Willard Van Orman Quine

**Willard Van Orman Quine** (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He is recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.

Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. Quine was famous for his position that first order logic is the only kind worthy of the name. Based on this idea, he developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations. In the philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities. He had the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis, but continuous with science; the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. This led to his famous quip that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough". He led a "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself" and 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 also advocated ontological relativity in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis.

His major writings include the papers "On What There Is" (1948), which elucidated Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable", and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), which attacked the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism. It wasa against the then-popular logical positivism, advocating instead a form of semantic holism. They also include the books _The Web of Belief_ (1970), which advocates a kind of coherentism, 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.

## Infobox (philosopher)

- **region**: Western philosophy
- **era**: 20th-century philosophy
- **image**: Willard Van Orman Quine on Bluenose II in Halifax NS harbor 1980.jpg
- **caption**: Quine in 1980
- **name**: Willard Van Orman Quine
- **birth place**: Akron, Ohio, U.S.
- **death place**: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
- **education**: Oberlin College (Bachelor of Arts, BA)
Harvard University (PhD)
- **institutions**: Harvard University
- **school tradition**: Analytic philosophy, Analytic
Mathematical nominalism (1947
Mathematical quasi-empiricism (1960)
Immanent realism
Neopragmatism
Empiricism
Anti-foundationalism
Logical behaviorism
- **main interests**: Logic, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, set theory
- **influences**: Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Tarski, Vienna Circle, Clarence Irving Lewis, C. I. Lewis, Alfred North Whitehead, A. N. Whitehead, B. F. Skinner, Pierre Duhem
- **influenced**: Noam Chomsky, Roger Gibson, Donald Davidson (philosopher), Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, David Lewis (philosopher), David Lewis, Penelope Maddy, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Gilbert Harman, Hao Wang (academic), Hao Wang, Peter van Inwagen, Shunsuke Tsurumi
- **awards**: Rolf Schock Prizes, Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy
List of Kyoto Prize winners, Kyoto Prize <small>(1996)</small>
- **thesis title**: The Logic of Sequences: A Generalization of Principia Mathematica
- **thesis url**: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271047938_Quine_W_V_The_logic_of_sequences_A_generalization_of_Principia_mathematica_Harvard_dissertations_in_philosophy_Garland_Publishing_New_York_and_London_1990_xi_290_pp
- **thesis year**: 1932
- **doctoral advisor**: Alfred North Whitehead
- **academic advisors**: Clarence Irving Lewis, C. I. Lewis
- **doctoral students**: David Lewis (philosopher), David Lewis, Gilbert Harman, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Hao Wang (academic), Hao Wang, Burton Dreben, Charles Parsons (philosopher), Charles Parsons, John Myhill, Robert McNaughton
- **notable students**: Donald Davidson (philosopher), Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett