Donald Davidson (1917-2003) is one of the most influential philosophers in the second half of the 20th century. His main contribution can be found in philosophy of Language (esp. Theory of Meaning), philosophy of mind (esp. Theory of Action), metaphysics (esp. the relation between language and the world), and epistemology (esp. the epistemic aspect of the concept of truth), and some other related fields. Surprisingly, he did not publish any single monograph, apart from his Ph.D. dissertation—‘ Plato's Philebus’, and ‘Truth and Predication’ (2005, posthumously). His philosophical thought can be found in five collections of essays. Interestingly, each essay appears to be individually developed and seems to be fascinating and invaluable on its very own. It is striking that when and only when they are drawn together there emerges a compelling whole picture of man as a rational animal (presumably the only rational animal in this world). According to Davidson, the thoughts of human being should never be reducible to the material. Nonetheless, thoughts are components of the reality. Moreover, he classifies our knowledge into three distinct categories, including knowledge of our own mind, knowledge of the minds of others, and knowledge of the external world. And having knowledge of these categories are so fundamental to the nature of human being as the power of thought and speech itself.

Davidson's philosophical program can be roughly 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 this course will focus on Davidson's investigation of reasons, causes, and intentions, which revolutionized the philosophy of action. This leads to his notable doctrine of anomalous monism, the view that all mental events are physical events, but that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical. The second part of this course focuses on his philosophy of language. We shall study several famous essays in which Davidson set out his highly original and influential truth-conditional program of meaning theory and the role the very concept of truth plays in the theory of meaning and the philosophy of language in general.