Davidson and Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza a Dutch rationalist philosopher of the 17th century and Donald Davidson one of the most distinguished contemporary American analytic philosophers, are two thinkers not usually analysed in conjunction with each other in the philosophical literature yet there are remarkable parallels in their thought. In this book Floris van der Burg identifies topics of comparison in the areas of ontology, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language and, after explaining the theory of each philosopher, examines the parallel themes between Spinoza and Davidsonian theory.

Dr Floris van der Burg is from University College Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Contents: Introduction; A brief intellectual history; Mind versus matter: parallelism and anomalous monism; Knowing the world and those who live in it: issues in epistemology and metaphysics; Naturalism, representationalism and the linguistic turn; An ethics for our time?; Bibliography; Index.