bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: O'Leary Brendan
Published: October 2003

Brendan O’Leary identifies the main goal of the volume, which is to investigate the causes and consequences of the politics of moving borders. He defines ‘right‐sizing’ as the preferences of political agents at the centre of existing regimes to have what they regard as appropriate external and internal territorial borders. The author then offers an eight‐part definition of a modern state and the resulting typical crises of statehood. He argues that any theory of right‐sizing the state must address two interrelated questions: What factors, from the perspective of central government elites, govern the right‐sizing of state's domestic and external territorial shape? And which factors govern the right size of the state's despotic (coercive) and infrastructural (policy‐making, extractive, allocative, and distributive) powers?
The Elements of Right‐Sizing and Right‐Peopling the State
Authors: O'Leary Brendan
Published: October 2003

Brandan O’Leary sets up a framework for a broad theory of right‐sizing the state. He addresses the distinctiveness of modern state borders, the centrality of nationality and ethnicity that makes public officials concerned with ‘right‐peopling’ their states, and territorial expansion, maintenance and contraction, which oblige public officials to consider ‘right‐sizing’. His theory builds on Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism and Ian Lustick's theory of state expansion and contraction. The author also classifies different strategies of eliminating and managing ethnic differences and existing borders.
Resizing and Reshaping the State: India from Partition to the Present
Authors: Singh Gurharpal
Published: October 2003

Gurharpal Singh traces the institutional dependence of the Indian state on conceptions of itself and its original borders as sacrosanct. But, the author argues that the state is, in reality, reshaped as a result of demands from linguistic and other groups of the dominant North Central Hindu/Indian populations, while demands from the periphery are ignored. The chapter examines how political elites deliberately entrenched the hegemonic beliefs about the state size after the partition, the centre's response to the challenges faced by Kashmir and Punjab to these beliefs, and various coalitions in favour and against reshaping of the Indian state.
The Negotiable State: Borders and Power‐Struggles in Pakistan
Authors: Nasr Vali
Published: October 2003

Vali Nasr examines the political dynamics behind the crucial 1969–71 negotiations on the shape of Pakistan's territory. The author examines how power‐elite interests and their perception of the malleability of state borders influenced the pattern of state formation and policy‐making. The author argues that the tension that is inherent in the ideological posture of state leaders and their pragmatic political practices has provided both opportunities to manage challenges to borders, as in Sind, and to loss of territory, as in East Pakistan.
Reifying Boundaries, Fetishizing the Nation: Soviet Legacies and Élite Legitimacy in the Post‐Soviet States
Authors: Motyl Alexander J.
Published: October 2003

Alexander Motyl argues that Russian elites—incapable of glorifying the post‐imperial state they shattered or the Soviet ideology they never fully embraced—sought legitimacy by fetishizing the Russian nation. In the rest of the former Soviet Union, non‐Russian elites adopted a cult of statehood and consequently eliminated state downsizing from the menu of political action. The vicious circle that results is one of Russian insistence on state up‐sizing to incorporate Russians living in the neighbouring ‘near abroad’ and non‐Russian elites’ refusal to downsize. The author concludes that the vicious circle leads on both sides to mistrust, build‐up of unitary vertical state rule, obstacles to democratization, and possible violent conflict.
Turkey's Kurdish Problem: Borders, Identity, and Hegemony
Authors: Cizre Ümit
Published: October 2003

Ümit Cizre rethinks the connections between the metaphor of boundaries as containers of democracy and the evolution of Turkish and Kurdish identities since the founding of the modern Turkey in 1919–23. The author identifies the dual nature of Turkish nationality: equal citizenship without regard to ethnicity and ethnic singularity of Turkishness. Cizre then examines Kurdish contestation of this hegemonic discourse of nationality and its link to the state's territory. The author also places the chapter's conclusions in the context of the arrest and trial of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).
Indigestible Lands? Comparing the Fates of Western Sahara and East Timor
Authors: Zunes Stephen
Published: October 2003

Stephen Zunes compares and contrasts territorial disputes and forces that have attempted to influence outcome of Indonesian occupation of East Timor and Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. The author concludes that the institutionalization of expanded borders led to resistance to state downsizing, and that opportunities for withdrawal from the occupied territory emerged in Indonesia only with the fall of the Sukharto regime and subsequent democratization. The author also shows how great power politics of the Cold War enabled the occupations, and the post‐Cold War international community was an obstacle to the full integration of the territories into the two states.
‘Right‐Sizing’ Or ‘Right‐Shaping’? Politics, Ethnicity, and Territory in Plural States
Authors: Yiftachel Oren
Published: October 2003

Oren Yiftachel argues that consociational patterns of authority among elites, the restricted state authority, and the internal boundaries for rival communal groups open up a possibility of maintaining state borders intact with high levels of democratic stability. The author focuses on three bi‐ethnic states: Lebanon from 1943 to 1985, Cyprus from 1960 to 1974, and Belgium from 1963 to 1993. Theoretically, the author brings together discussion of public policy towards ethnic groups —particularly accommodation and consociation—and the role of ethnic geographies that highlight special factors of state integrity and cohesion.
The United States and the European Union: Models for Their Epochs
Authors: Elazar Daniel J.
Published: October 2003

Draws a contrast between the American and European experiences of union, the one built upon an indigenous American ideology, which may be properly termed federal democracy, and the other in which federation was too great a step for post‐World War II Europe. The problem is that of integrating the federal vision with the modern conception of state sovereignty, and this has given rise to two systems that are roughly intended to serve the same purpose (the joining together of identifiable polities in a common enterprise within an embracing authoritative framework), although the nature of their respective unions is different: one federal and the other confederal. Addresses the manner in which these two systems became models by looking first at the theoretical history of the competition between statism and federalism in the modern and postmodern epochs (the latter of which is only beginning to take form). In the following sections, it goes on to look at the rejection of federalism in Europe, the EU as a confederation, subsidiarity as federal or hierarchical, the EU's Catholic cultural origins, the spread of confederal arrangements in the new European model, federalism and confederalism as forms of democratic government, and the current challenge for Europe.
Blueprints for Change: Devolution and Subsidiarity in the United States and the European Union
Authors: Lazer David , Mayer‐Schoenberger Viktor
Published: October 2003

Examines the most recent attempts in both the USA and the EU to respond to attacks on the legitimacy of ‘federal’ governance by building into the legislative or regulatory processes a federalism or subsidiarity criterion. The authors show that such criteria, when formulated as guidance on ‘where’ policy should be made, have been largely ineffective and inoperable; ‘federalism’ criteria have been subsumed and assumed away under either purely political decisions over the scope of devolution or broader cost‐benefit analysis in the USA, and the EU has not abandoned significant policies under its ‘subsidiarity review’. In contrast, there has been increased use of ‘how’ criteria, which increase accountability of central decision‐making by requiring a publicized process of justification for the policies. ‘Procedural subsidiarity’ is a concept relevant to governance on both sides, as they each have come to focus on how to provide more discretion to lower levels of governance in implementing or administering federal policies—although that has been achieved in very different ways in the USA and the EU. In short, the authors make the case that new sources of legitimate governance are not mainly to be found in the recent subsidiarity and devolution pledges appended to the USA and EU covenants.
Federalism in the European Union: Rhetoric and Reality
Authors: Moravcsik Andrew
Published: October 2003

Moravcsik attacks the view, shared by Euro‐enthusiasts and Euro‐sceptics alike, that current developments in the EU herald the advent of a European federal state; according to Moravcsik, the EU lacks and is likely to continue to lack the fundamental competences that would make it federal. To make this point, Moravcsik emphasizes what the EU does not do and is unlikely to take on in the foreseeable future, spelling out how the ‘EU plays almost no role—at most a weak sort of international coordination—in most of the issue‐areas about which European voters care most, such as taxation, social welfare provision, defence, high foreign policy, policing, education, cultural policy, human rights, and small business policy’. Moravcsik finds this not surprising, since the EU's built‐in ‘constitutional constraints’, from fiscal to legislative and regulatory powers, create a strong bias towards the status quo. His normative conclusion that the ‘existing hybrid status quo is sufficiently efficient and adequately legitimate to resist any fundamental institutional reform’ seems to echo Weiler's conclusion in Ch. 2 that the EU ‘ain’t broke, so don’t fix it’, although the two authors get to this position from opposite premises: Weiler thinks that today's EU founded on constitutional tolerance—bowing to the majority without being one people—is an amazingly ambitious project, while Moravcsik celebrates the EU's character as ‘a second‐best constitutional compromise designed to cope pragmatically with concrete problems’. The three sections of the chapter: (1) describe the existing confederal structure of EU institutions, focussing on the substantive narrowness and institutional weakness of its mandate; (2) examine the causes of this narrow and weak institutional mandate in the European constitutional settlement; and (3) assess the normative consequences for the democratic legitimacy of the EU state structure.
Comparative Federalism and the Issue of Commandeering
Authors: Halberstam Daniel
Published: October 2003

Examines the difference between the European and American perceptions of the effects and desirability of commandeering (the issue of binding commands by central government that force its component states to take regulatory action with respect to private parties) as a mechanism of central–component system interaction. Whereas the USA constitutional jurisprudence prohibits commandeering, the founding charters of the European Union and Germany permit such action. In successive sections, the chapter explores the relevant political and institutional background against which commandeering takes place in the USA, the EU, and Germany. It discusses (1) commandeering in international law and the apparent paradox in American views; (2) the formal supremacy of central law within component legal systems; (3) the ‘viscosity’ of the central legal system, i.e., the intensity of the obligation to adhere to the central legal system's norms; (4) the specificity of commands issued by central to component units of government (the directive as a limited tool of commandeering); (5) the corporate representation of component state systems within the law‐making bodies of central systems; and (6) the relative completeness and effectiveness of the levels of governance and the prominent alternatives to commandeering in each system, with specific reference to central government dependence (or not) on component state resources.
Federal Governance in the United States and the European Union: A Policy Network Perspective
Authors: Peterson John , O'Toole Laurence J.
Published: October 2003

The authors start by pointing out that as institutional forms for the governance of polities on a massive scale in the USA and the EU, networks face serious and potentially disabling challenges in terms of legitimacy. Network forms of governance tend to advantage experts or sophisticated actors who are familiar with all levels of government in federal systems, as opposed to ordinary citizens. To ignore the normative questions about input legitimacy to which network governance gives rise to risks weakening the democratic foundations of the federalist contracts that bind together levels of governance, public, quasi‐public, and private actors, and states and citizens in Europe and America. The argument is presented in four sections: first, an explanation is given of why network forms of governance have proliferated and the legitimacy issues that arise are considered, yielding a set of assessment criteria to be applied in framing analyses of legitimacy in different, real‐world political systems; second, an examination is made of networks in the EU; third, an assessment is offered of network structures in American governance; last, network structures in the two polities are compared and contrasted, highlighting both critical issues and network features with implications for legitimacy, as well as ways in which the democratic deficit that plagues network forms of governance might be closed.
Beyond Devolution: From Subsidiarily to Mutuality
Authors: Landy Marc , Teles Steven M.
Published: October 2003

In this chapter, Landy and Teles take a strong normative stance in favour of decentralization. They echo a point made on economic grounds by Scharpf in Ch. 13, namely, that the role at the federal level should be to allow states to function better as a democracy; this they call ‘the principle of mutuality’. Accordingly, ‘It should be the obligation of each level of government as it participates in joint decision‐making to foster the legitimacy and capacity of the other. Local government contributes to central government by taking the brunt of the burden of citizen‐demands and of providing a coherent and properly constrained voice for citizen grievances. To do so adequately, it must be both responsive and capable. Central government has the responsibility to facilitate and encourage the ability of lower‐level governments to act as sites for deliberation and administration’. This leads Landy and Teles to stress the ways in which European Union powers need to be increased precisely and only to the extent to which this facilitative role is called for. In the end, they can see only classic indirect accountability as the way of enhancing the democratic legitimacy of the EU: ‘The EU needs democratic legitimacy, but that legitimacy should derive from its ability to protect the possibility for democratic government in its Member States, not from the largely fruitless mission of democratizing itself’.
Explaining Eliminativism
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: October 2003

Folk ontology includes statues. Eliminativism denies that statues exist but says that there are atoms arranged statuewise. In this chapter, I explain eliminativism and define ‘arranged statuewise’. I also argue that eliminativism is neither obviously false nor contradictory. In presenting this argument, I consider, among other things, ‘reductionism’ and composition as identity.
Surviving Eliminativism
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: October 2003

I argue that we human organisms—though composite—are not mere overdeterminers. We cause, by way of having conscious mental properties, some effects that our constituent atoms do not cause. (My defence of this claim involves considerations regarding supervenience. I argue that our existing and having conscious mental properties does not supervene on the features of, and relations among, our microphysical parts.) Because mental causation makes us causally non‐redundant, we are not eliminated by the overdetermination argument of Ch. 3.
Mental Causation and Free Will
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: October 2003

I argue that the Exclusion Argument against mental causation (an argument primarily associated with Jaegwon Kim and which opposes systematic overdetermination) is self‐defeating and should be rejected by everyone. A new version of the Argument—the ‘Micro Exclusion Argument’—does not undermine itself, but, I argue, we should reject that argument in light of the rejection of microphysical closure defended earlier in the book. And, among other things, I present an argument against free will, an argument that presupposes incompatibilism. I then show that those who believe in non‐redundant mental causation of the sort I defend in Ch. 4 can resist that argument. And so, I suggest, incompatibilists who believe in free will should embrace my most controversial claims about mental causation.
Introduction
Authors: Heine Ronald E.
Published: October 2003

Discusses Origen's commentary on Ephesians in relation to the early exegetical tradition, the relationship between Jerome's commentary on Ephesians and that of Origen, and the dates and circumstances of the composition of the two commentaries. There is a description and discussion of the two Greek manuscripts containing the catena commentaries, which preserve the Greek excerpts from Origen's commentary. Special attention is given to Jerome's methodology in using Origen in his own commentary and to the relationship between the prologues in Jerome's commentary on Ephesians and what we know of Origen's composition of prologues in his other exegetical works. Finally, the introduction discusses the important contributions that St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians made either to the formation or the support of Origen's doctrinal views.
The Commentaries of Eusebius Jerome the Presbyter on the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians
Authors: Heine Ronald E.
Published: October 2003

Contains a complete English translation of the first book of Jerome's Latin commentary on Ephesians plus an English translation of all the Greek excerpts from Origen's commentary on Ephesians, which treat the passages from the epistle covered by Jerome in the first book. Book I begins with a lengthy prologue and then provides commentary on Ephesians 1: 1–2: 22. Jerome appears to depend on Origen in the prologue when he discusses the task of a commentator on Scripture and when he describes the idolatry and magic practiced at Ephesus as an explanation for the obscure and mysterious nature of much of the epistle. The first two chapters of Paul's epistle to the Ephesians give Origen numerous opportunities for philological comments on Paul's use of language. They also provide the basis for discussions of themes such as the creation of the world, the origin of souls, divine foreknowledge, the demonic powers, and the reconciliation of earthly beings and angels effected by Christ.
Book III
Authors: Heine Ronald E.
Published: October 2003

Contains a translation of the third book of Jerome's commentary on Ephesians with a translation of the parallel excerpts from Origen's commentary. Book III begins with a prologue and then provides commentary on Ephesians 4: 31–6: 24. Origen and Jerome interpret Paul's comments in this section of the epistle on subjects such as anger, sex, obscenity in actions, speech, and thought, marriage and its symbolism in relation to Christ and the Church, and household relationships. There is a major discussion, focused especially on Ephesians 6: 12, of Paul's words about the ‘wrestling’ of the Christian ‘against the cosmic powers of darkness’.
Epictetus in His Time and Place
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: October 2003

Discusses the life of Epictetus, and situates him in his cultural and intellectual context. He was taught Stoicism by Musonius Rufus, and the salient doctrines of traditional Stoicism are compared with Epictetus’ main themes, with a view to assess his originality. Epictetus plays down Stoic paradoxes and technicalities, focusing instead on moral progress and the fallibility of ordinary persons.
The Discourses
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: October 2003

Surveys the scope, themes, and style of Epictetus’ Discourses, starting with an assessment of their transmission by Epictetus’ student, Arrian. They should be read as an accurate record of how he taught the young men who were his students to internalize the principles of Stoicism and practise that philosophy in daily life. Epictetus’ expository style has three components: protreptic, elenctic, and doctrinal, for which he appeals to three respective authorities—Socrates, the Cynic Diogenes, and the Stoic Zeno.
Philosophy and Pedagogy
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: October 2003

Epictetus’ philosophy combines rationality, empiricism, and eudaimonism. He refutes scepticism by arguing that this stance involves self‐refutation. He requires his students to recognise that Stoicism requires complete commitment to the wish to live free from error. He divides his curriculum into three stages: ’desires and aversions’, ’appropriate actions’, and ’advanced logic’, emphasizing the need to master the first of these before going on to the others. In his self‐presentation, he distances himself from capitalized Philosophers, much as Plato distances Socrates from the Sophists.
From Theology to Ethics
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: October 2003

Like earlier Stoics, Epictetus views the goal of ethics as life in accordance with nature, but he gives that goal distinctively theonomic foundations. His conception of happiness is explored, together with his insistence that everyone is naturally motivated by self‐interest, which, when properly understood, is the precondition of a properly social identity. He construes living well as making the most skilful use of every circumstance, as exemplified by the way Socrates conducted himself at the end of his life.
Autonomy and Integrity
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: October 2003

Elucidates Epictetus’ key term prohairesis, translated by volition. This is our God‐given capacity to achieve autonomy if we internalize the doctrine that genuine freedom is entirely a function of our mental disposition. For Epictetus, freedom of the will signifies not being constrained in one's mind‐set by external events. He envisions this condition as essential to the realization of moral integrity, which he takes to be an innate capacity for treating other persons with affection and respect.
The End of Arianism
Authors: Wiles Maurice
Published: October 2003

Arianism has been extensively studied as a fourth‐century phenomenon, usually seen as brought to an end by the Council of Constantinople in the East and the Council of Aquileia in the West (both 381 ce). The chapter is concerned with the ending of Arianism as a significant movement within the early church. This involves giving special attention to the Homoians, the Neo‐Arians and the Theodosian Code in the East, to the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum in the West, and to Ulfila and the Goths.
Faith and Historical Judgement in British Arian Scholarship
Authors: Wiles Maurice
Published: October 2003

Looks at British Arian scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Arianism was no longer a live option for faith, with a special concern for the relation between the scholars’ faith and scholarly judgement. In the nineteenth century, it looks at how Newman's historical approach is affected by the close links he saw between the early Arians and the liberal churchmen of his own day, and also considers how Gwatkin, with his more self‐consciously modern historical approach, is still led to an equally strong condemnation of Arianism. In the twentieth century, it looks at the two leading Britsh writers on Arianism, Richard Hanson and Rowan Williams (both Anglican bishops), and seeks to understand how their far more critical attitude to Athanasius and their far more sympathetic appreciation of Arian motives are nonetheless combined in each case with strong support for the orthodox Trinitarian beliefs that emerged from the Arian conflict.
Essays on Actions and Events
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

This volume collects Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action. Its overarching thesis is that the ordinary concept of causality we employ to render physical processes intelligible should also be employed in describing and explaining human action. In the first of three subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson uses causality to give novel analyses of acting for a reason, of intending, weakness of will, and freedom of will. The second section provides the formal and ontological framework for those analyses. In particular, the logical form and attending ontology of action sentences and causal statements is explored. To uphold the analyses, Davidson urges us to accept the existence of non‐recurrent particulars, events, along with that of persons and other objects. The final section employs this ontology of events to provide an anti‐reductionist answer to the mind/matter debate that Davidson labels ‘anomalous monism’. Events enter causal relations regardless of how we describe them but can, for the sake of different explanatory purposes, be subsumed under mutually irreducible descriptions, claims Davidson. Events qualify as mental if caused and rationalized by reasons, but can be so described only if we subsume them under considerations that are not amenable to codification into strict laws. We abandon those considerations, collectively labelled the ‘constitutive ideal of rationality’, if we want to explain the physical occurrence of those very same events; in which case we have to describe them as governed by strict laws. The impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between them. The mental and the physical would thus disintegrate were it not for causality, which is operative in both realms through a shared ontology of events.
How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson attempts to analyse the case in which an agent deems some available course of action to be better on the whole than the one he actually, and intentionally, takes. He insists that the case presents a genuine problem that cannot be analysed away by tinkering with, or simply dismissing out of hand, the principles of practical reasoning that generate it––viz. that if I could, I would perform an action I want (provided I want it more than any other one), that I want to perform an action more than another one if I deem it better, and hence, that I would perform an action that I deem better than any other one if I could. Davidson dismisses various accounts from Socrates and Aristotle onwards that one way or another deny that the incontinent person acted intentionally, voluntarily, and with full knowledge of what he was doing (he also notes that these accounts mistakenly treat the problem as necessarily moral, ignoring that one might be overcome by an excessive sense of duty while knowing the course of pleasure to be the better on the whole). Presenting his own account, he notes that if reasons are causes, as Essay 1 argued, then the strongest reasons would seem to be the strongest causes––as this would evidently rule out incontinence, Davidson has to dissociate the ‘causally strongest’ reasons from those the agent deems best, to the effect that the conclusion of the practical syllogism based on the latter is no longer identical to the action the incontinent agent performs (as Essay 1 had claimed).
Agency
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Examining the relation that has to obtain between an agent and an event for the latter to be an action attributed to the agent, Davidson shows there are no grammatical tests of agency: action verbs sometimes leave it open whether the action was done intentionally or not, as in ‘he fell’. He offers an alternative definition by which someone is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional; this leaves the relation between the act and its agent intact regardless of how these are described. As this still requires illumination of what makes an action intentional, Davidson invokes causal terms familiar from Essay 1: an action counts as intentional if the agent (his beliefs and desires) caused it. However, this had better not straightforwardly reduce to ordinary event causation lest all causal effects of my actions are invariably attributed to my agency; this is called the ‘accord on effect’ by which causal transitivity makes for transfer of agency.

Davidson therefore sharply distinguishes ‘primitive actions’ (those mostly having to do with bodily action) from their ‘unintended begettings’ and concludes that the former, for which I can solely be attributed agency, are ‘the only actions there are’: while primitive actions allow re‐descriptions that may include their causal consequences it is mistaken to infer that the consequences themselves are included in the described action.
Freedom to Act
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

This Essay defends the view that freedom to act is a causal power. Davidson believes that an agent is free to act if he can act intentionally, and he can so act in virtue of having beliefs and desires that rationalize and cause his action; thus, freedom of act is a causal power necessarily defined in terms of intention, even though the agent could not have caused the causal conditions of so acting viz. his desires and beliefs. Davidson demotes the view that freedom to act requires that one ‘could have done otherwise’: choosing something to do and doing it suffices for the action to be free, no matter what would have happened if we hadn’t chosen (besides, if as Essay 1 argued there are no distinct acts of will, it follows that ‘could have done otherwise’ could not even be analysed as withholding such an act). After addressing various objections to analysing ‘can’ and ‘is free to’ in terms of causal conditionals, Davidson ends on a sceptical note: unless we can spell out the ‘right way’ in which attitudes must cause actions if they are to rationalize them (for beliefs and desires may rationalize an action in one way and cause it in another; see Essay 5) our notions of rationalization and freedom to act must remain programmatic.
Intending
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

This essay picks up where Essay 4 left off: how best to specify the desire and belief that rationalize and cause an action? A conjunction of desire and belief rationalize an action only when that action is suitably described; also, the desire must be expressed so that we can arrive at an action and to that end must be formulated as an explicit value judgement, says Davidson. He then proceeds to make precise the claim that rationalizing desires and beliefs must cause their action in the right as opposed to a ‘deviant’ way, i.e. the causal chain must proceed as the rationalization tells us. Davidson notes a further problem for his analysis in Essay 1: if I intend to do something but never get round to do it, my intention cannot be identified with an action it rationalizes and causes, and if I form an intention on the basis of no prior deliberative process, then I cannot identify it with any beliefs and desires I held at the time; either case seems to warrant reintroducing distinct intentions or ‘acts of will’ into our ontology. Investigating various entities they can be identified with––actions, beliefs that one will act, a form of wanting––Davidson identifies such ‘pure intendings’ as conditional value judgements and ordinary intentions as all‐out ones.
The Logical Form of Action Sentences
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson attempts to state the logical form of sentences in which actions are adverbially modified (e.g. ‘Jones buttered the toast slowly, with a knife, at midnight’); he wishes to regiment them into first‐order notation such that all valid inferences to sentences containing words of the original one are preserved. He claims that the only effective way of doing so is to transform the adverbs into predicates and recognize an implicit quantification over an entity to which the predicates apply (cf Appendix A); this entity he identifies as a dated, non‐recurrent particular––an event. Rival construals that do not require such an ontology either fail to preserve the inferences or end up assigning the adverbs to distinct actions. Davidson appends his replies to various critics of the paper in which he clarifies his methodology (applying the concept of logical form to sentences of natural language), the individuation of events (see further Essay 8), and suggests how his analysis can be extended to cover tensed action sentences.
Causal Relations
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

This essay applies the methodology of Essay 6 to singular causal statements. Rejecting rival accounts that use sentences to identify causes and effects, and an intensional connective like ‘caused it to be the case that’, Davidson prefers to construe causes and effects as referred to by singular terms; consequently, the relation of causality is extensional i.e. holds (if at all) regardless of how the terms are described. He investigates a thesis commonly attributed to Hume, whereby causal relations hold in virtue of laws or generalities that subsume their relata. After making precise the logical form of sentences stating those laws, Davidson agrees that a singular causal statement entails the existence of a nomological statement, but denies that it entails any particular such statement unless it already describes the causal relata in terms of types subsumed under that law (hence, we can know a singular causal statement to be true in the absence of knowing the correlative law).
The Individuation of Events
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson notes that none of his key claims in the theory of action (Essay 1, Essay 2, Essay 3, Essay 4, Essay 5), nor his analysis of action sentences (Essay 6) or causal statements (Essay 7), will work unless we can talk of the same action, or event, under different descriptions, descriptions that, if they refer at all, must refer to the same thing and not change the referent of the re‐described expression. This requires that there are singular terms denoting events that can be variously referred to, and Davidson investigates the motivations for believing that ordinary language speakers refer to them already and readily concede their existence. He stresses that it is singular terms rather than sentences as a whole that refer to events, since sentences are only existential and generic with respect to events; i.e. sentences merely say that at least one event of a certain kind occurred without referring to any particular one of them (see also Essay 9). Against Strawson, Davidson argues more generally that events constitute a fundamental ontological category that cannot be dispensed with in favour of an ontology that only recognizes ordinary enduring objects. After examining the general need to provide identity and individuation conditions for entities whose existence we are committed to, Davidson asks how well that need is met in the case of material objects, and provides such conditions for events in terms of their causes and effects (see also Appendix B).
Events as Particulars
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson repeats the motivation for accepting the existence of events that he brought out in Essay 8, especially stressing that natural languages supply not only appropriate singular terms apparently denoting events but also the appropriate machinery of reference including quantification and identity‐statements involving those terms. He then looks at an alternative theory, espoused by Roderick Chisholm, in which events are not particulars but universals, denoted not by singular terms but expressed by complete sentences. Davidson asks how well the theory succeeds in dealing with adverbial modification (see Essay 6), whether Chisholm's events can be counted or quantified over, and whether a sentential theory can avoid collapsing all co‐referring ‘events’ into the one event that occurs (an argument Davidson spelt out in greater detail in Essay 8). More generally, he investigates what makes an entity ‘recurrent’, stressing the context‐relativity of required similarity across instantiations.
The Material Mind
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

This essay continues the question from Essay 12 on the nature of psychology as a science, except that it engages hypothetically with a very precise knowledge of the physical workings of the mind. If we succeed in building a physical machine that perfectly imitates human behaviour, we can predict its behaviour on the sole basis of purely physical terms; nevertheless, to the extent that psychological explanations appeal to the concepts of desire, belief, and intention, they remain definitionally irreducible to such predictions (Essay 11, Essay 12). Inversely, regardless of how well advanced our neurophysiology is, it would provide no shortcut to the kind of interpretation required for the application of psychological concepts. After explaining at length what the application of those key concepts involves, Davidson stresses that their definitional irreducibility does not threaten a materialist metaphysics, provided we are willing to settle for a non‐reductive variety (see Essay 11).
Hempel on Explaining Action
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

After acknowledging Hempel as an ‘early partisan’ of the causal theory of action, Davidson takes issue with him on whether explanations that rationalize actions make essential appeal to laws. Apart from clarifying in which sense, and to what degree, laws are ‘implicit’ in rationalizations, Davidson explores the nature of law that might be involved. Where Hempel had provided a uniform (‘deductive‐nomological’) model of explanation on which all explananda can be deduced from laws, whether reason explanation or explanation in physics, Davidson holds that the law backing the causal relation between an action and its reason need not be spelt out for the explanation to be valid (Essay 7); indeed, the causal relata insofar as they are described in intentional terms cannot be thus subsumed under law. There are no law‐like generalizations relating desires and beliefs (from which reasons are constructed, see Essay 1) and the actions they cause (Essay 11) because rationality, which constitutively governs the attributions of these desires and beliefs, is uncodifiable, and the mental, inextricably holistic––a conclusion Davidson reaches, as in Essay 12, by appeal to Frank Ramsey's work on subjective probability.
Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson asks what properties a language must have to be learnable. He criticizes a (then) popular response that models the order of language acquisition on the epistemological priority of the types of expressions learnt; he labels this position the ‘building‐block theory’ (see further Essay 16). He discusses Strawson's critique of Quine's elimination of singular terms and shows how it is likewise premissed on the questionable derivation of claims about language learning from purely a priori considerations. On the positive side, Davidson proposes that a language is learnable by a creature with finite means if the language's number of semantic primitives or undefinables is finite. Using this criterion, he demonstrates that various theories in the philosophy of language introduce an infinite number of semantic primitives into the language and thus make it unlearnable; theories he alleges of this error (1) model quotations on names of expressions (Tarski, Quine; cf Essay 6), (2) analyse belief attributions in terms of linguistic marks (Scheffler, Carnap) or distinct one‐place predicates for each attributed belief (Quine; cf Essay 7), or (3) postulate intensional entities into their overall semantic framework (Frege, Church).
Truth and Meaning
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Develops the criterion of learnability proposed in Essay 1 into a constraint for a satisfactory theory of meaning: such a theory must show how, on the basis of a finite stock of semantic primitives, speakers come to understand a potentially infinite number of sentences; more precisely, how the meaning of each and every sentence in the language is owed to the sentence's structural composition. Davidson notes that introducing distinct entities as meanings for each expression (‘intensions’, ‘senses’) does not illuminate these structural workings of the language (this complaint, he says, operates quite independently of ontological reservations about intensions being ‘abstract’ or lacking clear individuation conditions). If, on the other hand, we dispense with intensions, we must define ‘meaning’ by mere appeal to reference; but this clearly won’t work since, if we concede that sentences ‘refer’ to their truth‐values, all sentences alike in truth value would be alike in meaning. Davidson therefore individuates a sentence's meaning by its ‘logical place’ in the language to which it belongs, i.e. by its entailment relations to other sentences in the language; the meaning of a subsentential expression is likewise individuated holistically, namely in terms of the systematic effect the expression has on the entailment relations of the sentence in which it occurs. Since a Tarskian truth theory captures these entailment relations for each sentence (in a specified language) by associating it with its ‘truth‐condition’, the truth theory can be said to give the ‘meaning’ thus construed for each sentence (a fortiori for their subsentential expressions), while meeting both the constraint for finiteness and the restriction to purely referential means. Davidson discusses various objections to this proposal (since called ‘Davidson's programme’), e.g. that it cannot accomodate sentences containing indexicals or contexts in which extensionality breaks down; and he shows its merit in its varied applicability to questions of logical form, the success of which is evaluated by whether the aforementioned entailments are preserved and explained for a variety of sentences (see Essays 6–8, and Essays 6–10 of the companion volume Essays on Actions and Events).
True to the Facts
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson explores whether the semantic concept of truth utilized in Essay 2 (i.e. a theory of truth recursively defined on satisfaction) can be developed into a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth, i.e. into a theory that explains the property of being true ‘by a relation between a statement and something else.’ He shows how reducing truth to either its disquotational function (the redundancy theory of truth associated with Ramsey) or to a notion of correspondence insensitive to more advanced semantic considerations both fail. In the former case, idioms such as ‘everything he said was true’ cannot be analysed without universally quantifying over propositions and defining truth for them recursively on satisfaction; in the latter case, the position of q in the sentential predicate ‘corresponds to the fact that q’ allows coextensive redescriptions to the effect of collapsing all q into one fact (the ‘One Great Fact’, as Davidson calls it). Davidson adds that traditional correspondence theories of the latter sort invariably suffer from assigning distinct entities, such as facts, to sentences as a whole (entities with which to compare sentences); whereas on his preferred theory, such assignments take place at the subsentential level via the apparatus of satisfaction and denotation ( Essay 15).
Semantics for Natural Languages
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson rehearses the demands for an acceptable theory of meaning for a natural language—that it give the meaning for each (actual and potential) utterance in the language, that it do so by finite means and shed light on the structural workings of the language (see Essay 2)—and argues that a theory of truth for that language provides ‘a precise, profound and testable answer’ to these demands. In addition, he demands that the stock of concepts used by metalanguage in which the truth theory is stated (its ‘ideology’) extends minimally beyond, and ideally includes, that of the object language (cf Essay 14); he looks at how alternative semantic programs fare under this constraint (cf Essay 5). He then addresses the more general question of how truth‐theoretic semantics copes with recalcitrant, i.e. non‐extensional, locutions current in natural languages, and addresses Tarski's pessimism of formal frameworks to ‘tame’ them. He concludes by stressing, as he did in Essay 2, that recognizing the role played by logical form (as analysed in truth theories) for the analysis of sentential meaning is all‐important; and questions whether this form or ‘deep structure’ of the sentence can be identified, as Chomsky suggested, with an underlying psychological mechanism in the speaker.
Quotation
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson applies the truth‐theoretic apparatus of Essay 2 to give a systematic analysis of quotation. He demands that our analysis uses and not merely mentions quoted words, and that we individuate quotations by finite means. Writers who model quotations on names of expressions (Tarski, Quine) and hence treat them as semantically unstructured fail on both scores, says Davidson (see also Essay 1). More generally, the reference of quoted expressions and truth conditions of quotational attributions (‘He said “. . .” ’) are explored.
Radical Interpretation
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: October 2003

Davidson asks what knowledge suffices for redescribing an uninterpreted utterance as an interpreted one, a process he terms ‘radical interpretation’. He explores how best to construe the evidential base on which this process operates, wavering between too thick or too thin a base, i.e. intensions and purely physical characterizations, respectively, the latter leaving it mysterious how the evidence is ‘related to what it is surely evidence for’. The inverse difficulty, of too thick a base, is not to pre‐suppose what we set out to verify; i.e. we must not individuate the evidential base by reference to facts we have no access to prior to radical interpretation. Davidson argues that most speakers’ propositional attitudes or intentions fall into this category, and this precludes an intention‐based approach to semantics (made famous by Grice and Strawson). After discarding Quine's approach of ‘radical translation’ as inapt for the task at hand because of its neglect of the semantic structure of interpreted utterances, Davidson proceeds to outline his own truth‐theoretic approach on which the interpretation of speech and attribution of propositional attitudes must proceed simultaneously (see Essay 10); he answers three queries about truth theories on which his approach is based: (1) whether such theories can be given for a natural language as a whole (cf Essay 4), (2) whether the evidence on which their verification proceeds, and the technical machinery of satisfaction and related notions they introduce, meet the above constraints, and (3) whether they can really serve the task of radical interpretation.