Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as "Van") was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of logic and set theory, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. A recent poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine as the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries. He won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993, for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning."

Quine falls squarely into the analytic philosophy tradition while also being the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not merely conceptual analysis. His major writings include "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), which attacked the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions and advocated a form of semantic holism, 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. He also 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." He is also important in philosophy of science for his "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself" and for his conception of philosophy as continuous with science. This led to his famous quip that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough." In philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the "Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis," an argument for the reality of mathematical entities.

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    Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    One man’s antinomy is another man’s falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    [T]here is no breaking out of the intentional vocabulary by explaining its members in other terms.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    You made me hate myself.
    Gilbert Ralston, U.S. screenwriter, and Daniel Mann. Willard (Bruce Davison)

    The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done;
    The Master has paid him his wages, the goal of his journey is won;
    He rests, but he never is idle; a thousand years pass like a day,
    In the glad surprise of Paradise where work is sweeter than play.
    —Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)

    [T]here is no breaking out of the intentional vocabulary by explaining its members in other terms.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)