Causality in Davidson’s Treatment of Mind and Agency (Keynote speech at Workshop on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson)

Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck College, University of London, All Souls College, Oxford University)

Keynote speech at Workshop on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson

―The Third Taiwan Metaphysics Colloquium (TMC 2017)

Causality in Davidson’s Treatment of Mind and Agency

10 November (Friday) 09:10-10:40 a.m.

[Abstract]

Davidson’s treatments of human perception and human agency alike make use of an idea of causation understood as a relation between events. In the case of agency, Davidson supposes that an account must start from supposing that actions are events having a distinctive kind of causal explanation; this enables him to find a place for human agency in the event causal order. When it comes to perception, Davidson again relies upon thinking that a person’s perceiving an object to be a certain way is a matter of the operation of event causation. Now Davidson’s account of agency is contested by those who say that it suffers from the problem of “the disappearing agent”; and an account of perception along Davidson’s lines is not universally endorsed. My suggestion is going to be that in both cases objections to Davidson’s treatments might be seen to arise from his having a faulty view about wherein the causal character of the relevant concepts (sc. of action and of perception) reside.