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Donald Davidson
American philosopher (1917-2003) · United States · Academics · Died at 86
Donald Davidson is read about 159 times a day, in 34 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 17 September 2026
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Something wrong?A philosopher whose writing was notoriously hard to crack but whose ideas rewired how analytic philosophy thought about mind, language, and action from the 1960s on.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
In their own words 2
I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.
The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox.
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About this person
Donald Herbert Davidson was born March 6, 1917, and built a teaching career across Stanford, Rockefeller, Princeton, and Chicago before landing at Berkeley in 1981 as Slusser Professor of Philosophy, a post he held until his death on August 30, 2003. His work was systematic and his prose famously difficult, but the charisma in person was real, and the influence spread wide - philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, action theory. Though rooted in the analytic tradition, his thinking jumped the fence into continental circles, particularly literary theory. He left behind a body of work that demanded close reading and repaid it.
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