Although Donald Davidson, one of America’s leading philosophers, had been born as long ago as 1917, his friends were stunned by his death, which was completely unexpected. He had been very fit, save for a routine operation on his knee: he was dedicated to keeping fit, and still took a good deal of physical exercise. He continued, as he had done for years, to travel across the world, giving lectures and attending conferences, for which he composed fresh new papers; he was expected this October at a conference in Vienna on the work of Frank Ramsey, a brilliant Cambridge philosopher whose contributions were very important to Davidson, and who died at the age of 27 in 1930. Probably Davidson’s friends expected him to reach 100, like the German philosopher Gadamer, whom he knew and admired.

Davidson studied as an undergraduate at Harvard; he majored in English for his first two years and then switched to philosophy. He attended a course and a seminar given by A. N. Whitehead, and was invited by him to his afternoon teas. He later decided that his encounter with Whitehead had set him back philosophically for years. He went on to become a graduate student, and made an acquaintanceship that was to prove far more fruitful, with W. V. Quine. From Quine he learnt some mathematical logic and, more importantly, a new attitude to philosophy. He had been interested in it as a part of the history of ideas; now he became imbued with a desire to attain the truth about philosophical questions. His friendship with Quine and respect for his philosophical views lasted the whole of his life. In several respects he could be regarded as a disciple of Quine’s; but his importance in the subject derives from ideas that were original to him.

Davidson’s graduate studies were interrupted by the war. He joined the Naval Reserve, and was demobilised in 1947. He was fortunate to obtain a post as an instructor at Queen’s College, New York, before he had completed his dissertation for Harvard (surely impossible nowadays). The chairman of the department was John Goheen, an old friend of his from Harvard. In 1950 Goheen went to Stanford, in northern California’s Bay Area, to become chairman of the department there. Invited to become an assistant professor at Stanford, Davidson followed him. McCarthyism was at its height, and he feared that his left-wing political views would prevent him from obtaining tenure at Queen’s; so he was glad to escape to California.

He was to remain at Stanford for 16 years, and although he later taught at other universities, it was at Stanford that he attained his full stature both as a teacher and as an original thinker. It was Stanford that made him.

He lectured on a great variety of philosophical subjects, and held classes for graduate students in his beautiful house high in the hills above the university, becoming the favourite teacher among graduate students in philosophy.

In his classes, to which visiting professors were often invited, he usually took some book to study week by week, often a book of essays by different hands. He displayed two excellent characteristics. If any of the graduate participants said something silly he would reinterpret it as an interesting and sensible remark, attributing the reinterpreted question or statement to the confused speaker. Secondly, he did not doggedly hang on to views he had expressed, but was very willing to yield to any telling objection that had been made.

He did not begin publishing on any considerable scale until much later in his career than most academics. Until then, his name was known only at Stanford and at nearby Berkeley; elsewhere, other philosophers had not heard of him. In 1957 and 1959 he collaborated with Patrick Suppes and others on work on decision theory; otherwise his name appeared mostly in footnotes to books by Quine saying: “I owe this point to Donald Davidson.” In the 1950s he contributed an essay to the “Library of Living Philosophers” volume on Carnap, which was not published until 1963 and then not much noticed. But in the 1960s he discovered something that made his name known. It surely was not how to write philosophical articles; more probably it was how to submit them to learned journals. It may have been an access of resolution: he had not previously felt the pressure, and perhaps not the confidence, to write for publication.

In 1965 he wrote “A Theory of Meaning for Learnable Languages”, and in 1967 the article that made him famous, “Truth and Meaning”. It was a great step forward to make his ideas accessible to the community of analytical philosophers at large. Unfortunately, it had one adverse effect. John Cook Wilson had refused to publish all his life, on the ground that if one did so one would be tempted to defend one’s published views instead of revising them in the light of further reflection. Davidson now became a fierce defender of views that he had published, and was sometimes angered by those who criticised them, in contrast to his earlier readiness to accept criticism. But he remained willing to modify his views in response to his own pondering of the philosophical issues.

His early publications in the philosophy of language encapsulated the original version, subsequently modified, of the idea that was to become central to his philosophy. The idea was dual. First, the way to answer the question “What is meaning?” is to determine the form that a theory of meaning for an arbitrary natural language must take. A theory of meaning need not itself employ the notion of meaning: rather, it displays those features possessed by the words and sentences of the language that constitute their having the meanings that they have.

Secondly, the way to arrive at a theory of meaning for a natural language is, first, to construct a Tarskian truth-definition for the statements of that language, and then to turn that definition on its head. Alfred Tarski attempted to define truth for the sentences of a formal language, taking their meanings as given. By turning on its head a definition of his type for the statements of a natural language, Davidson intended to take the notion of truth as given, and so give a theory — not a definition — of meaning for the Ianguage.

From this basis Davidson developed many arguments for theses to which he subscribed: for instance, the thesis that beliefs, and, more generally, thoughts, are possible only for those who have a language, and thus not for infants or for (non-human) animals. One can have a belief only if one has grasped the possibility that it may be mistaken: it is integral to beliefs that they may be right or wrong, true or false. But from where do we obtain the notion of a mistake? From language, Davidson argued: the notion of a mistake arises from the experience of a mismatch between the condition for the truth of a statement and its being taken to be true.

Towards the end of his career, various commentators claimed resemblances between Davidson’s thought and that of philosophers well outside the analytic tradition, such as Derrida and Heidegger. Perhaps the most characteristic tenet of analytic philosophy, as it has been traditionally practised, is that the best means of attaining a philosophical analysis of thoughts — their contents rather than the psychological process of grasping them — is to give a philosophical analysis of the linguistic means by which we express them. Davidson’s view was more radical than this. He believed that thought is not possible for beings who lack the linguistic means of expressing it.

To give a Tarskian truth-definition for a natural language, it is necessary to analyse the sentences of that language in such a manner as to render them amenable to such a definition — more exactly, to a definition of the Tarskian notion of satisfaction. It is notorious that natural language contains many devices that are hard to represent in the notation of first-order quantification theory that Tarski assumed for his formal languages. Davidson struggled with two of these.