Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine

Born: 25 June 1908 in Akron, Ohio, USA
Died: 

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Quine studied at Oberlin College and Harvard University before studying at Prague under Rudolf Carnap. He received an M.A. from Oxford and a Ph.D. from Harvard (1932) in philosophy. Quine was appointed onto the staff at Harvard in 1936. He became Pierce professor of philosophy there remaininng until he retired in 1978.

He is known for his work in symbolic logic. Symbolic logic represented for Quine the framework for the language of science. Quine developed a new type of philosophy, which he called naturalized epistemology. He claimed that epistemology's only legitimate role is to describe the way knowledge is actually obtained so, according to Quine, its function is to describe how present science arrives at the beliefs accepted by the scientific community.

Among Quine's publications are A System of Logistic (1934), Mathematical Logic (1940), Elementary Logic (1941), From a Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), Set Theory and Its Logic (1963) and Philosophy of Logic (1970).

References:

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. D Davidson and J Hintikka (eds.), Words and Objections (1969).
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JOC/EFR February 1996