Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman QuineQuine is an American philosopher, often acknowledged as the most influential American philosopher of the past half century, and one of the most influential philosophers of the entire 20th century. This is his official home page, maintained by his son. It has lists of all the countries Quine visited, saw while passing by, and saw while flying over.
It may sound strange to advertise his home page as containing such lists, but that is Quine for you.
from the (now obsolete) site http://www.philosophy.ohio-state.edu/quine.html ...
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.
While Quine was known for catchy aphorisms, I find more inspiring his attitude expressed in the following longer "maxim", as he called it: "It is a basic maxim for serious thought that anything that can be said can, with perseverance, be said clearly".
Quine's interests were largely in logic and metaphysics. He wrote only one paper on ethics, "On the nature of moral values". As an empiricist and neo-positivist, he held a Humean position, starting the essay by saying
"Imagine a dog idling in the foreground, a tree in the middle distance, and a turnip lying on the ground behind the tree. Either of two hypotheses, or a combination of them, may be advanced to explain the dog's inaction with respect to the turnip: perhaps he is not aware that it is there, and perhaps he does not want a turnip. Such is the bipartite nature of motivation: belief and valuation intertwined. It is the deep old duality of thought and feeling, of the head and the heart, the cortex and the thalamus, the words and the music".
He goes on to explain how "This duality can be traced back to the simplest conditioning of responses". Of course this Humean position, which alleges that belief and reason alone cannot motivate moral action, but desire is also required at the very base, is criticised by many philosophers. See the page on "The Moral Problem" soon to be at And Wiki.
Quine died on Monday, 25 December 2000, in Boston, MA. He was 92. Obituaries ...
Here's a link to one of Quine's most famous (to undergrad philosophy majors, anyway) papers, Two Dogmas of Empiricism:
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