Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)

Author(s):  
Ernie Lepore ◽  
Jeff Malpas

Donald Davidson is a central figure in twentieth-century American philosophy. Of the five volumes that make up Davidson’s collected essays, the best known are the first two, Essays on Actions and Events (2001a [1980]) and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (2001b [1984]), which draw together his work from the 1960s and 1970s, and include many seminal contributions to the philosophy of action, mind, and language. Davidson’s later writings, from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, are less well-known in their entirety, but also include many significant and influential essays particularly on questions of truth and knowledge, as well as on content and the mind. Of these three later volumes, the most important is undoubtedly Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001c), in which Davidson’s commitment to a holistic or ‘relational’ view of the mind – a view that also sees the mind as necessarily implicated with and implicating other minds and the world – appears in its most explicit form. Problems of Rationality (2004) and Truth, Language and History (2005a) were published posthumously, along with Truth and Predication (2005b), the latter being Davidson’s only published monograph. Influential on an entire generation of philosophers, Davidson opened up new approaches to the study of intention, action, causal explanation, rationality and irrationality, the nature of truth and knowledge, first person authority, indexicals, modality, reference, quotation, metaphor, indeterminacy, convention, realism and the publicity of language. Although connecting with core issues in analytic philosophy, Davidson’s work has also been seen as having close affinities with important aspects of hermeneutic, deconstructionist, and pragmatist thinking.

Author(s):  
Morten Hammerborg

The final section explores the successes and failures of twentieth-century Norwegian shipping, in attempt to determine why maritime businesses failed; to pinpoint turbulence in the industry; and to examine success alongside failure to better understand how new opportunities arose out of each. It is split into four sections; the first explores the differing approaches to shipping during the World War One boom in Haugesund, southwest Norway, through the case studies of two brothers who owned shipping companies - one that thrived and one that failed - and determines that their choices were limited and the fates of each firm difficult to overturn. The second is a case study of four shipping businesses that failed during the 1970s and the reasons for their failure, which, despite the market depression, was mostly due to internal decision-making and poor governance. The third is a quantitative analysis of company sizes between the 1960s and 1970s which, through a careful consideration of statistics, determines that larger companies were far more likely than small to survive the economic crisis. The final segment explores the growth of the deep-sea car-carrying business between 1960 and 2008, and finds that specialised tonnage and the successful transformation of shipping services in the twentieth century could keep maritime businesses afloat.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.


Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa N. Terranova

This essay focuses on a body of photoconceptual works from the 1960s and 1970s in which the automobile functions as a prosthetic-like aperture through which to view the world in motion. I argue that the logic of the “automotive prosthetic“ in works by Paul McCarthy, Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Ed Kienholz, Julian Opie, and Cory Arcangel reveals a techno-genetic understanding of conceptual art, functioning in addition and alternatively to semiotics and various philosophies of language usually associated with conceptual art. These artworks show how the automobile, movement on roads and highways, and the automotive landscape of urban sprawl have transformed the human sensorium. I surmise that the car has become a prosthetic of the human body and is a technological force in the maieusis of the posthuman subject. I offer a reading of specific works of photoconceptual art based on experience, perception, and a posthumanist subjectivity in contrast to solely understanding them according to semiotics and linguistics.


2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben W. Dhooge

AbstractAnglo-American and Russian stylistics influenced each other substantially in the 1960s and 1970s. From the 1980s on, however, this fruitful mutual influence came to an end. The two schools started to grow apart, but despite that, they would develop almost parallel to each other, displaying many theoretical and methodological similarities. The present paper illustrates this by highlighting one such specificity – the idea of the possible reflection of one's conceptualization of the world in the use of literary language, and the possibility of reconstructing that conceptualization by means of a stylistic analysis (‘mind style’–‘kartina mira’). By comparing the Anglo-American and Russian theories on the topic, it is shown that the separately evolved conceptions are similar and even complement each other: the differences between them clarify and help solve possible theoretical and methodological gaps. Moreover, the juxtaposition of both conceptions allows us to perfect the notion of ‘mind style’ and its practical applications. A similar approach to other conceptions and tendencies in current seemingly mutually independent Anglo-American and Russian stylistics have the same potential, and may lead to a new convergence between the two schools.


2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan McCargo

Thailand's ‘southern border provinces’ of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat – along with four districts of neighbouring Songkhla – are the site of fiery political violence characterised by daily killings. The area was historically a Malay sultanate, and was only loosely under Thai suzerainty until the early twentieth century. During the twentieth century there was periodic resistance to Bangkok's attempts to suppress local identity and to incorporate this largely Malay-speaking, Muslim-majority area into a predominantly Buddhist nation-state. This resistance proved most intense during the 1960s and 1970s, when various armed groups (notably PULO [Patani United Liberation Organization] and BRN [Barisan Revolusi Nasional]) waged war on the Thai state, primarily targeting government officials and the security forces. In the early 1980s, the Prem Tinsulanond government brokered a deal with these armed groups and proceeded to co-opt the Malay-Muslim elite. By crafting mutually beneficial governance, security and financial arrangements, the Thai state was able largely to placate local political demands.


Author(s):  
Mike Nellis

Since its operational beginnings in the United States in 1982—where its prototypes were first experimented with in the 1960s and 1970s—the electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders has spread to approximately 40 countries around the world, ostensibly—but not often effectively—to reduce the use of imprisonment by making bail, community supervision, and release from prison more controlling than they have hitherto been. No single authority monitors the development of EM around the world, and it is difficult to gain fully comprehensive accounts of what is happening outside the Western and Anglophone users of it. Some countries are secretive. Standpoints in writing on EM are varied and partisan. Although it still tends to be the pacesetter of technical innovation, the United States remains a relatively lower user of EM, in part because the exceptional punitiveness of its penal culture has inhibited its expansion, even when it has itself been developed in various punitive ways. Interprofessional and intergovernmental processes of “policy transfer” have contributed to EMs spreading around the world, but the commercial bodies that manufacture and market EM equipment have been of at least equal importance. In Europe, the Confederation of European Probation (CEP), a transnational probation advocacy organization, took an early interest in EM, and its regular conferences became a touchstone of international debate. As it developed globally, the United Nations reluctantly accepted that it may be of some value even in developing countries and set out standards for its use. Continuing innovations in EM technology will create new possibilities for offender supervision, both more and less punitive, but it is always culture, commerce, and politics in particular jurisdictions which shape the scale, pace, and form of its development.


Author(s):  
Georgina Colby

Chapter 2 addresses Acker’s practice of collage, and the anxiety of self-description. Blood and Guts in High School is positioned in relation to both the Dadaist collage and montage practices of artists such as Hannah Höch at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the subversive publications of the 1960s and 1970s: mimeographed magazines, and the punk and post-punk medium of Xeroxed publications. The original manuscript of Blood and Guts in High School housed in the archive possesses a different materiality to the published version of the novel. The materiality of the text in its collage and typographic experimentation is situated in a counter position to the language and hegemonic discourses within which Janey, the voice of the text, is imprisoned. Drawing on Acker’s practices of illegibility, and Denise Riley’s work on language and affect, the chapter argues that Blood and Guts in High School, through its experimental form, reveals the anxiety of self-description that Janey experiences within conventional language structures. Illustration, experimental typography, non-referential language, and the use of the poetic, function in Blood and Guts in High School as sites of an alternate language that emerges through compositional form and experimental forms of iteration.


2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.


2017 ◽  
pp. 204-234
Author(s):  
Enzo Traverso

The seventh chapter retraces the encounter of the French philosopher Daniel Bensaid and the work of Walter Benjamin, that reveals a resonance between two crucial turns of the twentieth century—1940 and 1990—through a vision of history based on the idea of remembrance. After the fall of Berlin Wall, the survivors of the 1960s and 1970s met a vision of history engendered by the defeats of the 1930s. This encounter reveals the potentialities of a political reinterpretation of the tradition of melancholy Marxism.


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