Work
Quine's Ph.D. thesis and early publications were on formal logic and set theory. Only after WWII did he, by virtue of seminal papers on ontology, epistemology and language, emerge as a major philosopher. By the 1960s, he had worked out his "naturalized epistemology" whose aim was to answer all substantive questions of knowledge and meaning using the methods and tools of the natural sciences. Quine roundly rejected the notion that there should be a "first philosophy", a theoretical standpoint somehow prior to natural science and capable of justifying it. These views are intrinsic to his naturalism.
Quine could lecture in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German, as well as his native English. But like the logical positivists, he evinced little interest in the philosophical canon: only once did he teach a course in the history of philosophy, on Hume. Quine has an Erdős number of 3.
Read more about this topic: Willard Van Orman Quine
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“And work was little in the house,
She was free,”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
“I have everything in the world that is necessary to happiness, good faith, good friends and all the work I can possibly do. I think God’s greatest blessing to the human race was when He sent man forth into the world to earn his bread by the sweat of his face. I believe in toil, in the dignity of labor, but I also believe in adequate compensation for that toil.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)