Willard Van Orman Quine 1908 – 2000

  • Quine Birth

    Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher who pursued science in a systematic manner from within science itself. He was born June 25th, 1908 in Akron, Ohio. He is known for and has published many works to include his arguments against logical empiricism, and the use of analytic- synthetic distinction.
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    Education and first work

    Quine attended Oberlin College, Ohio to complete a B.A in mathematics and later attended Harvard to complete his PH D. in philosophy. After the completion of his education he held a travelling fellowship and travelled to Vienna, Warsaw and Prague. He returned to Harvard to join the Society of Fellows and in 1934 published his first major work “A System of Logic”.
  • "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"

    In 1951 Quine published a paper titled “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” which according to Peter Godfrey-Smith “the paper [is] sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy". The two dogmas argued in this work are analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism. The following link describes this work in more detail. youtube.com/watch?v=bJSh4lPLAtI
  • “From Stimulus to Science”

    In 1995 Quine’s last work titled “From Stimulus to Science” was published. This work focused on Quine's thoughts on naturalized epistemology. Quine takes the question of "how we acquire knowledge?" to the question of "how we acquire cognitive language?"
  • Quine Death

    Quine died in December of 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts after an illustrious career in philosophy. He published over a dozen works to include titles such as “From a Logical Point of View” in 1953 and in 1966 published the book “Ways of Paradox”.
    Hylton, Peter and Gary Kemp, "Willard Van Orman Quine", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/quine/.