As an undergraduate from 1964 to 1967, Gareth Evans, a British philosopher of language and mind, studied for the PPE degree (philosophy, politics, and economics) at University College, Oxford, where his philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson. In 1968, less than a year after completing his degree, Evans was elected to a fellowship at University College. He took up the position in 1969, succeeding Strawson, who had become Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford. During the 1970s Evans and his University College colleague John McDowell played leading roles in developing a distinctive conception of truth-theoretic semantics, drawing on the work of Strawson, Michael Dummett, and especially Donald Davidson. Their coedited collection, Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, appeared in 1976.

While philosophy of language enjoyed a central position in Oxford philosophy of that period, Evans did not share the view (regarded by Dummett as constitutive of analytic philosophy) that...