Donald Davidson was born in 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1939. After serving in the United States Navy, Davidson returned to Harvard, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Plato's Philebus (1990a). After he received his PhD in 1949, Davidson went on to do extensive work in decision theory, in collaboration with Patrick Suppes and others. After many years at Stanford, and somewhat shorter stays at Princeton, Rockefeller, and Chicago, Davidson in 1981moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he was appointed Willis and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy. Davidson lived in Berkeley for the rest of his life, continuing to produce important work until his death in 2003.

The early confrontation with the methodological challenges of giving empirical application to rational-choice theory had a lasting influence on Davidson. It is apparent in his later formulation of philosophical questions regarding action, the...