Martin Davies was born in Guildford, Surrey, England and migrated to Australia with his family when he was seven years old. He attended Scotch College, Melbourne, and then studied philosophy and mathematics at Monash University, where his teachers included AC (Camo) Jackson and Aubrey Townsend in philosophy and John Crossley in mathematics. He went to Oxford for the first time in 1973, as a BPhil and then DPhil student at New College, supervised by Dana Scott, Christopher Peacocke and Gareth Evans.

Like many other philosophy graduate students in the 1970s, Martin Davies worked in philosophy of language and an early paper with Lloyd Humberstone contributed to the foundations of two-dimensional semantics. Since the mid-1980s, most of his research has been in the areas of philosophy of cognitive science (on tacit knowledge, the debate between the theory theory and mental simulation approaches to everyday psychological understanding, levels of description, cognitive neuropsychology, and delusions) and philosophy of mind (on concepts and the language of thought, externalism about mental content, and consciousness). The work on externalism and on levels of description led to work in epistemology on the problem of armchair knowledge.

A brief note on Philosophy and Psychology at Oxford.

In January 1993, he returned to Oxford as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy – a philosophy post located in the Department of Experimental Psychology – and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Davies was Wilde Reader until 2000, when he left Oxford to take up a Professorship in the Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University. The Wilde Readership was converted to a Professorship and John Campbell was the first Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy, from 2001 to 2004. Davies returned again to Oxford in 2006 as the second Wilde Professor.