Herbert Paul Grice and Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Essays on Reference, Language, and Mind.

Speranza

Keith Donnellan, Joseph Almog and Paolo Leonardi, "Essays on Reference, Language, and Mind"
English

Keith Sedgwick Donnellan (b. Washington, DC, e: Maryland, Cornell; UCLA) is one of the major figures in 20th century philosophy of language, a key part of the highly influential generation of scholars that included not just H. P. Grice (who was born in 1913 -- but kept influencing) Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, and David Kaplan.

Like Herbert Paul Grice, Keith Sedgwick Donnellan's primary contributions were published in article form rather than books.

This volume presents a highly focussed collection of articles by Keith Sedgwick Donnellan.

In the late sixties and early seventies, the philosophy of language and mind went through a paradigm shift, with the then-dominant Fregean theory losing ground to the "direct reference" theory sometimes referred to as the direct reference revolution.

Keith Sedgwick Donnellan played a key role in this shift, focusing on the relation of semantic reference, a touchstone in the philosophy of language and the relation of "thinking about" - a touchstone in the philosophy of mind, or philosophical psychology, as Grice preferred.


The debates around the direct reference theory ended up forming the agenda of the philosophy of language and related fields for decades to come, and Keith Sedgwick Donnellan's contributions were always considered essential.

His ideas spawned a scholarly debate that continues to the present day. This volume collects his key contributions datng from the late 1960's through the early 1980's, along with a substantive introduction by the editor Joseph Almog, which disseminates the work to a new audience and for posterity.