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Donald Davidson is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He is an analytic philosopher in the tradition of Ludwig Wittgenstein and W. V. Quine, and his formulations of action, truth, and communicative interaction have generated considerable debate in philosophical circles around the world. He has never attempted a systematic exposition of his philosophical program, and so there is no single place where a student, interpreter, or critic can seek its official formulation. His published essays, taken together, form a mosaic that must be viewed all at once to discern an overall pattern. In addition, many of them include subtleties, complexities, and cross-references that cannot be entirely appreciated except in conjunction with one another. Davidson was born on 6 March 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Clarence Herbert Davidson, an engineer, and Grace Cordelia Anthony Davidson. The family lived in the Philippines from shortly after Davidson was born until he was about four. They then returned to the United States. They lived for about a year in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Davidson‘s father taught elementary mathematics at Amherst College, then in suburban Philadelphia. When Davidson was about nine, they settled in Staten Island, New York, where he attended the Staten Island Academy. As a high-school student he read the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato‘s Parmenides, and Immanuel Kant‘s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; revised, 1787; translated as Critique of Pure Reason, 1855). In the fall of 1935 he entered Harvard University, where he was regularly invited to afternoon tea in the apartment of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Davidson became acquainted with most of the people in the philosophy department, including Quine, C. I. Lewis, and Raphael Demos. After graduating with a B.A. in philosophy and classics in the spring of 1939, Davidson spent the summer in Hollywood writing scripts for Big Town, a weekly private-eye radio program starring Edward G. Robinson. He returned to Harvard in the fall on a graduate scholarship to study philosophy with an emphasis in classics. Among his fellow graduate students were Roderick Chisholm, Roderick Furth, Henry Aiken, and Arthur Smullyan. Davidson left graduate school in November 1942 to enlist in the navy. Before going overseas he married Virginia Baldwin on New Year‘s Eve; they had one child, Elizabeth. He participated in the invasions of Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio before being discharged in the summer of 1945.Davidson returned to Harvard in March 1946. After completing the first draft of his dissertation on Plato‘s Philebus, he was hired in September as an instructor at Queens College in New York City. He completed the dissertation early in 1949 and received his Ph.D. (The dissertation was published in 1990.) He and his wife spent the summer of 1950 bicycling through France; during the trip he read and commented on the manuscript for Quine‘s "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1953). In January 1951 Davidson joined the philosophy department at Stanford University. His work on decision theory and measurement theory with his colleagues Patrick Suppes and J. C. C. McKinsey culminated in a joint paper, "Outlines of a Formal Theory of Value I," which appeared in the journal Philosophy of Science in 1955. While directing a dissertation in the late 1950s, Davidson identified a mistake in the literature of action theory.This discovery led to his classic paper "Actions,
Reasons, and Causes," which he presented at the American Philosophical
Association meeting in Washington, D.C., on 29 December 1963; it was
published in The Journal of Philosophy that year and was later collected in his Essays on Actions and Events
(1980). Prior to Davidson‘s paper, a near consensus had formed among
philosophers that whatever the relationship between reasons and actions might be, it could not be causal: an alleged "logical connection" between reasons and actions
excluded any causal relation between them. Davidson‘s purpose in his
paper, he says, is "to defend the ancient--and commonsense--position
that rationalization is a species of causal explanation." Much of the essay is devoted to refuting various then-popular arguments that purported to show that reasons could not cause the actions
that they rationalize. Many philosophers believed that the
eighteenth-century British philosopher David Hume had established that
if event A is causally related to event B, A and B cannot be logically
connected. In Hume‘s example, when a billiard ball
moving with a certain momentum hits another ball, the movement of the
second ball occurs not as a matter of logic but as a matter of the
physical nature of the universe; and it is logically possible that
causal interaction could have been different from what it actually is. One intuition behind the denial that reasons can be causes of actions, then, is that reasons and actions are logically related: for example, if a person believes that smoking is harmful and desires not to be harmed, he or she must, as a matter of logic alone, intend not to smoke. The person‘s reasons for intending not to smoke, therefore, could not be the cause of the intention. Davidson replies that a logical connection between the description of a cause and the description of an effect does not, by itself, preempt causation, as is evident in the statement "The cause of event E caused event E." No one would infer from the fact that an event could not logically be described as "the cause of E" without being the cause of E that the first event did not cause the second. Similarly, even if no one could have a belief that smoking is harmful and have a desire not to do anything harmful without having an intention not to smoke, it does not follow that there is no causal relation between the reasons and the intentional action that ensues. |
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