CFP: Graduate Conference: The Legacy of Donald Davidson

In 2017 it will be 100 years since the birth of Donald Davidson (1917-2003), one of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century. The graduate students in the Department of Philosophy at York University (Toronto) are organizing a graduate conference in celebration of his thoroughly systematic and deeply original work, whose influence on, and relevance for, current ways of addressing many philosophical questions, including questions about action, knowledge, language, mind, reasons, and so on, would be hard to overstate.

We invite submissions that engage with any of the wide variety of topics that Davidson himself was preoccupied with, which include (but are most certainly not limited to) the conception of reasons for actions as causes of actions, the connection between truth and meaning, the determination of meaning and its implications for the treatment of scepticism (both semantic and epistemic), anomalous monism, the interdependence between meaning and the contents of our beliefs and desires, the nature of the obstacles to the explanatory reduction of the intentional domain, the implications of Davidson’s work for issues in ethics and metaethics, and others. Finally, while Davidson is known to analytic philosophers primarily for the contributions to philosophy of action and language that he made in the early stages of his career, his later work, much of which revolves around what is known as ‘the triangulation argument’, is just as philosophically fecund. Submissions focused on Davidson’s notion of triangulation and the ways in which it can shed new light on old questions are especially welcome.

The conference will take place on the 27th and 28th of April, 2017 at York University (Toronto). Please submit contributions to [email protected]. The submissions should be in the form of extended abstracts (no more than 1000 words) and should be prepared for blind review.

The deadline for submissions is 15 January 2017.