Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Born	(1908-06-25)June 25, 1908 Akron, Ohio
Died	December 25, 2000(2000-12-25) (aged 92) Boston, Massachusetts
Education	Oberlin College (B.A., 1930) Harvard University (Ph.D., 1932)
Spouse(s)	Naomi Clayton (1907–1997) Marjorie Boynton (1918–1998)
Awards	Rolf Schock Prizes in Logic and Philosophy (1993) Kyoto Prize (1996)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Institutions	Harvard University
Main interests	Logic, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, set theory
Notable ideas	New Foundations, indeterminacy of translation, naturalized epistemology, ontological relativity, Quine's paradox, Duhem–Quine thesis, Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis, radical translation, inscrutability of reference, confirmation holism, two dogmas of empiricism, cognitive synonymy, , Quine–McCluskey algorithm, Plato's beard
Influences Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Tarski, Vienna Circle, C. I. Lewis, A. N. Whitehead, B. F. Skinner, Pierre Duhem
Influenced Roger F. Gibson, Jr., Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, Hilary Putnam, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Gilbert Harman, Hao Wang, Stephen Stich, Hilary Kornblith, John Myhill

Willard Van Orman Quine (/kwaɪn/; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as "Van") was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century." From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of logic and set theory, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. A 2009 poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine as the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries. He won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993 for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning." In 1996 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for his "outstanding contributions to the progress of philosophy in the 20th century by proposing numerous theories based on keen insights in logic, epistemology, philosophy of science and philosophy of language."

Quine falls squarely into the analytic philosophy tradition while also being the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis but the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. His major writings include "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), which attacked the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions and advocated a form of semantic holism, 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. He also 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." He is also important in philosophy of science for his "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself" and for his conception of philosophy as continuous with science. This led to his famous quip that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough." In philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the "Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis," an argument for the reality of mathematical entities.