Language, Mind and Epistemology: On Donald Davidson’s Philosophy

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.