Abstract

What is the relationship between contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy? This Ur-question forms the backdrop for the essays of Alan Donagan, the most important of which are included in the two volumes of his Philosophical Papers. Donagan, who died in 1991, was uniquely in a position to work out an adequate answer. His philosophical training and teaching career spanned the period from the logical empiricism of the 1940s to the "cognitive revolution" of the 1980s and early 1990s, running intermediately through the heydays of the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy, conceptual analysis, post-empiricist naturalism, and modal metaphysics. His travels led him from Melbourne to Oxford and then on to the USA. There he taught successively at the University of Minnesota, Indiana University, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the University of Chicago, and finally at the California Institute of Technology. Donagan's philosophical research was similarly wide-ranging. He published many papers on topics in the philosophy of history, the history of philosophy, action theory, and ethics; and he produced four books: The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, The Theory of Morality, Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action, and Spinoza.