ABSTRACT
Introduction If there is one issue that cannot be left out of a work that claims similarities between the thought of Davidson and that of Spinoza, then it must be that of epistemology. Without any doubt Davidson’s ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’ is his most famous article. And yet it may not contain his most convincing argument. The force of ‘On the Very Idea...’ is not to be found in the compelling way that logic forces the conclusions upon us, but rather in the way the article makes connections between different aspects of the world or our lives in such a way that certain conclusions are no longer viable options. One of these options that is no longer viable is radical skepticism about the world we live in. And although we may not be able to locate an obviously parallel piece of writing in Spinoza’s work, the philosophical parallels are numerous and obvious once we realize that Davidson was really offering us the beginnings (or rather the starting point) of a comprehensive philosophical system. I do not think that I am overstating the case when I say that such a comprehensive philosophical system was always the only option for Spinoza. This chapter aims to reconstruct Davidson’s argument in ‘On the Very Idea...’ while emphasizing the larger ramifications for philosophy. Then, I intend to show that a parallel interpretation of Spinoza is not only possible, but also plausible. Setting the Scene for Davidson Since Donald Davidson’s ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’ appeared in 1974, there has been much discussion about the nature and status of the argument against scheme/content dualism. Some have claimed that the argument is verificationist, which is any view according to which the conditions of a sentence’s or thought’s meaningfulness or intelligibility is identified with the conditions of this thought being verifiable or falsifiable (Stroud in Dancy, 1994, p.518). Interestingly, there seem to be some contributions to the debate that were unknowingly made prior to the 1974 article. Some of these contributions were
made in response to earlier versions of the article, as presented in the form of the John Locke Lectures (1970) or the Presidential Address to the Eastern Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 1973. Others, however, made their contributions to the debate entirely unaware of the future relevance of their work to the debate about scheme/content dualism. And yet this relevance exists. The topics of the works in question seem to reflect just the kind of debate that has been going on about the status of Davidson’s argument in ‘On the Very Idea...’.
