Arnold Ira Davidson (born 1955) is an American philosopher and academic, and the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, History of Science, and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago.
Davidson holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he wrote a dissertation under the supervision of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell.
[2] Davidson, who often speaks and teaches at French and Italian universities, has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin as well as visiting professor, chaire d'Etat, at the Collège de France.
In Davidson's most recent book, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, he applies and develops Foucauldian archeological and genealogical methodological innovations in the development of a method he calls "Historical Epistemology".
This work consists of essays on epistemology, the history of sexuality and scientific concepts, and the interpretation of Foucault.