Davidson’s Analytic Hermeneutics: From Theory of Meaning to Topology of Understanding | Series of Lectures

Dr Jeff Malpas is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Tasmania, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University, an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and a Distinguished Fellow and Vice-President of the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows.

Dr. Malpas, in these series of three lectures will provide an overview of and introduction to Davidson’s thinking from the early work on action to the last writings on truth and prediction. The account is based on Dr. Malpas’ reading of Davidson’s work – a reading strongly influenced by personal relationship with Davidson and Dr. Malpas’ work on place. As a result, the idea that underpins these lectures is of Davidson’s philosophy as essentially hermeneutic-topological– even though that designation is not one that Davidson himself employed.

Lecture 1

The first lecture covers Davidson’s early work (and its background), up until the 1980s, in the philosophy of action, mind, and language (roughly the material in the first two seminal volumes of collected essays).

Lecture 2

The second lecture deals with the developments in Davidson’s thinking from the 1980s until his untimely death in 2003, focusing on language, meaning and understanding issues.

Lecture 3

The final lecture looks at Davidson in more explicitly comparative fashion with an eye, especially, to his connections with Gadamer and other contemporary thinkers, and the elements of convergence that can be found between Davidson’s thinking and that of Martin Heidegger. Dr. Malpas argues that both Davidson and Heidegger can be seen as thinkers for whom the idea of place plays a central role.