Donald Davidson: Life and Words

Maria Baghramian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415528801
• eBook ISBN: 9781135713638
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) was one of the most prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. His thinking about language, mind, and epistemology has shaped the views of several generations of philosophers. This book brings together articles by a host of prominent philosophers to provide new interpretations of Davidson's key ideas about meaning, language and thought.

The book opens with short commemorative pieces by a wide range of people who knew Davidson well, giving us glimpses into the life of a great philosopher, a beloved husband and father, a colleague, teacher and friend. The chapter by Lepore and Ludwig and the ensuing heated debate with Frederick Stoutland on how to interpret Davidson demonstrate why Davidson's legacy has become a disputed intellectual territory. The chapters by Kathrin Glüer, Peter Pagin, Barry Smith, James Higginbotham and William Child, all eminent philosophers of language, are prime examples of just one strand of this legacy, while the piece by Sophie Gibb gives us an opening to Davidson's enormous contribution to philosophy of mind. Donald Davidson: Life and Words closes with a piece by Davidson himself, first published in 1995 in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, where he brings together the various strands of his work in a Unified Theory of speech and action.

This book comprises key articles first published in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies and previously unpublished commemorative pieces, and serves as a fitting dedication to the work and memory of a great philosopher.

Part I

Remembering Donald

Marcia Cavell

Except for occasional brief encounters at the APA meetings, I had not seen Donald for some twenty-five years when in New York, in 1978, a stranger named Ernie Lepore called to invite me to participate in a Rutgers conference on the philosophy of Donald Davidson who had been one of my professors at Stanford. At that time he was having difficulty writing. I had no idea that he had solved the problem and become a highly esteemed philosopher. I knew that the invitation was Donald’s oblique and somewhat mischievous way of responding to a note of condolence I had written to him after his second wife died. He was, I was told, unhappy and lonely. I was recently divorced, curious about who he was now, unhappy and lonely. I had read none of his work, so I asked a colleague of mine if there was some subject of Davidson’s that a total innocent of his work could handle. The colleague replied, ‘metaphor,’ (1978b) and suggested that I read Donald’s essay by that name. ‘Everything Davidson writes,’ my friend continued, ‘is connected with everything else, but that essay can stand by itself.’

The advice about metaphor was good, for Donald’s essay begins with a provocative passage from Freud about what he calls ‘dreamwork.’ I was living in New York, teaching philosophy, and studying at a psychoanalytic institute. Dreamwork was up my alley, so I said ‘Yes.’ Once I had, Donald called me more and more frequently from Berkeley. I was surprised that after all those years I still had a vivid place in his emotional life, as he did in mine. At first his calls were courtly, and then increasingly intense, and I began to have the sense that we would become more than colleagues to each other.

Not too long before the conference, another stranger, Akeel Bilgrami, in the philosophy department at Columbia University, invited me to a cocktail party in Donald’s honor. When I rang the bell, Akeel and Donald were both at the door, as if he had been waiting there for me. He took my hand and led me to a private table in a far corner of the room. With his famously blue eyes he looked at me intently and said ‘Tell me anything.’ Perhaps only a short story could convey how moving that imperative was to me. For one thing, it was an open-ended invitation to lead us to whatever degree of intimacy I wanted. Except that it wasn’t clear who was leading whom. Most of the time we were just traveling together. This man was so deeply committed to sexual equality that I doubt he ever had to think about it; it had been a part of his character since he was a little boy, the off-spring of a father whom he hated and a mother he adored and wanted to emulate. At his request he learned from her how to sew on buttons, iron, and cook. Now fathers cradling their babies as they walk down the street is a common sight. That was not so when Donald was a young man.

At the conference itself, Donald made a point of being present at every talk, even if for only a few minutes, though there were always three talks going on at the same time. He told me later that he thought he owed it to the speakers since many of them had been his students, and in any case all the speakers had spent energy and time on his work. He seemed also to turn up on the row in which I was sitting, or just behind. After the conference was over he told me that it was one of the more difficult things he had ever done, since he had vowed not to open his mouth at any of the papers, even though of course many were bound to get him wrong and to say things in criticism to which he might have had an answer.

As readers of this volume know, Donald was one of the true philosophical stylists of his generation. His prose was witty, lucid, elegant. ‘Events as Particulars,’ (1970) for example, begins: ‘Things change. But are there such things as changes? A pebble moves, an eland is born, a land slides, a star explodes.’ ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’ (1974) was one of the first of his articles that I read. To his surprise, I said I had found it difficult. I also am surprised now, since the basic idea is straightforward, that, contra sociologists like Whorf who contend that different conceptual schemes are unintelligible to outsiders, Donald argues that if you can know in the first place that another person is speaking a language, then in theory at least it will be possible to interpret him. Perhaps what threw me off on my first reading was the very lucidity of the writing. There was no spare word. His ideal, I think, was, as much as possible, to erase every sentence and word that played no part in the argument until he had a single resonant chord. I have loved ‘On the Very Idea …’ for its quiet implication that no two groups of people are forever locked in their own ways of understanding the world, that there is always – given enough time – and good will – a space they share for discussion. Donald himself would never have made so large a claim.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Donald had taken a course from Alfred North Whitehead, a paradigm of a systematic philosopher, and was pleased to find that in philosophy you could write whatever you want – poetry, meditation, provocative babble. But he soon gave up that idea and that ideal of philosophy and chose instead the form that best suited him: the closely reasoned essay. He chose to explore a single difficult philosophical problem as it came up. His opus reflects this intellectual character: each of his books is a collection of inter-related articles, but there is no single volume that makes the connections apparent. Donald’s ‘style’ is as much a reflection of moral commitment as of poetic skill. His choice was to keep himself in the background and to ignore fashion and flash. Integrity was one of his principal values, both in philosophy and in life. I once said to him about some domestic matter that he really tried to live up to his principles, and with surprise he said, ‘Of course.’

As Akeel Bilgrami so well conveys in this volume, Donald’s sense of humor was inimitable and undescribable. At night, after a shower, he often slithered into the bedroom, a towel around his waist, and with a straight face delivered himself of some esoteric factoid. Among many other things, he was a scientist by nature and given the breadth of his reading, esoteric factoids were easily come by.

Our standard breakfast was cereal with nuts and milk. I don’t remember the context but once a houseguest asked us what we ate for breakfast on Sunday morning. ‘We tend to eat eggs,’ I said. Donald corrected: ‘We do eat eggs.’

Before I met Donald this time around I had been working on a manuscript that brought certain themes in philosophy and psychoanalysis together. My thesis was that there is no such thing as a mind without a second person with whom the first is interacting. I had in mind the baby and its mother. Descartes’ solipsistic universe therefore rests on a blunder. Until I read Donald’s ‘Second Person’ (1992) and ‘Thought and Talk’ (1975) I didn’t know how to support my thesis. There, in his writing, was the argument. Of course giving Donald credit, I paraphrased it many times in my own writing.

But Donald had one conviction that I didn’t share, namely that without talk there is no such thing as thought. In my psychoanalytic studies I had become engaged in developmental questions about the progress of mind from infancy on up. Donald wasn’t much interested in development. But I persisted. Many of our conversations over the nineteen years of our marriage, usually walking along the fire-trail behind our house in Berkeley, began, ‘May I come back to our favorite subject?,’ ‘I can’t image what that would be,’ he would respond with mock seriousness, and we would go at it again, I arguing that infants do have minds, Donald that there is no mind without language. Now, knowing a little bit about neuro-biology and much more than I did then about language, I see his point. Of course infants have something going on that will be mind some day – emotions, the ability to communicate, some capacity for empathy – some day; in the full-bodied sense, it is not yet mind, or language. Discovering this truth of Donald’s thesis has happened only now as I tell the arguments and the story again.

Many people thought Donald was cold. He wasn’t, but I understood why others thought so. At parties he wasn’t good at going up to a stranger and starting a conversation, and he was sensitive to an extraordinary degree to feeling spurned, or left out. When he felt that way he could be either hostile, or a study in ice. Good friends knew how easily he was hurt, or worse, vulnerable to feeling erased. When he was introduced to a stranger whom he knew something about, one didn’t know if he would go to curiosity, or philosophy, or to something on the far side of teasing. The one thing that was not in his character was groveling, and he disdained it in others. One summer at Bellagio when he was introduced to the editor of some esteemed publication, he said, ‘Oh you’re the editor of that dreadful little magazine.’ I still think the remark was outrageous; yet somehow his interlocutor did not put up his fists, but joined him in laughter and the beginnings of a conversation.

His friends knew him as a man of many passions and talents. He was passionate about the natural world: clouds, mountains and mountain-climbing, surfing, travel, the heavens: He had a professional telescope in our living room just inside a screened door to the deck where he would move it when something extraordinary was happening. He was passionate about flying. He had both a glider license and one for regular airplanes. Once he took me up in a glider over the golden California hills. Of course he had done this many times, but he seemed to be as struck as ever by the beauty of flying with the hawks over small mountains, close to the edge of the sea. It was the silence – no human chatter, not even the hum of a motor – and being caught up in the same updrafts as the birds that were part of the exhilaration. For just a little while one shed one’s human skin and was both in the world and on the edge of it, looking in.

Of course he was passionate about philosophy, and the teaching of philosophy. He believed in the powers of reason, and was eager to take philosophy to as many parts of the world as he could, which was one of the reasons he accepted invitations to lecture not only in the bright countries like England and France but also in Mexico, India, Bosnia (during the war), Turkey, Argentina, Israel, and more before I knew him. Given the relations between Palestine and Israel, he was uneasy about Israel, but his friend Edward Said reassured him that as long as he also lectured in Palestine there wasn’t any moral obstacle.

He was passionate about music and about architecture. He and his first wife had built their house in Woodside from the ground up, including installing the electricity. At a small dinner party of ours one night he said that he thought he might have made a better architect than a philosopher. ‘Donald, you’re bragging,’ I said to the delight of our guests.

Donald’s judgment was sound, and he brought the same intelligence to any practical problem as he did to philosophy. But driving with him, for example, was something of a trial for he forbade all conversation. I asked him once, why. And he said that he was constantly thinking what he would do if a car dashed surprisingly from around a corner, and so on. I said, ‘How exhausting,’ and he agreed that it was. At the same time he was a bold driver, often making maneuvers that would have been dangerous had someone else been at the wheel. I always felt secure when I was in the same room with him. On a couple of our long-distance flights, a pilot came on the intercom to tell the passengers that something was wrong with one engine. Once it was on fire. I took Donald’s hand, or he took mine, and I realized that so long as I was by his side I would be all right no matter what happened.

Another airplane story is not so romantic. Donald had spent hours on our deck in California, watching the hawks circle above, waiting for an updraft. Shortly after 9/11 I asked him what he would do if he knew our building was on fire. He said he would take measure of the air currents, spread his wings and take off, looking for the best moment for a dive into the water. ‘What about me? Would you take me?,’ I asked. His description suggested a one-person plan, but I assumed that somehow his imagination took care of me as best as possible in such dire circumstances. Without a pause he said ‘Of course not! You wouldn’t know how to do it and you’d just kill us both.’ His friends laughed. I did not, or not easily.

After Rutgers I visited Donald in California. It was just before we decided to marry. When he did ask me to marry him, I said ‘Yes.’ But to see what he would say, I asked, ‘Why marry? Why not just live together? We’re obviously too old for children.’ I was fifty-one, Donald sixty-five. ‘Because marriage is romantic,’ he said. A week or so before that, sitting in the garden he loved to tend, he said, ‘I have something for you. Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to marry me.’ He brought out a little box that held a beautiful, simple diamond ring. ‘It was my mother’s. I have been saving it for you all these years. I don’t know which finger you want it on, so you do it, I mean, if you want to wear it at all.’ I decided to put it for the moment on the ring finger of my right hand, which is where I wear it now.

Akeel Bilgrami

Almost exactly two years ago in a symposium in Seattle, many of us who are here today had gathered to hear some of the most interesting philosophers of our time pay critical homage to Donald in his eightieth year, and to hear his replies. We all took in that afternoon that the forked lightning of John McDowell and Tyler Burge and Barry Stroud did not budge the Davidsonian oak. And it was so remarkable then, as it always was of Donald as his age advanced, that he was never once tempted by the nostalgic thought (often indulged by people much younger than him) that philosophy is no longer what it used to be. I remember thinking that afternoon that it would be a sad day when something causes the rich juices of this man to run dry – and I still cannot find it credible that it has happened.

I first laid eyes on Donald when as an undergraduate, having just defected to philosophy from the study of English Literature, I went along in a vast assembly to a seminar he gave in Oxford with Michael Dummett. It is a clear memory that Michael entered first, in crumpled formal wear, bent forward at the hip, agitated, and seeming to be under the strain of having to carry a large number of papers and books in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a streak of nicotine stain in his hair. The papers fell out of his hand prompting a cry of annoyance, and some people rushed to bend and collect them for him. Then Donald arrived, late, in rapid stride, wearing a black polo neck t-shirt, with his young wife Nancy on one arm and two tennis rackets in the other. Though I understood hardly anything at all of the proceedings, I could tell that the contrast I have been just trying to draw vaguely passed over into the style of their exchanges – the one impressive for having sharpened his philosophy with a combustible temper, the other impressive for having sharpened it with a cool wit.

Three years later, after a stint in India, I decided to go and study with Donald in America. When I presented the idea that I would not return to Oxford, to my father, who had always thought of America as some sort of jungle (in fact, I suspect, thought of every place outside the south of England, a jungle) he said it was a surrender of all sensible values, and asked with affected contempt: ‘Who is this Donaldson?’ Over the years, not so much because of my reports of Donald’s philosophy, which he found remote, more as a result of reports of his dry wit, his inquiries took on a more gruffly affectionate tone: ‘How is your man, Davidson?’

I was thinking last morning as I was writing this of the many examples of that wit. It was a singular sort of humour, never jokey or corny, never rugged or broad, but with a quality that came more from a unique sense of phrasing than anything else. Like the time when he had come to Ann Arbor, while I was briefly teaching there. He had recently returned from Australia, and at a reception for him, one of the students, keen to display his knowledge of Australian philosophy, said: ‘Professor Davidson, is it true that all philosophers in Australia are either materialists or relevance logicians?’ Donald stared at him without much expression and said in his dry, Protestant tone: ‘No, there are also some vegetarians.’ Or the time, when I was finishing up as a graduate student and applying to various universities and colleges for a job, and seeking his advice about where to apply. One of the options was Bennington College, so I asked him about it. ‘Akeel’, he said, ‘if you go to Bennington, you will expire with fun.’ The one my father enjoyed the most for its image of lazy, fin-de-siècle decadence, was when Donald, overhearing the cries of repulsion among the company which saw me pour umpteen packets of sugar in my coffee, said ‘Akeel takes so much sugar in his coffee because he is too superior to stir.’

Getting to know him in Chicago was slow, at first. He seldom appeared at the departmental colloquia and was never present at the weekly coffee hours intended to bring students and faculty informally together. None of this affected those early months of absolutely unparalleled philosophical instruction for me. It never ceased to amaze me that he was never thrifty with his time, nor that he never condescended. It allowed me to take myself seriously in the subject and feel for the first time what it might be like to enter the culture of research. These frequent meetings, initially in his office, moved every Thursday evening when he was not travelling somewhere (which was often) to a pizza parlour called ‘The Medici’, and then when his wife died, to the pizza being brought to his home every Thursday, where he always drank twice or three times as much wine as I did, preceded by vodka on the rocks before we started eating.

Nancy’s death made us personal friends because it was a time of solitude and un-self-pitying sorrow for him. I remember a few days after she died, he rang and asked me to come out for a walk with him to the lake in Chicago to take in the period of sundown, and I was filled with a sense of privilege. There was a storm welling up that evening and he said, as we walked, that the Midwest was to be admired, if for nothing else, for its thunderstorms. It was touching to see the great man, in his grief, looking smaller and weaker than usual, being tossed around by a disrespectful wind.

It really was not until he removed himself from Chicago to Berkeley that he entered a happy period of life again, and specially so after he joined with Marcia a few years later.

A measure of Donald’s remarkable achievements in Philosophy is the extent to which philosophers who write on his themes have defined their views, often very different views, in terms of his. Initially, his influence took the form of a number of younger philosophers elaborating on the d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I Remembering Donald
• PART II Interpreting Davidson
• PART III The Last Word
• Index