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It’s 40 years since the famous Davidson conference at Rutgers

Brian Leiter

You can see the remarkable program for the event organized by Ernie LePore here:  Davidson, Quine, Putnam, Kripke, Kim, Higginbotham, Dummett, Hacking, Antony, Tennant, McGinn, Bennett, Follesdal, Tye, Jackson, Chisholm, Harman, Johnston, Elster, Tversky, Bratman, Jeffrey, Grandy, Levi, Rovane, Bilgrami, Peacocke, A. Baier, Schiffer, Sosa, Lycan, McDowell, van Fraassen and many others.  The resulting two volumes of papers from the conference were essential books for those of us doing PhD work in the late 1980s, which was peak Davidson time in analytic philosophy.   (Davidson is less influential now, it seems to me, except perhaps in philosophy of action where the "Davidsonian" paradigm remains highly influential.) About five years after this conference, Rutgers catapulted into the top ranks of Anglophone philosophy programs with the appointments of Jerry Fodor and Stephen Stich. 

Comments are open for recollections of the event, or reflections on how Davidson's ideas have fared over time.

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6 responses to “It’s 40 years since the famous Davidson conference at Rutgers”

  1. James C. Klagge

    I did my UG honors thesis on Davidson's Logical Form of Action Sentences in 1976. Gil Harman's account of Davidson's work during the Rockefeller years is posted here: http://jamesklagge.net/downloads/pdf/Donald%20Davidson-Harman.pdf with permission of Liz Harman.

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  2. Robert McGarvey

    Ernie Lepore's 2013 piece on the event in the New York Times is a wonderful recounting https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/a-great-day-for-philosophy/

    Scroll to the bottom and there's a photo of the attendees

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  3. Steve Gerrard

    My first year of grad school at the University of Chicago (1980-81) I took two course with Davidson: the philosophy of language and the philosophy of action. I still use those notes. In his articles I thought Davidson shared a quality with Quine: they were such clever writers that sometimes an argument was condensed into a metaphor. In class, however, if you asked him what he meant by a phrase he would actually answer! He was a great teacher.

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  4. Ernie Lepore

    A couple of noteworthy facts about that program: One of the aims of the conference was to put together senior established figures with signifcantly. younger philosophers; so, e.g., BL mentions among the luminaries at the conference Antony, Rovane,nTye, Johnston, and Bilgrami. But BL knows that these philosophers were at the beginning of their careers in 1984. Peacock and McGinn were also early in their careers but already established as important figures in the profession. Then there were the undergrads, e.g, in the front on the far left of the photo (https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-ernest-lepore/the_davidson_conference/) is Robin Jeshion, who was a sophomore at RU at the time. It was also significant how many non-philosophers were on the program, including George Miller, Amos Tversky, Emmon Bach, James McCawley, Barbara Hall Partee, Piatelli-Palmarini, and Lukes and Elster.

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  5. Brad

    Davidson's philosophy figurely importantly at the University of Western Ontario in the 1990s, when I was a graduate student. We had a "metaphysics and epistemology" comprehensive examination – the Western programme was very much a product of the Logical Positivists, so traditional metaphysics had no place. What that meant was an exam with three sections: epistemology, mind, and language. And Davidson figured inmportantly on the last two sections – that was all we meant by "metaphysics" at Western. Nothing on the M&E examine pre-dated Frege. In fact, my first APA presentation was a paper on Davidson. My own research is now so focused on philosophy of science that I have not even glanced at Davidson for a long time.

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  6. Keith Douglas

    I wrote an MA thesis on a somewhat idiosyncratic updating of Davidson's metaphysics of events at UBC in 2001 under Gary Wedeking. One needs (in my view; the thesis defends this) a drop of Kim's to make Davidson's view compatible with special relativity. I wanted at the time to eventually do a general relativity sequel, but have long since left the profession. (And the problem it solved for me is still open but does not need the GR extensions in my view.)

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