Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and has just finished a year at Balliol College, Oxford. Oxford University Press has published two books of his: Essays on Actions and Events (1982) and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984). The article in this issue was given as an S.V. Keeling Memorial Lecture in Greek Philosophy at University College London last March. In the next issue Colin McGinn will write about Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events, a recent collection of critiques and rejoinders. Professor Davidson refers at one point to an important event in the world of scholarship: the publication of the first volume of a single-handed translation of Plato’s dialogues – the first such undertaking since Jowett. The Dialogues of Plato: Vol. I. (Yale University Press, 350 pp., £30, 0 300 03226 9) was published on 20 June. The single hand is that of R.E. Allen, Professor of Classics at Northwestern University. Allen’s commentaries are, according to Martha Nussbaum, ‘fine jobs of clear philosophical and historical explanation’, and his translations read beautifully. The dialogues translated in this inaugural volume are the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito, the Meno, the Gorgias and the Menexenus.