Willard Van Orman Quine
American Philosopher
June 25, 1908-December 25, 2000
Quine was the most famous, most widely cited, American philosopher of the 20th century. His career began in the early 1930s, when he visited Carnap in Prague. Under the early intellectual influence of the ideas of the Vienna Circle, Quine blended them with the American pragmatist's doctrines to create a unique brand of pragmatic holism. In particular, in his celebrated essay `Two Dogmas of Empiricism' he made a devastating attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, which forced those in the analytical tradition to re-assess the fundamental concepts and purpose of epistemology and the theory of meaning.
Quine's views are uncompromisingly materialist and extensionalist. He is not, though, a nominalist in the traditional sense, since he allows that quantification over mathematical objects such as numbers and sets is necessary for the simplest and most economical theoretical account that we can give of our total experience.
Quine brought the logical rigour of Frege, Russell and the Logical Positivists to bear on a wide range of problems in the philosophy of logic, language and science. His most famous work, Word and Object, set out the arresting and influential view that translation between languages is radically indeterminate on the basis of observable evidence. Hence, since the observable behaviour of speakers is all that can ground attribution of meaning to their expressions, there are no facts of the matter about meanings.
Quine's writings are a joy to read, for their crisp and aphoristic style. He is justly famous for a number of philosophical slogans: No entity without identity; To be is to be the value of a bound variable; Entification begins at arm's length; Ontology recapitulates philology; Meaning is what essence becomes when wedded to the word.