Abstract

The framework for the papers in this volume is set by the wide-ranging philosophical contributions of Gareth Evans, who died in 1980 at the age of 34. In the papers gathered together in the posthumously published Collected Papers and in The Varieties of Reference Evans made a number of important contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of thought, and philosophical logic. Evans was a far more systematic thinker than is usual in contemporary analytical philosophy and the first part of this introduction gives an overview of his thinking, setting it in the context of four powerful and competing currents in anglo-American philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. The second part of the introduction summarizes the papers in the collection and provides necessary background to the individual contributions.