Jeff Malpas

SummaryDonald Davidson's account of the interrelation between attitudes, and linguistic and non‐linguistic behaviour is a thoroughly holistic one. The project of radical interpretation itself embodies a holistic approach to the interpretative task. Yet Davidson also accepts a degree of indeterminacy in interpretation. Davidson's commitment to both holism and indeterminacy can give rise to a problem in the Davidsonian position. That problem is explained and a solution proposed. The indeterminacy thesis is thereby clarified, as is the nature of Davidsonian holism

Although often taken to lie at the very heart of philosophical inquiry, metaphysics has, at least since the time of Hume and Kant, frequently been surrounded by uncertainty and doubt as to its nature, possibility, and significance. The dominance of idealist philosophy in the late nineteenth century, and the reaction against it in the early twentieth, was often seen in terms of the dominance and subsequent decline of metaphysical styles of thought. Indeed, during the first half of the twentieth century “metaphysics” seemed to have become, in many quarters, an almost entirely pejorative term. Yet if the first half of the century was, within the English-speaking world, largely antimetaphysical, the second half of the century, and especially the last thirty years or so, has been much more favorable to metaphysical thinking. This has been partly a result of the increasing importance of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind within contemporary philosophical thinking; it has also been a consequence of new developments in logic, especially modal logic; and it has been given additional impetus by the resurgence of interest in past philosophers, and so also in the metaphysical systems that they developed—Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Locke, and Reid have all seen something of a renaissance over recent years and so has their metaphysics. Within contemporary English-speaking, “analytical” philosophy, then, metaphysics would seem to be alive and well.

The publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks has provoked a storm of controversy. Much of this has centred on the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic comments the volumes contain. But these aspects of the Notebooks are perhaps the least surprising and important. This essay offers a summary overview of the issues to which the Notebooks give rise, at the same time as it also aims to provide a preliminary assessment of their overall significance, especially in relation to what they show about the nature and development of Heidegger's thinking from the early 1930s to the late 1940s.

In this paper we discuss Heidegger’s conception of philosophy in the Black Notebooks. In particular, we set out a reading of the Notebooks from the 1930s and early 1940s as exhibiting an extremist view of philosophy, and its concern with being, which accords it an absolute and exclusive priority above and beyond everything else. We argue that such overcompensation for philosophy’s declining fortune involves a willful turning away from the realities of human life, and from the multifarious symbolic and functional worlds in which the meaning of being is articulated, refracted, and lived by individuals. In contrast, we suggest that Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses already contain the basis for a critique of such an inflated notion of philosophy, and that the shift in Heidegger’s thinking in the late 1940s—away from an onto-historical and towards a topological understanding—is a consequence of Heidegger’s own reaction against the extremity of his thinking, and a turning back to the properly human dimensions of thinking and the matters that call for thinking.

SummaryDonald Davidson's account of the interrelation between attitudes, and linguistic and non‐linguistic behaviour is a thoroughly holistic one. The project of radical interpretation itself embodies a holistic approach to the interpretative task. Yet Davidson also accepts a degree of indeterminacy in interpretation. Davidson's commitment to both holism and indeterminacy can give rise to a problem in the Davidsonian position. That problem is explained and a solution proposed. The indeterminacy thesis is thereby clarified, as is the nature of Davidsonian holism.

SummaryIn Davidson's Theory of radical interpretation the principle of charity plays a crucial role. However the principle is the subject of widespread misunderstanding. The author attempts to provide an overall account of the principle and in doing so details some aspects of the holism which characterises the Davidsonian approach to interpretation. Charity is shown as inseparable from that holism. Two aspects of the principle are distinguished and some objections to the principle are also considered.

In a recent number of this journal there appeared an article by Niall Shanks and John King-Farlow on the theory of radical interpretation as developed by Donald Davidson. In that paper Davidson was presented as an opponent of “metaphysical openness in general [and] … idealism in particular” and as a philosopher who has “sought to silence all philosophically challenging talk both about the ordinary speaker’s systematic errors and about the claims of revisionary metaphysicians such as phenomenalists or absolute idealists.” I suspect that Davidson would be somewhat surprised by this description of himself. He might also wonder just what it means to be an “opponent of metaphysical openness in general.” Like any other philosopher, Davidson has his own views on matters philosophical; and, like other philosophers, he criticizes what he sees as false or mistaken in the views of others. One cannot help but suspect that what Davidson’s opposition to “metaphysical openness” really comes down to is his criticism of views associated with idealism.

A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 2 addresses issues in the philosophy of action and moral theory. With papers on Kant, von Wright, Sellars, and Chisholm, this volume also covers a range of questions in applied ethics—from the morality of Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ethical questions in medicine and law

A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 1 includes essays on Spinoza, Descartes, Bradley, Collingwood, Russell, Moore, and Popper, as well as two previously unpublished papers on the history of philosophy as a discipline, and on Ryle and Wittgenstein's nature of philosophy. Linked by Donagan's commitment to the central importance of history for philosophy and his interest in problems of historical understanding, these essays represent the remarkable scope of Donagan's thought