What do you think?
Rate this book
Essays on Actions and Events (Philosophical Essays of Donald Davidson) (The Philosophical Essays of Donald Davidson
Including two new essays, this remarkable volume is an updated edition of Davidson's classic Essays on Actions and Events (1980). A superb work on the nature of human action, it features influential discussions of numerous topics. These include the freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
About the author
Donald Davidson
97 books59 followersDonald Davidson was one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. His ideas, presented in a series of essays from the 1960's onwards, have been influential across a range of areas from semantic theory through to epistemology and ethics. Davidson's work exhibits a breadth of approach, as well as a unitary and systematic character, which is unusual within twentieth century analytic philosophy. Thus, although he acknowledged an important debt to W. V. O. Quine, Davidson's thought amalgamates influences (though these are not always explicit) from a variety of sources, including Quine, C. I. Lewis, Frank Ramsey, Immanuel Kant and the later Wittgenstein. And while often developed separately, Davidson's ideas nevertheless combine in such a way as to provide a single integrated approach to the problems of knowledge, action, language and mind. The breadth and unity of his thought, in combination with the sometimes-terse character of his prose, means that Davidson is not an easy writer to approach. Yet however demanding his work might sometimes appear, this in no way detracts from either the significance of that work or the influence it has exercised and will undoubtedly continue to exercise. Indeed, in the hands of Richard Rorty and others, and through the widespread translation of his writings, Davidson's ideas have reached an audience that extends far beyond the confines of English-speaking analytic philosophy. Of late twentieth century American philosophers, perhaps only Quine has had a similar reception and influence.
Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6th, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. He died suddenly, as a consequence of cardiac arrest following knee surgery, on Aug. 30, 2003, in Berkeley, California. Remaining both physically and philosophically active up until his death, Davidson left behind behind a number of important and unfinished projects including a major book on the nature of predication. The latter volume was published posthumously (see Davidson, 2005b), together with two additional volumes of collected essays (Davidson 2004, 2005a), under the guidance of Marcia Cavell.
Davidson completed his undergraduate study at Harvard, graduating in 1939. His early interests were in literature and classics and, as an undergraduate, Davidson was strongly influenced by A. N. Whitehead. After starting graduate work in classical philosophy (completing a Master's degree in 1941), Davidson's studies were interrupted by service with the US Navy in the Mediterranean from 1942-45. He continued work in classical philosophy after the war, graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a dissertation on Plato's ‘Philebus’ (1990b). By this time, however, the direction of Davidson's thinking had already, under Quine's influence, changed quite dramatically (the two having first met at Harvard in 1939-40) and he had begun to move away from the largely literary and historical concerns that had preoccupied him as an undergraduate towards a more strongly analytical approach.
While his first position was at Queen's College in New York, Davidson spent much of the early part of his career (1951-1967) at Stanford University. He subsequently held positions at Princeton (1967-1970), Rockefeller (1970-1976), and the University of Chicago (1976-1981). From 1981 until his death he worked at the University of California, Berkeley. Davidson was the recipient of a number of award and fellowships and was a visitor at many universities around the world. Davidson was twice married, with his second marriage, in 1984, being to Marcia Cavell.
-http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dav...
Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6th, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. He died suddenly, as a consequence of cardiac arrest following knee surgery, on Aug. 30, 2003, in Berkeley, California. Remaining both physically and philosophically active up until his death, Davidson left behind behind a number of important and unfinished projects including a major book on the nature of predication. The latter volume was published posthumously (see Davidson, 2005b), together with two additional volumes of collected essays (Davidson 2004, 2005a), under the guidance of Marcia Cavell.
Davidson completed his undergraduate study at Harvard, graduating in 1939. His early interests were in literature and classics and, as an undergraduate, Davidson was strongly influenced by A. N. Whitehead. After starting graduate work in classical philosophy (completing a Master's degree in 1941), Davidson's studies were interrupted by service with the US Navy in the Mediterranean from 1942-45. He continued work in classical philosophy after the war, graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a dissertation on Plato's ‘Philebus’ (1990b). By this time, however, the direction of Davidson's thinking had already, under Quine's influence, changed quite dramatically (the two having first met at Harvard in 1939-40) and he had begun to move away from the largely literary and historical concerns that had preoccupied him as an undergraduate towards a more strongly analytical approach.
While his first position was at Queen's College in New York, Davidson spent much of the early part of his career (1951-1967) at Stanford University. He subsequently held positions at Princeton (1967-1970), Rockefeller (1970-1976), and the University of Chicago (1976-1981). From 1981 until his death he worked at the University of California, Berkeley. Davidson was the recipient of a number of award and fellowships and was a visitor at many universities around the world. Davidson was twice married, with his second marriage, in 1984, being to Marcia Cavell.
-http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dav...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 25, 2007
Who thought it would be a good idea to have Davidson look like a ghost on the cover of this and the four other volumes? He's the most frightening on Problems of Rationality.
April 16, 2024
When we’re in the business of giving reasons, we’re in the business of causal explanation. While causal explanation connects with nomological reference, it only hints at there being *an* explanatory law, not to *the* law. Even though each mental event is identical to a singular physical event, that does not mean the laws in question are psychophysical laws, for the kind of explanation we get from connecting different mental events can’t be gotten from scratch by connecting (how?) different physical events; hence a difference at the level of the scope of the quantifier, or a form of “holism” in DD’s account, aka anomalous monism. I’m not entirely convinced by it, because I’m wondering if the nomological oddity at the mental level couldn’t be explained away as precisely a feature of folk psychology; ofc strictly physical laws wouldn’t yield the same pattern, to use Dennett talk, as psychology, but isn’t that an argument for, and not against, EM? But ok, DD was writing in the 70s.
In this historical perspective, he looks like an intermediate spot between Anscombian dualism (intentional and observational are description relative features of an action, and reasons and causes don’t overlap) and Dennett (reasons and causes do overlap, and the difference is just ways of carving up a pattern).
More about causal explanations: just because someone has the intention of doing something, makes the relevant steps towards doing it, and does it, and it happens that what he had the intention of doing gets done, doesn’t mean he caused it necessarily: there is still some contingence left between the point where his contribution to the event stops, and the world’s functioning as it does begins (cf the famous example of the wild animals startled by a gunshot). The more specification goes into the description of the cause, the more the effect will appear necessary, but the less also the cause will appear sufficient, and vice versa.
Pretty good philosophy overall, some of the middle essays were not exactly gripping though; really love his style, agree with his criticisms of Strawson on concept dependence and Parsons on predicate places in action descriptions, but none of this really blew my socks off. Maybe it’s getting oldy
In this historical perspective, he looks like an intermediate spot between Anscombian dualism (intentional and observational are description relative features of an action, and reasons and causes don’t overlap) and Dennett (reasons and causes do overlap, and the difference is just ways of carving up a pattern).
More about causal explanations: just because someone has the intention of doing something, makes the relevant steps towards doing it, and does it, and it happens that what he had the intention of doing gets done, doesn’t mean he caused it necessarily: there is still some contingence left between the point where his contribution to the event stops, and the world’s functioning as it does begins (cf the famous example of the wild animals startled by a gunshot). The more specification goes into the description of the cause, the more the effect will appear necessary, but the less also the cause will appear sufficient, and vice versa.
Pretty good philosophy overall, some of the middle essays were not exactly gripping though; really love his style, agree with his criticisms of Strawson on concept dependence and Parsons on predicate places in action descriptions, but none of this really blew my socks off. Maybe it’s getting oldy
April 16, 2019
I think I agree with Davidson about a lot, although I'm less certain about other things (do causal statements really have to be nomological deductions?). My main problem with this book - and the reason for its low rating - was mostly the topics. I really don't care about philosophy of language, I don't care about the logical form of action sentences, I don't care about how we talk about events; I care about actions and I care about events. I don't mean to fault Davidson for this; he is a reasonably clear writer (given the age of the essays, at least) and seems to know his stuff. In fact, maybe I should care about what Davidson is talking about. But unfortunately I don't. I probably should have done more research about the topics discussed in this book, but there you go.
December 6, 2017
Reading Davidson for me is a mixed bag. On one hand him being a clear Quinean (indeterminacy of translation), is where I think I agree most with Davidson and then on the other hand his philosophy of mind and action just doesn’t click with me.
I will confess though, philosophy of action isn’t my favorite area of study in analytic philosophy, however philosophy of mind is. I guess this work shows it age because the reasoning behind his philosophy of mind (which is pretty good) obviously comes from an armchair philosopher perspective, which is to say no (to my knowledge) usage of data from the cognitive sciences.
I will confess though, philosophy of action isn’t my favorite area of study in analytic philosophy, however philosophy of mind is. I guess this work shows it age because the reasoning behind his philosophy of mind (which is pretty good) obviously comes from an armchair philosopher perspective, which is to say no (to my knowledge) usage of data from the cognitive sciences.
Shelved as 'to-keep-reference'
October 30, 2019... los actos humanos son racionalmente intencionales y explicables en términos de las creencias y los deseos del agente.
Sobre la Violencia Pág.103
Davidson es un monista anómalo (todos los presuntos sucesos mentales son sucesos físicos).
La mente Pág.102-103
Sobre la Violencia Pág.103
Davidson es un monista anómalo (todos los presuntos sucesos mentales son sucesos físicos).
La mente Pág.102-103
June 24, 2011
Donald Davidsons work probably consists many great thoughts, nevertheless I never managed to get to them. The main cause of this is his style of writing and how he develop his points. His thoughts and works are great for all who love to read analytic philosophy, but unfortunately, I don't.
Analytic philosophy irritates me for his 'overfixation' on logic and correct reasoning. Not that that is a bad thing, but by doing so, according to me, they lose grip on reality and the context of the subject. This is the main reason why I did not liked this work.
Analytic philosophy irritates me for his 'overfixation' on logic and correct reasoning. Not that that is a bad thing, but by doing so, according to me, they lose grip on reality and the context of the subject. This is the main reason why I did not liked this work.
August 11, 2023
It seems to me that the single central theme pervading all of Davidson’s work is that of interpretation. The cardinal question in philosophy of language is what it is to speak, to understand, and to be understood. For Davidson, this is all approached through the lens of interpretation, as witness his central claim that only an interpreter of another could have meaningful speech and thoughts of his own. Davidson defended, and worked out the consequences of, this tenet in various ways and forms through the rest of his career. It might seem that this project only begins in volume 2 of Davidson’s essays, but it is actually a central concern of the work in this volume as well.
Davidson’s concern with actions is to understand them in the context that is essential to them: decisions that can be understood in terms of reasons that agents have. This framework is what allows our actions to be interpretable by others, as well as by ourselves. The role of reasons in understanding actions is thus of crucial importance to getting any kind of philosophical theory about actions off the ground. Having given an elegant and plausible account of how it can be said that reasons cause actions, this idea is applied to akrasia, or weakness of the will. Here Davidson fills a gap that has been left wide open ever since Aristotle broached the issue: why don’t we always act on the reason we know is best (Aristotle’s own “solution” seems flatly inconsistent with his own syllogistic account of practical reasoning)? While the answer to this particular question is quite properly left a mystery, the question of how akrasia is even *possible* is answered very straightforwardly: sometimes a reason other than the one we know is best all things considered ends up being the reason that causes an action (see also “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” vol. 4). Davidson’s approach to this is also groundbreaking in that he seemed to be the first to realize that the issue of akrasia is not solely the province of moral philosophy, but of action theory more broadly; in choosing akratically, one does not necessarily morally err, but may just be foolish or merely inconsistent.
The subsequent essays that go on to locate and characterize agency and intention in this framework are full of careful analysis and good sense, yielding a fleshed-out theory that is both plausible and parsimonious. Also doing crucial work here is Davidson’s characteristic treatment of events and their individuation, which get their own explicit attention in the second section of the book. Davidson addresses the primary issue here by pressing his view of events as individuated by their causes and effects rather than by their descriptions. I see the latter notion as one of the worst ideas in the history of philosophy, so to me, it’s well-nigh impossible to overstate the importance of this material. There are more subtle distinctions at work here too, like that between describing and referring to an event (on which he cites Frank Ramsey’s “Facts and Propositions”).
For reasons to cause actions, they have to be physical, and so they have to be part of a physical mind. So, naturally, in “Mental Events,” all the foregoing is essentially put together. Davidson’s theory of anomalous monism is in some ways very straightforward and in many other, more treacherous ways, very easy to misunderstand and mischaracterize. Fully understanding any one of Davidson’s views also requires understanding and accounting for all his other views that interlock with it, so suffice it to say that if you haven’t taken on board his view of the individuation of events, you might end up making objections like “but then the mental aspect of mental events isn’t efficacious” (Kim, Sosa, and others). As Davidson later responded (see “Thinking Causes” and “Law and Cause” in vol. 5), since by his own lights events are causes independently of how they’re described, there can be no such thing as an event being causally efficacious “only as” a physical event and not “as” a mental event. Jaegwon Kim, for one, has made a career out of this simple refusal to understand anomalous monism, but however much it may have come in for criticism, I think Davidson’s position on this issue is exactly right.
And you might think at this point the issue of interpretation has been left behind, but that is not so, as in the follow-up essays “Psychology as Philosophy” and “The Material Mind,” Davidson explicitly portrays anomalous monism as underpinning the project of explaining what makes rational agents and their actions interpretable. And bearing anomalous monism in mind, one can retrospectively find it already baked into “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” right at the start. Davidson’s my favorite 20th century philosopher for the systematicity, uniqueness, and congeniality of his positions. His work rewards careful reading and re-reading.
Davidson’s concern with actions is to understand them in the context that is essential to them: decisions that can be understood in terms of reasons that agents have. This framework is what allows our actions to be interpretable by others, as well as by ourselves. The role of reasons in understanding actions is thus of crucial importance to getting any kind of philosophical theory about actions off the ground. Having given an elegant and plausible account of how it can be said that reasons cause actions, this idea is applied to akrasia, or weakness of the will. Here Davidson fills a gap that has been left wide open ever since Aristotle broached the issue: why don’t we always act on the reason we know is best (Aristotle’s own “solution” seems flatly inconsistent with his own syllogistic account of practical reasoning)? While the answer to this particular question is quite properly left a mystery, the question of how akrasia is even *possible* is answered very straightforwardly: sometimes a reason other than the one we know is best all things considered ends up being the reason that causes an action (see also “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” vol. 4). Davidson’s approach to this is also groundbreaking in that he seemed to be the first to realize that the issue of akrasia is not solely the province of moral philosophy, but of action theory more broadly; in choosing akratically, one does not necessarily morally err, but may just be foolish or merely inconsistent.
The subsequent essays that go on to locate and characterize agency and intention in this framework are full of careful analysis and good sense, yielding a fleshed-out theory that is both plausible and parsimonious. Also doing crucial work here is Davidson’s characteristic treatment of events and their individuation, which get their own explicit attention in the second section of the book. Davidson addresses the primary issue here by pressing his view of events as individuated by their causes and effects rather than by their descriptions. I see the latter notion as one of the worst ideas in the history of philosophy, so to me, it’s well-nigh impossible to overstate the importance of this material. There are more subtle distinctions at work here too, like that between describing and referring to an event (on which he cites Frank Ramsey’s “Facts and Propositions”).
For reasons to cause actions, they have to be physical, and so they have to be part of a physical mind. So, naturally, in “Mental Events,” all the foregoing is essentially put together. Davidson’s theory of anomalous monism is in some ways very straightforward and in many other, more treacherous ways, very easy to misunderstand and mischaracterize. Fully understanding any one of Davidson’s views also requires understanding and accounting for all his other views that interlock with it, so suffice it to say that if you haven’t taken on board his view of the individuation of events, you might end up making objections like “but then the mental aspect of mental events isn’t efficacious” (Kim, Sosa, and others). As Davidson later responded (see “Thinking Causes” and “Law and Cause” in vol. 5), since by his own lights events are causes independently of how they’re described, there can be no such thing as an event being causally efficacious “only as” a physical event and not “as” a mental event. Jaegwon Kim, for one, has made a career out of this simple refusal to understand anomalous monism, but however much it may have come in for criticism, I think Davidson’s position on this issue is exactly right.
And you might think at this point the issue of interpretation has been left behind, but that is not so, as in the follow-up essays “Psychology as Philosophy” and “The Material Mind,” Davidson explicitly portrays anomalous monism as underpinning the project of explaining what makes rational agents and their actions interpretable. And bearing anomalous monism in mind, one can retrospectively find it already baked into “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” right at the start. Davidson’s my favorite 20th century philosopher for the systematicity, uniqueness, and congeniality of his positions. His work rewards careful reading and re-reading.
July 15, 2008
been going through this book this summer and I have come to realize many things about davidson that i did not in the past, perhaps the most important is, the extant that he is a quinian, yet the more i come to know davidson the less i like his philosophy
March 14, 2009
Hard to argue against...
March 22, 2008
Importsnt work
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews