Donald Davidsonis widely regarded as one of the most important and influentialphilosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He is ananalytic philosopher in the tradition of Ludwig Wittgenstein and W. V.Quine, and his formulations of action, truth, and communicativeinteraction have generated considerable debate in philosophical circlesaround the world. He has never attempted a systematic exposition of hisphilosophical program, and so there is no single place where a student,interpreter, or critic can seek its official formulation. His publishedessays, taken together, form a mosaic that must be viewed all at onceto discern an overall pattern. In addition, many of them includesubtleties, complexities, and cross-references that cannot be entirelyappreciated 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‘sfather taught elementary mathematics at Amherst College, then insuburban Philadelphia. When Davidson was about nine, they settled inStaten 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 wasregularly invited to afternoon tea in the apartment of the philosopherAlfred North Whitehead. Davidson became acquainted with most of thepeople in the philosophy department, including Quine, C. I. Lewis, andRaphael Demos.
Aftergraduating with a B.A. in philosophy and classics in the spring of1939, Davidson spent the summer in Hollywood writing scripts for Big Town,a weekly private-eye radio program starring Edward G. Robinson. Hereturned to Harvard in the fall on a graduate scholarship to studyphilosophy with an emphasis in classics. Among his fellow graduatestudents were Roderick Chisholm, Roderick Furth, Henry Aiken, andArthur Smullyan.
Davidson left graduate school inNovember 1942 to enlist in the navy. Before going overseas he marriedVirginia Baldwin on New Year‘s Eve; they had one child, Elizabeth. Heparticipated in the invasions of Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio beforebeing 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 Collegein New York City. He completed the dissertation early in 1949 andreceived his Ph.D. (The dissertation was published in 1990.) He and hiswife spent the summer of 1950 bicycling through France; during the triphe read and commented on the manuscript for Quine‘s "Two Dogmas ofEmpiricism" (1953).
In January 1951 Davidson joined thephilosophy department at Stanford University. His work on decisiontheory and measurement theory with his colleagues Patrick Suppes and J.C. C. McKinsey culminated in a joint paper, "Outlines of a FormalTheory 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 PhilosophicalAssociation meeting in Washington, D.C., on 29 December 1963; it waspublished 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 amongphilosophers that whatever the relationship between reasons and actions might be, it could not be causal: an alleged "logical connection" between reasons and actionsexcluded any causal relation between them. Davidson‘s purpose in hispaper, he says, is "to defend the ancient--and commonsense--positionthat 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 actionsthat they rationalize. Many philosophers believed that theeighteenth-century British philosopher David Hume had established thatif event A is causally related to event B, A and B cannot be logicallyconnected. In Hume‘s example, when a billiard ballmoving with a certain momentum hits another ball, the movement of thesecond ball occurs not as a matter of logic but as a matter of thephysical nature of the universe; and it is logically possible thatcausal 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 actionsare logically related: for example, if a person believes that smokingis harmful and desires not to be harmed, he or she must, as a matter oflogic alone, intend not to smoke. The person‘s reasons for intendingnot to smoke, therefore, could not be the cause of the intention.
Davidsonreplies that a logical connection between the description of a causeand the description of an effect does not, by itself, preemptcausation, as is evident in the statement "The cause of event E causedevent E." No one would infer from the fact that an event could notlogically be described as "the cause of E" without being the cause of Ethat the first event did not cause the second. Similarly, even if noone could have a belief that smoking is harmful and have a desire notto do anything harmful without having an intention not to smoke, itdoes not follow that there is no causal relation between the reasons and the intentional action that ensues.
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