Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held substantive teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, but parti...
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Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held substantive teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, but particularly in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. Although published mostly in the form of short essays which do not explicitly rely on any overriding theory, his work is nonetheless noted for a strongly unified character—the same methods and ideas are brought to bear on a host of apparently unrelated problems—and for synthesizing the work of a great number of other philosophers, including Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Frank P. Ramsey, W.V. Quine, and G. E. M. Anscombe.
Davidson was born in Springfield,...
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