Willard Van Orman Quine

Lore & Background

Quine grew up in Akron, Ohio, with his parents and older brother. His father was a manufacturing entrepreneur and his mother a schoolteacher and housewife. He became an atheist around age nine. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Oberlin College in 1930 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1932, supervised by Alfred North Whitehead. As a Harvard Junior Fellow, he traveled in Europe during 1932–33, meeting Polish logicians and members of the Vienna Circle, including Rudolf Carnap, whom he called his 'true and only maître à penser.' During World War II, he arranged for the Jewish logician Alfred Tarski to sail from Danzig to the US, and Quine served in the Navy deciphering German submarine messages, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. He could lecture in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Reader's Guide

Quine's significance lies in his systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself, developing a naturalized epistemology that sought an improved scientific explanation of how elaborate scientific theories arise from meager sensory input. His attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' undermined logical positivism and advocated semantic holism and ontological relativity. His indeterminacy of translation thesis, introduced in 'Word and Object,' advanced a behaviorist theory of meaning. Quine's work in logic confined logic to classical bivalent first-order logic, rejecting higher-order logic and modal logic with quantification. His New Foundations system and the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument for mathematical realism remain influential. Despite his technical focus, he wrote in defense of conservative positions, including moral censorship. His legacy endures through his students, including David Lewis and Gilbert Harman, and his impact on philosophy of science, epistemology, and logic.

Did You Know?

• Quine arranged for Alfred Tarski to sail on the last ship from Danzig before World War II began.
• He served in the US Navy as a lieutenant commander deciphering German submarine messages.
• Quine could lecture in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
• He suffered from memory loss in his final years and joked that his illness must be Alzheimer because he could not remember its name.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Willard Van Orman Quine (25 June 1908 – 25 December 2000) was an influential 20th Century American philosopher and logician." — Willard Van Orman Quine "Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not?

This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor." — Willard Van Orman Quine "Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes." — Willard Van Orman Quine "On What There Is", p. 4. a humorous comment on the idea "unactualized possible"." — Willard Van Orman Quine