Davidson Donald 1917 2003 (7 results)

PAPERBACK, a few light pencil markings or a few underlined lines on a few pages only, otherwise still very good copy. DAVIDSON, DONALD. Inquiries into truth and interpretation. Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1991, Reprinted with corrections., xx, 292pp., . CONTENTS: Theories of meaning and learnable languages (1965) -- Truth and meaning (1967) -- True to the facts (1969) -- Semantics for natural languages (1970) -- In defence of Convention T (1973) -- Quotation (1979) -- On saying that (1968) -- Moods and performances (1979) -- Radical interpretation (1973) -- Belief and the basis of meaning (1974) -- Thought and talk (1975) -- Reply to Foster (1976) -- On the very idea of a conceptual scheme (1974) -- The method of truth in metaphysics (1977) -- reality without reference (1977) -- The inscrutability of reference (1979) -- What metaphors mean (1978) -- Communication and convention (1982). ISBN 0198750463.

Davidson, Donald, 1917-2003. Southern writers in the modern world. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958, xi, 76pp. 22 cm., very good dust-jacket, chipped at top of spine, very good black cloth. Eugenia Dorothy Blount Lamar memorial lectures, 1957.

Paperback / softback. Condition: New. This item is printed on demand. New copy - Usually dispatched within 5-9 working days.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First Edition. 3 leaves, 282 pp. Original cloth. Near Fine, in near fine dust jacket. Reprints 15 papers. 'The Essential Davidson compiles the most celebrated papers of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. It distills Donald Davidson's seminal contributions to our understanding of ourselves, from three decades of essays, into one thematically organized collection. A new, specially written introduction by Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, two of the world's leading authorities on his work, offers a guide through the ideas and arguments, shows how they interconnect, and reveals the systematic coherence of Davidson's worldview. Davidson's philosophical program is organized around two connected projects. The first is that of understanding the nature of human agency. The second is that of understanding the nature and function of language, and its relation to the world. Accordingly, the first part of the book presents Davidson's penetrating investigations of reasons, causes, and intentions, which revolutionized the philosophy of mind and action. He demonstrates that explanation of action is not only a matter of causal explanation of the movements of our bodies, but also involves justification, by showing the action to have been done for reasons. This leads to his notable doctrine of anomalous monism, the view that all mental events are physical events, but that there are no laws governing their connections, and so the mental cannot be reduced to the physical. The second part of the book presents the famous essays in which Davidson set out his highly original and influential philosophy of language, which founds the theory of meaning on the theory of truth. The connections between meaning, truth, and understanding are illuminated by his pioneering notions of radical interpretation and triangulation. He explores the role of first-person authority in human knowledge, and the role of indirect discourse and metaphor in human language. These fifteen classic essays will be invaluable for anyone interested in the study of mind and language. Fascinating though they are individually, it is only when drawn together that they have their full power, for there emerges a compelling picture of man as a rational linguistic animal whose thoughts, though not reducible to the material, are part of the fabric of the world, and whose knowledge of his own mind, the minds of others, and the world around him is as fundamental to his nature as the power of thought and speech itself' (Oxford University Press Web site).

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Original cloth. Very Good+, without dust jacket. Copy of Donald Davidson, with his pencil signature and a few pencil markings in the text. See Antti Kuusela, 'Non-reductive Physicalism, Irreducibility of the Mental and the Problem of Mental Causation: A study of Donald Davidson's and Georg Henrik von Wright's positions in the philosophy of mind', 2010.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Contributor Donald Davidson's copy of the First Edition, with his pencil signature 'Davidson' on the front flyleaf, pencil notes on the rear flyleaf, and corresponding lines in the margins. Frontispiece, xvi, 1,088 pp. Original cloth. Very Good, without dust jacket. Davidson's essay is 'The Method of Extension and Intension' (311-349). The notes on the rear flyleaf are 'Reductionist fallacy 551/Formal semantics for natural/language? Beth, p. 482, 492/Martin/Strawson, 506/Bar-Hillel, 520.' Davidson put pencil lines in the margins of those pages, and some others. The note 'Formal semantics for natural language' is interesting, as Davidson would go on to co-edit a volume entitled Semantics of Natural Language in 1972. 'An important influence on Davidson during the years at Stanford was his interactions with Carnap at UCLA. McKinsey had agreed to write an article on Carnap's semantics for the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Carnap. He asked Don to join him. After McKinsey's death, Don took it over and subsequently discussed the work extensively with Carnap' (Patrick Suppes, Biographical Memoirs, Procs. of the Amer. Philos. Soc., Vol. 150, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 353-9).

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. First printing. xiii, 242 pp; 170 figs. Original cloth. Very good, in dust jacket. Copy of Donald Davidson, with his signature. 'In 1951, when K. J. Arrow published his celebrated book 'Social Choice and Individual Values' (containing his famous theorem and related work, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize for economics), he had little awareness that the subject had been dealt with before. However, Duncan Black, another modern pioneer of social choice (who independently discovered some of the same results as Arrow), unearthed earlier work on this topic, including (inter alia) contributions by Condorcet, Laplace, and Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice books). See Black, 'The Theory of Committees and Elections', Cambridge UP 1958 (republished 1987 by Kluwer)' (Moshe' Machover, Department of Philosophy, King's College, London; please ask for on-line source). 'Duncan Black was an economist who revived interest in using mathematical tools to study voting systems. Black's book The Theory of Committees and Elections revived significant interest in using mathematical tools to study election questions' (American Mathematical Society Web site). 'Ends with a fascinating survey of ancients, Borda, Condorcet, & Dodgson' (please ask for on-line source). 'Arigorous analysis of the logic of voting based on elementary arithmetic and geometry' (please ask for on-line source). 'Dodgson is also remembered for his pamphlets and letters on 'Proportional Representation,' conveniently collected and assessed by Duncan Black in The Theory of Committees and Elections (1958)' (please ask for on-line source).