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Philosopher

Willard Van Orman Quine

Logic

Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician, born in 1908 and died in 2000, who spent almost his entire career at Harvard University and is regarded as one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. He is best known for his 1951 essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism, which attacked the traditional distinction between analytic truths, true by meaning alone, and synthetic truths, true by fact, and argued instead for a holistic view on which beliefs face the evidence of experience as an interconnected web rather than one by one. Quine also developed an influential naturalized epistemology that treats the theory of knowledge as continuous with natural science, worked out an account of ontological commitment summarized in his phrase "to be is to be the value of a variable," and, with Hilary Putnam, formulated the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objects.

Facts
Birth Year
1908 1
Birth Date
1908-06-25 1
Notable Publication
Word and Object (1960) 1
Death Year
2000 1
Death Date
2000-12-25 1
Tradition
Analytic philosophy, naturalized epistemology 1
Classification
Nationality
United States 1
Connections

Associated With

Indeterminacy of Translation, Arguments and Positions
Source Willard van Orman Quine (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Philosophy of Logic, Branches of Philosophy

Quine's Philosophy of Logic (1970) and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), challenging the analytic-synthetic distinction logic had rested on, are core texts of the field.

The Duhem-Quine Thesis, Arguments and Positions

Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) extends Duhem's narrower 1906 physics-specific thesis into its familiar broad form.

Source Underdetermination of Scientific Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Willard Van Orman Quine (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Lead section, first sentence (birth date)
    Willard Van Orman Quine ( KWYNE; June 25, 1908, December 25, 2000) was an American logician and philosopher in the analytic tradition
  • Lead section, first sentence (death year)
    Willard Van Orman Quine ( KWYNE; June 25, 1908, December 25, 2000) was an American logician and philosopher in the analytic tradition
  • Lead section, first sentence (death date)
    Willard Van Orman Quine ( KWYNE; June 25, 1908, December 25, 2000) was an American logician and philosopher in the analytic tradition
  • Lead section, third paragraph, sentence on Word and Object
    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.
  • Philosophy section, second sentence
    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.
  • Lead section, first sentence (birth year)
    Willard Van Orman Quine ( KWYNE; June 25, 1908, December 25, 2000) was an American logician and philosopher in the analytic tradition
View the Source
Underdetermination of Scientific Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Associated With: The Duhem-Quine Thesis
Willard van Orman Quine (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Associated With: Indeterminacy of Translation
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