Essays on Actions and Events [Paperback]

Donald Davidson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 1980

This collection brings together a series of connected essays on the nature of human action. Davidson argues for an ontology that includes events along with persons and other objects. Topics discussed include 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is one of the most impressive works of analytical philosophy to appear in a good many years."--P.F. Strawson, Times Literary Supplement

"[A] solid collection of important papers."--John Heil, Virginia Commonwealth University

About the Author

Donald Davidson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Donald Davidson is Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard, completing his Ph.D. in classical philosophy after serving in the US Navy from 1942 to 1945. Before coming to Berkeley in 1981, he was Professor at Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller, and the University of Chicago. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Underlining edition (October 2, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198246374
• ISBN-13: 978-0198246374
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #841,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Defeat of behaviorism and an embrace of free will, August 22, 2000

By 

Amol Sarva "Philosopher" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essays on Actions and Events (Paperback)

As a guy who wrote no books, Davidson's two published collections have done the work of securing his legacy. In this volume, among other things, we have the papers that argue for two of his most important theses in philosophy of mind. (1) The behaviorists argued that every state of mind was at best a disposition to some behavior, as in Gilbert Ryle's _The Concept of Mind_. Davidson, in "Actions, Reasons, Causes" and a couple of other papers in this volume, laid bare one of the essential arguments that put down this view for good. We often have many reasons or other mental states upon which we do not act. But such beliefs or desires are still reasons, and still mental states--just ones that behaviorism can't account for. (2) Davidson argues for the oft-maligned but influential thesis of anomalous monism, as a strategy to resolve the worries arising from "materialism of the mental". If the mind is mere matter, then physics will eventually figure out its laws! Then where will our free will be? Davidson argues, relying on some tendentious claims about what a law is, that there can never be laws of the mental *even though* there are laws of the physical stuff. The mental is anomalous and not lawlike.

Anyway, this volume is a very important piece of recent philosophy of mind. It also sets into motion an important tradition of thinking about moral psychology, action theory and ethics from the perspective of reasons for agential action.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Average rating - some papers 4-5 stars; some less, July 5, 2001

By 

Keith Douglas (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essays on Actions and Events (Paperback)

This is the standard collection of Davidson's early writings on events, action, and some of his work on the philosophy of mind and psychology. Some of the papers are very good ("The Logical Form of Action Sentences" is rightly regarded as a classic) whereas some other papers (e.g. "Mental Events") are obscure and confused. The latter suffers from (apparently) a lack of contact with how psychology (and in particular, cognitive neuroscience) is practiced. I nevertheless recommend the volume as a good collection of papers by one of the 20th century's more influential philosophers. I should note in passing that Davidson's current views on the individuation of events are not discussed in any of the papers. For that, see _Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosphy of Donald Davidson_ and his article "Reply to Quine on Events" therein.