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Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher who was "one of the greatest philosophers of the late 20th century."〔http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/sep/04/guardianobituaries.highereducation〕 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 the depth and difficulty of his thought.〔McGinn, Colin. "(Cooling it )". ''London Review of Books''. 19 August 1993. Accessed 28 October 2010.〕 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, and most of his influence lies in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.〔Dasenbrock, Reed Way, ed. ''(Literary Theory After Davidson )''. Penn State Press, 1989.〕 Although published mostly in the form of short, terse essays which do not explicitly rely on any overriding theory, his work is nonetheless noted for a highly unified character—the same methods and ideas are brought to bear on a host of apparently unrelated problems—and for synthesizing the work of a great number of other philosophers. He developed an influential truth-conditional semantics, attacked the idea of mental events as governed by strict psychological laws, and rejected the conception of linguistic understanding as having to do with conventions or rules, concluding famously that "there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with." His philosophical work as a whole is said to be concerned with how human beings communicate and interact with each other. ==Life== Davidson was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 6, 1917, to Clarence ("Davie") Herbert Davidson and Grace Cordelia Anthony. The family lived in the Philippines from shortly after Davidson's birth until he was about four. Then, having lived in Amherst and Philadelphia, the family finally settled on Staten Island when Davidson was nine or ten. From this time he began to attend public school, having to begin in first grade with much younger children. He then attended the Staten Island Academy, starting in fourth grade. At Harvard University he switched his major from English and comparative literature (Theodore Spencer on Shakespeare and the Bible, Harry Levin on Joyce) to classics and philosophy. He graduated in 1939, with a B.A. magna cum laude. Davidson was a pianist and always had an interest in music, later teaching philosophy of music at Stanford. At Harvard, he was in the same class as the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, with whom Davidson played piano four hands. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for the production which Davidson mounted of Aristophanes' play ''The Birds'' in the original Greek. Some of this music was later to be reused in Bernstein's ballet ''Fancy Free''. After graduation he went to California, where he wrote radio scripts for the private-eye drama Big Town, starring Edward G. Robinson. He returned to Harvard on a scholarship in classical philosophy, teaching philosophy and concurrently undergoing the intensive training of Harvard Business School. Before having the opportunity to graduate from Harvard Business School, Davidson was called up by the Navy, for which he had volunteered. He trained pilots to recognize enemy planes and participated in the invasions of Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio. After three and a half years in the Navy, he tried unsuccessfully to write a novel before returning to his philosophy studies and earning his doctorate in philosophy in 1949. ''Plato's Philebus'' served as his dissertation. Under the influence of W. V. Quine, whom he often credits as his mentor, he began to gradually turn toward the more formal methods and precise problems characteristic of analytic philosophy. During the 1950s Davidson worked with Patrick Suppes on developing an experimental approach to Decision Theory. They concluded that it was not possible to isolate a subject's beliefs and preferences independently of one another, meaning there would always be multiple ways to analyze a person's actions in terms of what they wanted, or were trying to do, or valued. This result is comparable to Quine's thesis on the indeterminacy of translation, and figures significantly in much of Davidson's later work on philosophy of mind. His most noted work (see below) was published in a series of essays from the 1960s onward, moving successively through philosophy of action into philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, and dabbling occasionally in aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and the history of philosophy. Davidson was widely traveled, and had a great range of interests he pursued with enormous energy. Apart from playing the piano, he had a pilot's license, built radios, and was fond of mountain climbing and surfing. He was married three times. His first wife was the artist Virginia Davidson, with whom he had his only child, a daughter, Elizabeth (Davidson) Boyer.〔Baghramian, Maria, ed. ''(Donald Davidson: Life and Words )''. Routledge, 2013.〕 Following his divorce from Virginia Davidson, he married for the second time to Nancy Hirschberg, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later at Chicago Circle. She died in 1979.〔''(Nancy Ann Hirschberg, In Memoriam, 1937 - 1979 )''〕 In 1984, Davidson married for the third and last time to the philosopher Marcia Cavell.〔''(In Memoriam: Donald Davidson )''〕 Thomas Nagel elliptically eulogized him as "deeply erotic". He served terms as president of both the Eastern and Western Divisions of the American Philosophical Association, and held various professional positions at Queens College (now part of CUNY), Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller University, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. From 1981 until his death he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy. In 1995 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Donald Davidson (philosopher)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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