Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine
Quine in 1980
Born	(1908-06-25)June 25, 1908 Akron, Ohio, U.S.
Died	December 25, 2000(2000-12-25) (aged 92) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Education	Oberlin College (BA) Harvard University (PhD)
Spouses	Naomi Clayton ​ ​ (m. 1932; div. 1947)​ Marjorie Boynton ​ ​ (m. 1948; died 1998)​
Awards	Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy (1993) Kyoto Prize (1996)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic Mathematical nominalism (1947)[1] Mathematical quasi-empiricism (1960) Immanent realism[2] Neopragmatism[3] Empiricism Anti-foundationalism[4] Logical behaviorism[5]
Institutions	Harvard University
Thesis	The Logic of Sequences: A Generalization of Principia Mathematica (1932)
Doctoral advisor	Alfred North Whitehead
Other academic advisors	C. I. Lewis[6]
Doctoral students	David Lewis, Gilbert Harman, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Hao Wang, Burton Dreben, Charles Parsons, John Myhill, Robert McNaughton
Other notable students	Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett
Main interests	Logic, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, set theory
Notable ideas	List New Foundations, abstract objects, indeterminacy of translation (holophrastic indeterminacy, inscrutability of reference, ontological relativity, gavagai), radical translation, referential transparency, naturalized epistemology, meta-ontology, ontological/ideological commitment,[7] natural kind, semantic ascent, Quine's paradox, Duhem–Quine thesis, Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis, semantic holism (confirmation holism, web of belief, hold come what may), extensionalism, problem of empty names, propositional attitude, two dogmas of empiricism, principle of charity, cognitive synonymy, observational statement, mathematical quasi-empiricism, Quine–McCluskey algorithm, Quine–Morse set theory, vivid designator, predicate functor logic, Quine quotation, Quine corners, Quine atom, Plato's beard, existential generalization and universal instantiation, veridical vs. falsidical paradoxes[8]

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.