There is a certain tradition in American philosophy that combines logical rigour and systematic thinking in a style so concise and self-contained as to offer little or no purchase to the critic. The tradition began with C.S. Peirce, found triumphant expression in Quine and Goodman, and lived again – just at the moment when everybody was beginning to think that it belonged to a vanished phase of American culture, alongside William Carlos Williams and Aaron Copland – in the philosophy of Quine’s most brilliant student, Donald Davidson.
When I began research in Cambridge in 1967, Davidson’s name was never mentioned in the philosophy department. But within a year or so graduate students in Oxford were hard at work on his seminal paper ‘Truth and Meaning’, applying its programmatic theory to all the old philosophical problems, with a view to recycling them as new. Daniel Dennett’s facetious Philosophical Lexicon defines ‘Davidsonic boom’ as ‘the sound made by a research programme when it hits Oxford’.
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