This chapter describes the work of Donald Davidson in philosophy of language as a manifestation of a willingness to drop the idea of “intrinsic nature,” a willingness to face up to the contingency of the language we use. According to the author, Philip Larkin’s poem owes its interest and its strength to the reminder of the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, the tension between an effort to achieve self-creation by the recognition of contingency and an effort to achieve universality by the transcendence of contingency. The same tension has pervaded philosophy since Hegel’s time, and particularly since Nietzsche. Only poets, Nietzsche suspected, can truly appreciate contingency. The rest of us are doomed to remain philosophers, to insist that there is really only one true lading-list, one true description of the human situation, one universal context of our lives.