M. Davies and H. P. Grice

Speranza

M. Davies was born in England – in Guildford, Surrey – and, with his family, migrated to Australia when he was seven years old.

 

Davies attended Scotch College, Melbourne, and then studied philosophy and mathematics at Monash University.

 

He came to Oxford for the first time in 1973, as a BPhil and then DPhil student at New College.

 

After completing his doctorate, he taught at the University of Essex for a year and was then a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College Oxford before moving in 1981 to Birkbeck College London, where he was Lecturer and then Reader in Philosophy. While at Birkbeck, he was one of the founding editors of the journal Mind & Language and a founder of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

In January 1993, he returned to Oxford as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy – a philosophy post located in the Department of Experimental Psychology – and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Davies was Wilde Reader until 2000, when he left Oxford to take up a Professorship in the Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University. The Wilde Readership was converted to a Professorship and John Campbell was the first Wilde Professor from 2001 to 2004. Davies returned to Oxford as the second Wilde Professor in 2006.

Like many other philosophy graduate students in the 1970s, Martin Davies worked in philosophy of language and an early paper with Lloyd Humberstone contributed to the foundations of two-dimensional semantics.

 

Most of his research has been in the areas of philosophy of mind (for example, on externalism about mental content) and philosophy of cognitive science (on tacit knowledge, the debate between the theory theory and mental simulation approaches to everyday psychological understanding, levels of description, and delusions). The work on externalism and on levels of description led to work in epistemology on the problem of armchair knowledge.