Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Davidson's philosophical project
- 2 Meaning and truth I
- 3 Meaning and truth II
- 4 Radical interpretation
- 5 Interpretation and meaning
- 6 Events and causes
- 7 Action theory and explanation in the social sciences
- 8 The matter of mind
- 9 Conclusion: scepticism and subjectivity
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Conclusion: scepticism and subjectivity
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Davidson's philosophical project
- 2 Meaning and truth I
- 3 Meaning and truth II
- 4 Radical interpretation
- 5 Interpretation and meaning
- 6 Events and causes
- 7 Action theory and explanation in the social sciences
- 8 The matter of mind
- 9 Conclusion: scepticism and subjectivity
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in 1973 and in subsequent writings, Davidson turns his attention to the “philosophical fallout from the approach to truth and interpretation” that he recommends and which we have been surveying over the course of the preceding chapters (Davidson 1984a: xviii). This fallout casts doubt on central threads of the weave that defines European philosophy since the seventeenth century.
The early modern philosophers are linked to one another and to their twentieth-century heirs by their efforts to answer the sceptic's challenge to validate the objectivity of human knowledge. Russell, for example, writes that Descartes
invented a method which may still be used with profit – the method of systematic doubt. … By inventing the method of doubt, and by showing subjective things are the most certain, Descartes performed a great service to philosophy, and one which makes him still useful to all students of philosophy.
(Russell 1912: 18)And Moritz Schlick, one of the founders of logical positivism in the early-twentieth century, observes that “all important attempts at establishing a theory of knowledge grow out of the problem concerning the certainty of human knowledge. … This problem in turn originates in the wish for absolute certainty” (Schlick 1959: 209). This “wish for absolute certainty” is heir to the Cartesian drive to meet the sceptical challenge.
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- Information
- Donald Davidson , pp. 175 - 196Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2004