Donald Davidson is probably the most eminent living analytic philosopher, and
his writings in philosophy of language and philosophy of action have shaped much
of the recent work in both these fields. However, despite the obvious shared
concerns of literary theory and these aspects of philosophy, up to this point
literary theorists have not paid much attention to Davidson's ideas or have only
known about them through the interpretations of other philosophers like Richard
Rorty. Literary theorists have seen more relevance to their concerns in
Continental philosophy and, among analytic philosophers, in the essentially
anti-analytic work of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein than in the harder
tradition