Willard Van Orman Quine (/kwaɪn/; known to his friends as "Van";[9] June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century".[10] He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.
Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. He was famous for his position that first order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations. In the philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities.[11] He was the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis, but continuous with science; it is the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. This led to his famous quip that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough".[12] He led a "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself"[13] and developed an influential naturalized epistemology that tried to provide "an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meager sensory input".[13] He also advocated holism in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis.
His major writings include the papers "On What There Is" (1948), which elucidated Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable", and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), which attacked the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism, undermining the then-popular logical positivism, advocating instead a form of semantic holism and ontological relativity. They also include the books The Web of Belief (1970), which advocates a kind of coherentism, and Word and Object (1960), which further developed these positions and introduced Quine's famous indeterminacy of translation thesis, advocating a behaviorist theory of meaning.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
SEP-Nomwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ "Scientific Realism and Antirealism". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ "Pragmatism". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ Poston, Ted. "Foundationalism". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Behaviorism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ a b Hunter, Bruce (2021). "Clarence Irving Lewis". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
- ^ Willard Van Orman Quine (1983). "Chapter 22: Ontology and ideology revisited". Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist: And Other Essays. Harvard University Press. pp. 315 ff. ISBN 0674030842.
- ^ Quine, W. V. (1966). "The Ways of Paradox". The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays. New York: Random House.
- ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F. (October 2003), "Willard Van Orman Quine", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- ^ Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (December 29, 2000). "W. V. Quine, Philosopher Who Analyzed Language and Reality, Dies at 92". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved November 21, 2023.
- ^ Colyvan, Mark, "Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
- ^ Quine, W. V. (August 28, 2023). "Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory". Mind. 62 (248): 433–451. JSTOR 2251091.
- ^ a b "Quine, Willard Van Orman: Philosophy of Science". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009.