Donald Davidson (philosopher)

Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and difficult writing style, as well as the systematic nature of his philosophy. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, with most of his influence lying in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.

Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6, 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts to Grace Cordelia (née Anthony) and Clarence "Davie" Herbert Davidson. His family moved around frequently during his childhood; they lived in the Philippines until he was four, and then in various cities in the Northeastern United States before finally settling in Staten Island when he was nine. He briefly attended a public school in Staten Island before receiving a scholarship to study at Staten Island Academy. He first became interested in philosophy while in high school, where he read works by Nietzsche as well as Plato's Parmenides and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

After graduating from high school in 1935, he enrolled at Harvard on an English major before switching to classics and earning his BA in 1939. It was at Harvard that he came to know many important philosophers of the time, including C. I. Lewis, Alfred North Whitehead, Raphael Demos, and especially W. V. O. Quine, who went on to become a lifelong friend and major philosophical influence. He also befriended the future conductor Leonard Bernstein while at Harvard.

Soon after earning his BA, he was awarded a Teschemacher Scholarship to pursue graduate studies in classical philosophy at Harvard. As a graduate student, he took courses on logic taught by Quine and was classmates with Roderick Chisholm and Roderick Firth. Quine's seminars on logical positivism greatly influenced his view of philosophy, as they made him realize that "it was possible to be serious about getting things right in philosophy, or at least not getting things wrong." He graduated with an MA in classical philosophy in 1941.

While pursuing a PhD at Harvard, he concurrently enrolled at Harvard Business School, but he ended up leaving a few weeks before graduating in 1942 so that he could volunteer for the U.S. Navy. During World War II, he taught spotters how to distinguish enemy planes from allied planes and also participated in the ground invasions of Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio. After returning from the war in 1945, he completed his PhD dissertation on Plato's Philebus under the supervision of Raphael Demos and D. C. Williams, and it was eventually accepted in 1949, earning him his PhD in philosophy.

Anomalous monism is a philosophical thesis about the mind–body relationship first proposed by Davidson in his 1970 paper "Mental Events". The theory is twofold and states that mental events are identical with physical events, and that the mental is anomalous, i.e. under their mental descriptions, causal relations between these mental events are not describable by strict physical laws. Hence, Davidson proposes an identity theory of mind without the reductive bridge laws associated with the type-identity theory.

Since in this theory every mental event is some physical event or other, the idea is that someone's thinking at a certain time, for example, that snow is white, is a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which can be characterized as both a thinking that snow is white (a type of mental event) and a pattern of neural firing (a type of physical event). There is just one event that can be characterized both in mental terms and in physical terms. If mental events are physical events, they can at least in principle be explained and predicted, like all physical events, on the basis of laws of physical science. However, according to anomalous monism, events cannot be so explained or predicted as described in mental terms (such as "thinking", "desiring", etc.), but only as described in physical terms: this is the distinctive feature of the thesis as a brand of physicalism.

Davidson's argument for anomalous monism relies on the following three principles: