DONALD DAVIDSON (1942-): Donald Davidson, one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, was born 6 March, 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He studied English, Comparative Literature and Classics in his undergraduate years at Harvard. In his sophomore year at Harvard, Davidson attended two classes that made a lasting impression on him. These two classes on philosophy were taught by Alfred North Whitehead in the last year of his career. Davidson was then accepted to graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, where his teacher was Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine set Davidson on a course in philosophy quite different from that of Whitehead. Subsequently, Davidson did his dissertation on Plato's Philebus. According to Davidson, "The central thesis that emerged was that when Plato had reworked the theory of ideas as a consequence of the explorations and criticisms of the Parmenides, Sophist, Theaetetus, and Politicus, he realized that the theory could no longer be deployed as a main support of an ethical position, as it had been developed in the Republic and elsewhere." Davidson's dissertation topic is mentioned only in passim in most encyclopedia entries. This is unfortunate, for one can see the development of Davidson's philosophical method in his dissertation. More important, one can trace Davidson's epistemological position back to Plato's. Davidson's most profound influences on contemporary philosophy stem from his philosophy of mind and action. However, Davidson's philosophical positions in action theory and philosophy of mind are intrinsically tied into his work on the semantics of natural languages. I will treat these in turn. Davidson's apprenticeship in philosophy took place in a very different intellectual milieu than that of today. The middle of the century was dominated, at least in the Anglo-American philosophical community, by Logical Positivism. Davidson recalls that he got through graduate school at Harvard by reading an anthology of Logical Positivism by Feigl and Sellars. Logical positivism emerged in the Austro-Hungarian empire early in this century. Influenced by the logicist project of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege on the one hand, and profound advances in science on the other, the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle turned to physics as a model of theoretical discourse and considered sensory experiences fundamental. Although Logical Positivism was not entirely a unified movement, one principle was more or less shared by major philosophers of that bent. This principle, known as the Verification Principle, states that the meaning of sentences can be accounted for in terms of experiences that would verify them. Logical Positivism also placed hopes in reductionism: the reduction of all special sciences to physics, and of all meaningful statements to reports about sensory experiences. In his famous paper, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Davidson's teacher Quine challenged two central tenets of logical positivism: reductionism and the analytic/synthetic distinction. Davidson has been greatly influenced by Logical Positivism, but self-admittedly took up Quine's project and continued to challenge certain basic precepts. In fact, in his own paper, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Davidson does away with what he considers the third and last dogma of empiricism: the dogma of the dualism of scheme and reality.