Dialogues With Davidson: Acting, Interpreting, Understanding

by Jeff E. Malpas (Editor), Christopher Durt, Samuel C. Wheeler III

Leading scholars discuss Donald Davidson's work in relation to a wide range of contemporary philosophical issues and approaches. The work of the philosopher Donald Davidson (1917–2003) is not only wide ranging in its influence and vision, but also in the breadth of issues that it encompasses. Davidson's work includes seminal contributions to philosophy of language and mind, to philosophy of action, and to epistemology and metaphysics. In Dialogues with Davidson , leading scholars engage with Davidson's work as it connects not only with aspects of current analytic thinking but also with a wider set of perspectives, including those of hermeneutics, phenomenology, the history of philosophy, feminist epistemology, and contemporary social theory. They link Davidson's work to other thinkers, including Collingwood, Kant, Derrida, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Davidson's philosophy, not only in terms of the philosophical relevance of the ideas he advanced, but also in the further connections and insights those ideas engender.

481 pages, Hardcover

First published June 24, 2011

About the author

Jeff Malpas is Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Latrobe University. He is the author of Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being, both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of essays on the philosophy of Donald Davidson - many informative, some more difficult (particularly, for me, the ones revolving around language theory).

Learned a new term, 'anomalous monism,' which I hope to use in polite company some day.

"But this is because, on Davidson’s view, there is no inner or outer world; there is no metaphysical bifurcation. There is only one world, an objective view of which can be made meaningful only by the language users who are part of it."