Mouse Thoughts 
Jerry Fodor
- Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective by Donald Davidson
I do wish Donald Davidson would write a book. I mean, a proper book with a beginning, a middle and an end, in contrast to the collections of papers of which the present volume is an instance. My wishing so is not invidious. These bite-sized essays, each a mere fifteen or twenty pages long, often impress one as serious philosophical achievements even when they are read piecemeal, as they were written. But when they’re read together, one sees (what I, at least, hadn’t fully realised) that Davidson is a kind of bird that’s become rare almost to extinction: a systematic philosopher. That’s to say that he holds to a small number of very general principles the application of which, he claims, resolves a heterogeneous bushel of philosophical puzzles. The puzzles range from, for example, whether animals believe things (apparently they don’t), to whether the concept of the self is irreducible (apparently it is), to how many people it takes to think about a light bulb (apparently it takes two; see below). A lot of the fun of reading these papers is seeing how an exiguous collection of commitments plays out in so many different domains.
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Jerry Fodor is collaborating with Massimo Piattelli-Palamarini on a book about evolution without adaptation.
Other articles by this contributor:
Look! · Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
Let your brain alone · why the brain?
Neither Egypt, nor Italy, nor Broadway, nor Theatre · Jerry Fodor sees the Elton John and Tim Rice reworking of Aida
Who ate the salted peanuts? · Michael Frayn
Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings · The Case against Natural Selection
The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism · Pinker and Plotkin
A Science of Tuesdays · Jerry Fodor writes about the Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World by Hilary Putnam
Headaches have themselves · Panpsychism
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