"Within contemporary philosophy, Spinoza’s position is very similar to Donald Davidson’s. Davidson also rejects at least certain kinds of explanatory connections between the mental and the physical and, like Spinoza, employs the lack of these connections as part of the basis for the identity between mental things and physical things. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between Spinoza and Davidson: Davidson rejects any strict science of the psychological. For Davidson, there are strict laws governing the physical, but no strict laws governing the psychological. Thus for Davidson, the psychological is special, not governed by the same kinds of principles at work throughout nature. This would be a violation of naturalism, according to Spinoza, and thus Spinoza would insist, contra Davidson, on a science of the mental that is every bit as strict and fundamental as the science of the physical, even though there are no explanatory connections between the mental and the physical."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Philosophers from the United StatesPeople from MassachusettsHarvard University alumniPrinceton University facultyStanford University faculty
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Michael Della Rocca, Spinoza (2008), Three: The Human Mind
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_(philosopher)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher, whose work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory.
9 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Donald Davidson (philosopher) →
Related Quotes
"The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a char…"
"In quotation not only does language turn on itself, but it does so word by word and expression by expression, and thi…"
"The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying parad…"
"I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and l…"
"I thought... that the fact that in characterizing truth for a language it is necessary to put words into relations wi…"
"There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know anot…"
"I cannot see that this view of radical interpretation possesses the relevance for historians that some of Davidson’s …"
"Donald Davidson has notoriously retorted that the resources of existing natural languages seem perfectly adequate for…"
"Americans have always been especially prone to regard all things as resulting from the free choice of a free will. Pr…"
"Democracy is clearly most appropriate for countries which enjoy an economic surplus and least appropriate for countri…"