-
1672Foreword to the new edition Acknowledgements Introduction: radically interpreting Davidson I. From translation to interpretation 1. The Quinean background 1.1 Radical translation and naturalized epistemology 1.2 Meaning and indeterminacy 1.3 Analytical hypotheses and charity 2. The Davidsonian project 2.1 The development of a theory of meaning 2.2 The project of radical interpretation 2.3 From charity to triangulation..
-
291Death and philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 1998.Death and Philosophy presents a wide ranging and fascinating variety of different philosophical, aesthetic and literary perspectives on death. Death raises key questions such as whether life has meaning of life in the face of death, what the meaning of "life after death" might be and whether death is part of a narrative that can be retold in different ways, and considers the various types of death, such as brain death, that challenge mind-body dualism. The essays also include explorations of Chi…Read more
-
182Truth, Narrative, and the Materiality of Memory: An Externalist Approach in the Philosophy of HistoryJournal of the Philosophy of History 4 (3-4): 328-353. 2010.One of the most influential and significant developments in the philosophy of language over the last thirty years has been the rise of externalist conceptions of content. This essay aims to explore the implications of a form of externalism, largely derived from the work of Donald Davidson, for thinking about history, and in so doing to suggest one way in which contemporary philosophy of language may engage with contemporary philosophy of history. Much of the discussion focuses on the elaboration…Read more
-
165Gadamer was fond of telling of his last meeting with his old teacher Martin Heidegger: ‘You are right’, said Heidegger, ‘language is conversation [Sprache ist Gespräch].’1 We might argue as to what such a comment, assuming Gadamer remembered it aright, would really have meant for Heidegger – whether it would have constituted a significant revision of any view to which Heidegger was himself committed.2 The fact that Gadamer felt it worth repeating, however, does indicate something of Gadamer’s co…Read more
-
150Truth, Lies, and DeceitInternational Journal of Applied Philosophy 22 (1): 1-12. 2008.On the one hand, most of us would take honesty to be a key ethical virtue. Corporations and other organizations often include it in their codes of ethics, we legislate against various forms of dishonesty, we tend to be ashamed (or at least defensive) when we are caught not telling the truth, and honesty is often regarded as a key element in relationships. Yet on the other hand, dishonesty, that is, lying and deceit, seems to be commonplace in contemporary public life even amongst those leading f…Read more
-
140Constituting the mind: Kant, Davidson, and the unity of consciousnessInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (1): 1-30. 1999.Both Kant and Davidson view the existence of mental states, and so the possibility of mental content, as dependent on the obtaining of a certain unity among such states. And the unity at issue seems also to be tied, in the case of both thinkers, to a form of self-reflexivity. No appeal to self-reflexivity, however, can be adequate to explain the unity of consciousness that is necessary for the possibility of content- it merely shifts the focus of the question from the unity of consciousness in g…Read more
-
124Philosophy's NostalgiaIn Hagi Kenaan & Ilit Ferber (eds.), Philosophy's Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking, Springer. pp. 87--101. 2011.This chapter attempts to examine nostalgia as both a mood or disposition in general, and as a mood or disposition that is characteristic of philosophical reflection. Nostalgia is a combination of the Greek nostos, meaning home or the return home, with algos, meaning pain, so that its literal meaning is a pain associated with the return home. Part of this inquiry will involve a rethinking of the mood of nostalgia and what that mood encompasses. Rather than understand the nostalgic as characterize…Read more
-
117Place and Experience: A Philosophical TopographyCambridge University Press. 1999.While the 'sense of place' is a familiar theme in poetry and art, philosophers have generally given little or no attention to place and the human relation to place. In Place and Experience, Jeff Malpas seeks to remedy this by advancing an account of the nature and significance of place as a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity. Drawing on a range of sources from Proust and Wordsworth to Davidson, Strawson and Heidegger, he ar…Read more
-
103Holism, realism, and truth: how to be an anti‐relativist and not give up on heidegger – a debate with Christopher NorrisInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 12 (3). 2004.Responding to criticisms raised by Christopher Norris, this paper defends an anti-relativist reading of the work of both Davidson and Heidegger arguing that that there are important lessons to be learnt from their example - one can thus be an anti-relativist (as well as a certain sort of realist) without giving up on Davidson or on Heidegger.
-
103Self-knowledge and scepticismErkenntnis 40 (2): 165-184. 1994.Donald Davidson has argued that 'most of our beliefs must be true' and that global scepticism is therefore false. Davidson's arguments to this conclusion often seem to depend on externalist considerations. Davidson's position has been criticised, however, on the grounds that he does not defeat the sceptic, but rather already assumes the falsity of scepticism through his appeal to externalism. Indeed, it has been claimed that far from defeating the sceptic Davidson introduces an even more extreme…Read more
-
93Space and socialityInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (1). 1997.To what extent is our being as social creatures dependent on our having a grasp of sociality? Is a purely solipsistic space, a space that can be grasped without any grasp of the existence of others, possible? These questions are examined and the possible connection between space and sociality explored. The central claim is that there is indeed an intimate relation between the concept of space and the idea of the social: that any creature that has a grasp of the concept of space must also be a cr…Read more
-
92Donald Davidson and the mirror of meaning: holism, truth, interpretationCambridge University Press. 1992.J. E. Malpas discusses and develops the ideas of Donald Davidson, influential in contemporary thinking on the nature of understanding and meaning, and of truth and knowledge. He provides an account of Davidson's holistic and hermeneutical conception of linguistic interpretation, and, more generally, of the mind. Outlining its Quinean origins and the elements basic to Davidson's Radical Interpretation, J. E. Malpas' book goes on to elaborate this holism and to examine the indeterminacy of interpr…Read more
-
90Ontological Relativity in Quine and DavidsonGrazer Philosophische Studien 36 (1): 157-178. 1989.According to Quine the inscrutability of reference leads to ontological relativity, or, as Donald Davidson calls it, relativity of reference. Davidson accepts both inscrutability and the indeterminacy of translation which it grounds, but rejects any explicit relativity of reference or ontology. The reasons behind this rejection are set out and explained. Explicit relativization is shown to be at odds with indeterminacy. Some notion of the relativity of reference (or, more generally, interpretati…Read more
-
74The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies (edited book)MIT Press. 2011.Interdisciplinary perspectives on landscape, from the philosophical to the geographical, with an emphasis on the overarching concept of place.
-
71From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental (edited book)Routledge. 2002.Recent philosophy has seen the idea of the transcendental, first introduced in its modern form in the work of Kant, take on a new prominence. Bringing together an international range of younger philosophers and established thinkers, this volume opens up the idea of the transcendental, examining it not merely as a mode of argument, but as naming a particular problematic and a philosophical style. With contributions engaging with both analytic and continental approaches, this book will be of essen…Read more
-
70Martin HeideggerIn Robert C. Solomon & David Sherman (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: Heidegger's Life Philosophical Development The Question of Being The Meaning of Being: Being and Time Truth and Place: The Later Writings Nazism and the University: Heidegger's Politics.
-
66Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, WorldBradford. 2006.This groundbreaking inquiry into the centrality of place in Martin Heidegger's thinking offers not only an illuminating reading of Heidegger's thought but a detailed investigation into the way in which the concept of place relates to core philosophical issues. In Heidegger's Topology, Jeff Malpas argues that an engagement with place, explicit in Heidegger's later work, informs Heidegger's thought as a whole. What guides Heidegger's thinking, Malpas writes, is a conception of philosophy's startin…Read more
-
65Heidegger, geography, and politicsJournal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2): 185-213. 2008.It is often argued that there is a connection between certain forms of environmental or place-oriented thinking and conservative or reactionary politics. Frequently, the philosopher Martin Heidegger is taken to exemplify this connection through his own involvement with Nazism. In this essay, I explore the relations between Heidegger's thought and that of certain other key thinkers, principally the ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, and the geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Paul Vidal de la Blache, as …Read more
-
64The life of Gautama, who came to be known as the Buddha, the Enlightened One, is famously said to have been irrevocably changed by his experience of three things: poverty, old age, and death – it was this experience that started him on the road to enlightenment. There is no doubt that the encounter with death can be a life-changing experience, perhaps more so than either poverty or old-age, and not only because death may be construed as an especially powerful emblem of human suffering. Quite asi…Read more
-
63Shanks, King-Farlow, and the Refutation of DavidsonIdealistic Studies 18 (1): 20-31. 1988.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 phenomenalis…Read more
-
59Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus (edited book)MIT Press. 2000.For more than a quarter of a century, Hubert L. Dreyfus has been the leading voice in American philosophy for the continuing relevance of phenomenology, particularly as developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus has influenced a generation of students and a wide range of colleagues, and these volumes are an excellent representation of the extent and depth of that influence.In keeping with Dreyfus's openness to others' ideas, many of the essays in this volum…Read more
-
59Ted Relph’s review of Heidegger’s Topology acknowledges the importance of Heidegger’s thought in the contemporary turn to place within the Humanities and Social Sciences, just as it acknowledges the importance of the philosophical inquiry into place as such (Relph is also particularly generous in his estimation of the role of my work, in Heidegger’s Topology and elsewhere, in contributing to this). Moreover, Relph provides a strikingly apt and vivid image of the way the concept of ‘place’ has, i…Read more
-
58The commonplace image of Heidegger is of a philosopher firmly rooted, not in the city of Freiburg in which much of his life was spent, but in the Alemannic-Schwabian countryside around the village of Messkirch in which he was born. It would seem that the distance between Heidegger and Benjamin, between Messkirch and Berlin or Paris could not be greater. But to what extent are Heidegger's own personal predilections for the provincial and the bauerlich actually tied to the philosophical positions …Read more
-
58The nature of interpretative charityDialectica 42 (1): 17-36. 1988.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 consi…Read more
-
56On not giving up the world - Davidson and the grounds of beliefInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (2). 2008.What is the relation between our beliefs, or thoughts in general, and the perceptual experience of the world that gives rise to those beliefs? Donald Davidson is usually taken to have a well-known answer to this question that runs as follows: while our beliefs are, at least in part, caused by our experience, such experience does not thereby count as providing a rational ground for those beliefs; our beliefs are thus evidentially grounded in other beliefs, but not in the experience that gives ris…Read more
-
56Transcendental Heidegger (edited book)Stanford University Press. 2007.The thirteen essays in this volume represent the most sustained investigation, in any language, of the connections between Heidegger's thought and the tradition of transcendental philosophy inaugurated by Kant. This collection examines Heidegger's stand on central themes of transcendental philosophy: subjectivity, judgment, intentionality, truth, practice, and idealism. Several essays in the volume also explore hitherto hidden connections between Heidegger's later "post-metaphysical" thinking—wh…Read more
-
University of TasmaniaPhilosophy & Gender Studies