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The Life of Van
William Van Orman Quine, who was also called Van by his friends, was born on June 25, 1908. He was an American philosopher who was recognized as one of the most influential philosophers in the twentieth century. He served as the Edgar Piece Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. Quine died on Christmas day in 2000 at the age of 92 in his home. Throughout the course of his life he left a lasting impact on the world of philosophy -
Van in World War II
In WWII Van served in the United States Navy from 1942 to 1946 serving as a Naval Intelligence Officer. He worked in a Unit that decoded, translated and analyzed coded messages from German submarines. After the war he returned to teaching the Harvard introductory logic course Philosophy 140. This leads him on to write his next book Methods of Logic -
The Methods of Logic
The Methods of Logic develops the elements of modern deductive logic. Quine formulates mechanical and time saving tests for consistency, inconsistency, validity, implication and equivalence. Quine confines logic to first order logic and clearly demarcates it from set theory and mathematics. language of first order logic serves as a canonical notation in which to express our ontological commitments. He used the slogan "To be is to be the value of the variable" to encapsulate this project -
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Modern empiricism has been conditioned by two dogmas. One is a belief that there is some fundamental gap between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact; and truth which are synthetic or grounded in fact. The other is reductionism which is the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. https://philpapers.org/rec/QUITDO-3