Book Description
Professor Donald Davidson is one of the most innovative andinfluential recent philosophers. Ranging over a variety of topics inthe philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and epistemology, hissystem of thought is unified by his inquiries into the nature ofinterpretation and understanding the speech and behavior of others.
Together with its introduction,Language, Mind and Epistemologyexamines Davidson's unified stance towards philosophy by joiningAmerican and European authors within a collection of essays, publishedhere for the first time. The authors discuss the central topics inDavidson's latest philosophy: his holistic truth-theoretic stancetowards meaning and understanding, the epistemology of interpretationand translation, the externalist viewpoint in epistemology, theanti-Cartesian approach in accounting for first person authority, thethesis of anomalous monism, and the holistic conception of the mental.
... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Southern Historical Association on February 1, 2003. The length of the article is 549 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance.(Book Review)
Author: Catherine E. Howard
Publication: Journal of Southern History (Refereed)
Date: February 1, 2003
Publisher: Southern Historical Association
Volume: 69Issue: 1Page: 222(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

You can't touch this
Well, it looks like I just bought the last copy of this book available anywhere :-)So why bother reviewing it?

Its true that this book is mostly of historical interest now.It is basically the proceedings of a conference held in 1985 on Donald Davidson's theories of, (surprise, surprise) actions and events.The debates are long over; the arguments are stale, for the most part...

...but for the true connoseur, there's some gems to be found here.One of the last rounds of conversation between Quine and Davidson on the ontology of events is recorded here.Terrence Parsons has a nice paper which is basically a precis of this book "Events in the Semantics of English".

If you are wondering what it takes to transform a philosophy department into one of the top 5 philosophy departments in the world, understanding this book and the social phenomena behind it is a good place to start.LePore and McLaughlin organized the conference, which attracted the coolest people in philosophy to have one of the coolest conversations--we're still having that conversation, 25 years on. ... Read more

Book Description
The work of Donald Davidson (1917-2003) transformed the study of meaning. Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, two of the world's leading authorities on Davidson's work, present the definitive study of his widely admired and influential program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages,
giving an exposition and critical examination of its foundations and applications. ... Read more

Book Description
A southern literary master's captivating novel about the rise of a Nashville-bound singer as "hillbilly" evolves into "country." ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

A comparative exam of Chinese and analytic philosophy
Collections strong in philosophy or Asian studies will find Two Roads To Wisdom? to be a fine survey of Chinese philosophy's history and its contrast with Western analytic traditions. Leading philosopher in both traditions contribute to this comparative exam of Chinese and analytic philosophy and the methodologies which differ. ... Read more

Book Description

This brief book takes readers to the very heart of what it is that philosophy can do well. Completed shortly before Donald Davidson's death at 85, Truth and Predication brings full circle a journey moving from the insights of Plato and Aristotle to the problems of contemporary philosophy. In particular, Davidson, countering many of his contemporaries, argues that the concept of truth is not ambiguous, and that we need an effective theory of truth in order to live well.

Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar; in the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life--such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language use--how we connect noun to verb. This is a problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and Davidson draws on their thinking to show how an understanding of linguistic behavior is critical to the formulating of a workable concept of truth.

Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty.Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.

Customer Reviews (1)

Disappointed
Davidson is trying to solve the age-old problem of the "unity of the proposition". The proposition SOCRATES HITS PLATO is different from the heap SOCRATES, THE RELATION OF HITTING, PLATO. This corresponds to the semantic fact that "Socrates hits Plato" is a sentence, whereas "Socrates, the relation of hitting, Plato" is not. Frege ineffectively tried to solve this by saying that the verb (in "Socrates hits Plato") denotes something which is "unsaturated", i.e. has holes in it, thereby enabling that thing to link up, in a proposition-forming way, with the items flanking it. Frege's theory is radically confused, as Davidson has noted many times.(For one thing, it has the absurd result that the thing corresponding to the verb "hits" has a hole in it, whereas the thing corresonding to the noun "the relation of hitting" does not. But how can this be, given that both expressions presumably pick out the same relation? Frege gave the absurd answer that we cannot speak of properties the way we can speak of individuals -- this is embodied in Frege's dictum "the property HORSE is not a property".) Rightly rejecting Frege's view, Davidson produces one of his own, which -- like much of his previous work -- involves a dubious reliance in Tarski's work relating to the definability of truth-predicates in formal languages. Throughout his career, Davidson often tried to turn Tarski's technical points in logic to deep semantic and metaphysical account. Davidson also seems to have found support in Tarski's work for some extremely strange and, I believe, false doctrines. Tarski's disquotationalism -- "snow is white" is true iff snow is white -- apparently inspired Davidson to think that (a) there are no propositions (sentences are enough), (b) there are no facts, (c) the predicate "is true" and the corresponding property are innocuous and somehow vacant (this is supposedly evidenced by the apparent equivalence of "snow is white" and "it is true that snow is white") (d) there is no difference between meanings and truth-conditions (Tarski talks about truth-conditions, not about meanings). None of these doctrines has any real support in Tarski's work; and Davidson's attempt to give them support - in particular, his use of the spurious "Slingshot" argument to prove that there are no facts and that, consequently,
sentences are not made true by anything -- involved rather glaring fallacies. Davidson's views on truth are based on a complete failure to see past the phonetic surface structure of indicative sentences. From a purely orthographic point of view, "snow is white" is less complex than the corresponding nominal: "that snow is white". But semantically the story is very different. Both encode the proposition THAT SNOW IS WHITE. But "snow is white" does something additional: it manages to ascribe truth to that proposition. (How this is done is a delicate matter.) Once the semantic anatomy of "snow is white" is laid bare, it becomes impossible to sustain the idea that the truth-predicate is innocuous or the concomitant idea that nothing MAKES a sentence be true. 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. In Identity and Predication, the unique blend of obscurity, indirectness, and flabby logic that vitiated much of Davidson's earlier work is in full bloom. Further, he doesn't really add anything that wasn't already found in his earlier papers. As a philosopher, Davidson had some fine moments. His work on scepticism is original (though unsuccessful). Some aspects of his work on semantics -- especially his excavation of the logical form of action sentences and his scathing criticisms (in "Theories of Learnable languages") of Frege's bizarre views on indirect discourse -- are philosophical classics. But in this work, Davidson is not at his best, and this exposes a certain lack of focus that pervaded his career. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 2. ... Read more

Book Description
W.V. Quine and DonaldDavidson are among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Their influence on contemporary philosophy is second to none, and their impact in disciplines such as linguistics and psychology is strongly felt. Questioning some of their basic assumptions, this text includes interesting comparisons of Quine and Davidson with other philosophers, particularly Wittgenstein. The text also offers detailed accounts of central issues in contemporary analytic philosophy.Download Description
Quine and Davidson are among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Their influence on contemporary philosophy is second to none, and their impact is also strongly felt in disciplines such as linguistics and psychology. This is the first book devoted to both of them, but also the first to question some of their basic assumptions. Hans-Johann Glock critically scrutinizes their ideas on ontology, truth, necessity, meaning and interpretation, thought, and language, and shows that their attempts to accommodate meaning and thought within a naturalistic framework, either by impugning them as unclear or by extracting them from physical facts, are ultimately unsuccessful. His discussion includes interesting comparisons of Quine and Davidson with other philosophers, particularly Wittgenstein, and also offers detailed accounts of central issues in contemporary analytic philosophy, such as the nature of truth and of meaning and interpretation, and the relation between thought and language. ... Read more

Book Description
History of the Tennessee Valley from the Civil War to the TVA. ... Read more