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Professor Donald Davidson is one of the most innovative and influential recent philosophers. Ranging over a variety of topics in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and epistemology, his system of thought is unified by his inquiries into the nature of interpretation and understanding the speech and behavior of others.
Together with its introduction, Language, Mind and Epistemology examines Davidson's unified stance towards philosophy by joining American and European authors within a collection of essays, published here for the first time. The authors discuss the central topics in Davidson's latest philosophy: his holistic truth-theoretic stance towards meaning and understanding, the epistemology of interpretation and translation, the externalist viewpoint in epistemology, the anti-Cartesian approach in accounting for first person authority, the thesis of anomalous monism, and the holistic conception of the mental.
List of contents
Philosophy of Language.- Meaning, Holism and the Problem of Extensionality.- Davidson's Use of Truth in Accounting for Meaning.- Was ist Wahrheit? (What Is Truth?).- Eigennamen und Kennzeichnungen - Anmerkungen zur sogenannten Frege-Russell-Theorie (Proper Names and Definite Descriptions - Some Remarks on the So-Called Frege-Russell-Theory).- Epistemology.- Quine and Davidson: Two Naturalized Epistemologists.- Davidson and Quine on Observation Sentences.- Events and Externalism.- Conceptual Relativism and Translation.- Conceptual Schemes after Davidson.- Singular Causal Sentences and two Relational Views.- Philosophy of Mind and Theory of Action.- The Inadequacy of Anomalous Monism as a Realist Theory of Mind.- Internalism, Externalism, and Davidson's Conception of the Mental.- Dividing the Self.- Willensschwäche - Wie ist das nur möglich? (Weakness of the Will - How Is It Possible?).- Davidson on Intentional Content and Self-Knowledge.- Sharing Beliefs and the Myth of the Subjective.- First-Person Knowledge and Authority.- Rationalität: Absichten - Primärgründe - praktisches Denken (Rationality: Intentions - Primary Reasons - Practical Thinking).- Dialectic and Dialogue.- Name Index.
Report
`The present volume is one among a number of evidences of the new openness to the pleasures and advantages of the free exchange of ideas drawn from philosophical cultures that until recently often seemed so disparate as to preclude productive conversation. '
Donald Davidson
