis" in the philsophy of mind: that mental events just are brain events, and that mental states are brain states.
		Davidson argued that such a reduction would not be necessary to an identity thesis: it is possible that each individual mental state or event just is the corresponding brain state or event, without there being laws relating kinds of mental states to kinds of brain states--such as those in the above example.
	www.ipedia.com /donald_davidson__philosopher_.html (1527 words)

	Swamp man - (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt.
		This being, whom Davidson terms 'the swamp man' has, of course, a brain which is structurally identical to that which Davidson had, and will thus, presumably, behave exactly as Davidson would have.
		Davidson holds that there would, in fact, be a difference, though no one would notice it.
	www.grohol.com /psypsych/Swamp_man (811 words)

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