Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson was an American philosopher whose work on action, mind, and language transformed analytic philosophy. His anomalous monism argued that mental events are physical but cannot be reduced to physical laws, and his principle of charity proposed that interpreting others requires assuming their beliefs are largely rational.

Davidson's essays — collected in Actions and Events and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation — had an influence disproportionate to their number. His argument against the scheme-content distinction in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme is one of the most discussed papers in late twentieth-century philosophy.