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Titolo: morto quine in tre minuti, anche meno..

quine è morto sembra contro la sua volontà a 92 anni [cut]
W.V. Quine, a logician and Harvard philosophy professor whose analysis
of language and its relation to reality made him one of the
influential philosophers of the 20th century, died on Monday in a
hospital in Boston, where he lived. He was 92. 
As a mathematical logician who wrote and published prolifically, Mr.
Quine was often perceived as a philosopher who focused his analytic
talents on apparently disparate doctrines and theses. Yet those who
understand him best insisted on his status as a thinker who addressed
and attempted to answer the larger questions of philosophy. 
Like most philosophers, Mr. Quine set out to define the reality of the
world and how human beings fit into that reality. The conclusion he
arrived at was that a person can only understand the world
empirically, or through our direct experience of it. 
In ''The Philosophy of W.V. Quine: An Expository Essay,'' a study that
the subject himself endorsed, Roger F. Gibson Jr. wrote that if Mr.
Quine's project could be summed up in a single sentence, that sentence
would read. ''Quine's philosophy is a systematic attempt to answer,
from a uniquely empiricistic point of view, what he takes to be the
central question of epistemology, namely, 'How do we acquire our
theory of the world?''' 
Mr. Quine's answer, in a nutshell, began by rephrasing the question to
read, ''How do we acquire our talk about the world?'' In his radically
empiricist view, nothing that humans know about the world lies outside
the realm of language, and so he insisted that any theory of knowledge
depended on a theory of language, which he duly set about to develop
and which became the framework of his philosophy. 
In pursuing these objectives, Mr. Quine seemed to place himself in a
distinct position among his contemporaries. If 20th-century philosophy
can be defined as a battle between what the so-called historicists ---
those who believed in speculating about and proclaiming metaphysical
truths independent of empirical evidence --- and the formalists ---
those mathematical logicians who wanted philosophy to be a historical
discipline that replaces metaphysical speculation with scientific
habits of thought --- then Mr. Quine was a standard bearer in the
latter camp, a hero of empiricism who once declared that ''philosophy
of science is philosophy enough.'' 
Yet having even fought in the ranks of the so-called logical
positivists, Mr. Quine went on to challenge them in what is arguably
the best known of his many published essays, 'Two Dogmas of
Empiricism.'' It first appeared in the Philosophical Review in January
1951 and was reprinted in 1953 in a collection of his essays titled
''From a Logical Point of View.''

quine è morto sembra contro la sua volontà a 92 anni 
W. V. Quine, a logician and Harvard philosophy professor whose
analysis of language and its relation to reality made him one of the
most influential philosophers of the 20th century, died on Monday at a
hospital in Boston, where he lived. He was 92. 
As a mathematical logician who wrote and published prolifically, Mr.
Quine was often perceived as a philosopher who focused his analytic
talents on many apparently disparate doctrines and theses. Yet those
who understood him best insisted on his status as a system builder, or
a thinker who addressed and attempted to answer the larger questions
of philosophy. 
Stuart Hampshire, a fellow philosopher, called him in 1971 "our most
distinguished living systematic philosopher." Like most philosophers,
Mr. Quine set out to define the reality of the world and how humans
fit into that reality. He concluded that a person can only understand
the world empirically, or through direct experience of it. In "The
Philosophy of W. V. Quine: An Expository Essay," a study that the
subject endorsed, Roger F. Gibson Jr. wrote that if Mr. Quine's
project could be summed up in a single sentence, that sentence would
read, "Quine's philosophy is a systematic attempt to answer, from a
uniquely empiricistic point of view, what he takes to be the central
question of epistemology, namely, `How do we acquire our theory of the
world?' " Mr. Quine's answer, in a nutshell, began by rephrasing the
question to read, "How do we acquire our talk about the world?" In his
radically empiricist view, nothing that humans know about the world
lies outside the realm of language, and so he insisted that any theory
of knowledge depended on a theory of language, which he duly set about
developing and which became the framework of his philosophy. In
pursuing this objective Mr. Quine found himself in a distinct position
among his contemporaries. Among 20th-century philosophers were the
so-called historicists those willing to speculate about and proclaim
metaphysical truths independent of empirical evidence and the
formalists those mathematical logicians who considered philosophy an
autonomous, ahistorical discipline that replaced metaphysical
speculation with scientific thinking. In the battle between followers
of those views, Mr. Quine was a standard-bearer in the latter camp, a
hero of empiricism who once declared that "philosophy of science is
philosophy enough." Changing Direction In a Scholarly Battle This led
him to fight in the ranks of the so- called logical positivists, or
those like his European friends A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap, who
asserted that all statements of truth must be based on observable
data. He even helped to shift the main ground of their battle from
Europe to the United States. Yet Mr. Quine later challenged them in
what is arguably the best known of his many published essays, "Two
Dogmas of Empiricism." It first appeared in the Philosophical Review
in January 1951 and was reprinted in 1953 in a collection of his
essays titled "From a Logical Point of View." The essay set out to
undermine the two main points of positivism. First, Mr. Quine rejected
the fundamental distinction between what Kant had called analytic and
synthetic propositions, or the distinction between statements that
seem true no matter what (like "all bachelors are unmarried") and
those that are true because of the way things happen to be (like "Mr.
X is a bachelor"). (This position, incidentally, earned him a place in
Dan Dennett's "Philosophers' Lexicon," in which names of philosophers
are construed as verbs or common nouns: to "quine" is to repudiate a
clear distinction.) To deny the distinction between analytic and
synthetic statements meant that nothing could be known independent of
experience. Second, the essay argued against what he called the dogma
of reductionism, or "the belief," as he put it, "that each meaningful
statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which
refer to immediate experience." In other words, nothing in a person's
experience lies beyond meaningful statement about it. Although this
seemed to amount to a rejection of all knowledge of a reality beyond
our senses, Mr. Quine did not completely shut the door to a world out
there. The alternative that he preferred was this explanation: "The
totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual
matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic
physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric
which impinges on experience only along the edges." This position led
him to two more conclusions about the nature of meaning and what
humans can know about objective reality. One, enunciated in his 1960
book, "Word and Object," was that when translating from one language
to another, or even from one sentence to another within the same
language, there were bound to be many contradictory ways to understand
the meaning and that there was no sense in asking which of them was
right. This works, in his view, with what he called ontological
relativity, which holds that because our theories of what exists are
not sufficiently determined by the experiences that give rise to them,
quite different accounts of what there is, each with its own
interpretation of the evidence, may be equally in accord with that
evidence. To the objection that surely at least physical objects must
figure in all theories of what is out there, Mr. Quine responded, yes,
in practice, although he said he considered physical objects a matter
of convenience. Tools for Determining The Real World "As an
empiricist," he wrote toward the end of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," "I
continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool,
ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past
experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the
situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of
experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable,
epistemologically, to the gods of Homer." He concluded: "For my part I
do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's
gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But
in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods
differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter
our conceptions only as cultural posits." Willard Van Orman Quine, or
Van to his friends, was born on June 25, 1908, in Akron, Ohio, the
second son of Cloyd Robert Quine, a machinist and successful
businessman, and Harriet (Van Orman) Quine. The surname is from the
Celtic language Manx, Mr. Quine's paternal grandfather having
emigrated from the Isle of Man to Akron. Mr. Quine was named Willard
after his mother's brother, a mathematician. The nominal connection
seemed to work. He took a liking to mathematics in high school and
majored in it at Oberlin, although philology and philosophy also
interested him early. (During his junior year at college his mother
presented him with Whitehead and Russell's "Principia Mathematica" and
Skeat's Etymological Dictionary, the latter of which, he said, "I
persistently consulted and explored over the succeeding half century,"
a fact attested to by the liveliness and clarity of his writing.) 
About his subsequent teaching career he said: "What I enjoyed most was
more the mathematical end than the philosophical, because of it being
less a matter of opinion. Clarifying, not defending. Resting on
proof." His honors thesis at Oberlin used the system of "Principia
Mathematica" to prove with 18 pages of symbols a law having to do with
ways of combining logical classes. (He later edited the 18 pages down
to three for the Journal of the London Mathematical Society.) His
thesis landed him at Harvard University, where he switched to
philosophy to study with Alfred North Whitehead. ("He radiated
greatness and seemed old as the hills," Mr. Quine wrote in his
autobiography, "The Time of My Life." "I retained a vivid sense of
being in the presence of the great.") 
Trying to Grasp The Nature of Science Only two years later, in 1932,
he had earned his Ph.D., his dissertation being an attempt, in his
words, "like `Principia,' to comprehend the foundations of logic and
mathematics and hence of the abstract nature of all science." (It was
published in revised form by the Harvard University Press with the
title "A System of Logistic.") He then went to Europe on a Sheldon
Traveling Fellowship and spent the next year in Vienna, Prague and
Warsaw, where he studied, lectured and met various members of the
Vienna Circle of logical positivists, among them Philip Frank, Moritz
Schlick, Alfred Tarski, A. J. Ayer, their English spokesman, Kurt
Gödel (who preferred not to be called a logical positivist), and
Rudolf Carnap, from whom, Mr. Quine said, "I gained more . . . than
from any other philosopher." (In Vienna he dropped a note to
Wittgenstein, who never responded.) The European interlude allowed him
to indulge his lifelong passion for crossing borders (perhaps related
to his penchant for denying distinctions, or, more likely, inspired by
a youthful ardor for philately), which, according to a count he made
late in his life, was to take him into 118 countries, over another 19,
and within sight of 8 more, among the last being China, Oman and
Bangladesh. His autobiography describes many of these visits somewhat
matter-of-factly. His early love of geography was also reflected in a
gift for drawing maps, which later extended to sketching portraits,
several of which appear in his autobiography. In 1933 he returned to
Harvard as a junior fellow in the newly formed Society of Fellows,
which meant three years of unfettered research. Another junior fellow
that year was the psychologist B. F. Skinner, with whom Mr. Quine came
to share, as he put it, "the fundamental position that an explanation
not the deepest one, but one of a shallower kind is possible at the
purest behavioral level." 
In 1936 Mr. Quine became an instructor in philosophy at Harvard, where
he taught, off and on, for the rest of his life, interrupted only by
service in the Navy during World War II, when he did cryptanalytic
work translating the German submarine cypher in Washington, as well as
by his globe-girdling travels, the bestowal of medals, prizes and some
dozen-and-a-half honorary degrees, and by lectures and classes
delivered all over the world. 
A Harvard Professor To Notable Students His students at Harvard
included Donald Davidson and Burton Dreben, the philosophers; Tom
Lehrer, the mathematician and songwriter; and Theodore J. Kaczynski,
the Unabomber ("although I don't remember him," Mr. Quine told an
interviewer, "he tied for top, 98.9 percent"). In the Navy he met
Marjorie Boynton, a Wave in his office who became his second wife in
1948. His first marriage to Naomi Clayton in 1930 ended in divorce in
1947. His second wife died in 1998. He is survived by two daughters
from his first marriage, Elizabeth Quine Roberts and Norma Quine; a
son and daughter from his second, Douglas Boynton Quine and Margaret
Quine McGovern; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson. 
A Positive View Of State Lotteries Mr. Quine published about 20 books,
some reprinted in multiple editions and several translated into as
many as eight languages. One of the more accessible works,
"Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary" (1987), was
praised in The New York Times by John Gross in general for "a deadpan
humor that can light up even the most austere subjects" and in
particular for commending the state lottery as " `a public subsidy of
intelligence,' on the grounds that `it yields public income that is
calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the
expense of the benighted masses of wishful thinkers.' " At the end of
"The Time of My Life," Mr. Quine wrote: "I am orderly and I am frugal.
For the most part my only emotion is impatience," he continued. "I am
deeply moved by occasional passages of poetry, and so,
characteristically, I read little of it." 
Although a "Quine" is defined in the New Hackers Dictionary as "a
program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete
output," Mr. Quine never wrote on a computer, always preferring the
1927 Remington typewriter that he first used for his doctoral thesis.
Because that project contained so many special symbols, he had to have
the machine adjusted by removing the second period, the second comma
and the question mark. "You don't miss the question mark?" a reporter
once asked him. "Well, you see," he replied, "I deal in certainties." 
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quine è morto sembra contro la sua volontà a 92 anni [cut[
The death, on Christmas Day, of Willard Quine deprives America of its
greatest contemporary philosopher. It also prompts us to reflect on
the place of philosophy -- or at any rate of Quine's kind of
philosophy -- in American culture. 
Quine was a lucid writer, with a refined use of language and an
ability to summarize difficult thoughts in entrancing aphorisms. He
was also a metaphysician, with a view of the world as comprehensive,
in its way, as that of Hegel. In almost all areas of logic,
metaphysics and the philosophy of science, there is a distinctive
"Quinean" position -- a position so fortified by the internal
coherence of the system as to be virtually unassailable from outside.
This ought to make Quine one of the most widely read and pondered of
American philosophers. In fact the discussion of his views is now
largely confined to the professional journals. 
One reason for this comparative neglect is that Quine had no social or
political agenda. His was an honest, logical philosophy, and his
theories, however radical, eschew all moral exhortations. He was
profoundly influenced by the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce, which sees
truth as a species of utility and scientific method as the route to
it. But Quine's pragmatism, like that of Peirce, stands at one remove
from all first-order disputes, and recognizes no avenue to knowledge
apart from scientific method. That Quine also cast serious doubt on
the absolute claims of science in no way tells against his view that
it is science, not philosophy, that answers our first-order questions.
That is one reason why Quine is worth reading. He belonged to the
intellectual tradition which included Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell,
Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Godel and Alfred Tarski, and which was,
collectively, one of the outstanding achievements of modern
philosophy. Like his predecessors, Quine saw philosophy as an
extension of logic -- a realm of pure enquiry, concerned to clean up
the tools with which we reason and to wipe away the shadows cast by
words. In face of the pretentious theories of Being with a capital "B"
-- with which the phenomenologists enrolled their congregations --
Quine's robust insistence that "to be is to be the value of a
variable" had a cheekily iconoclastic air. 
Yet behind that simple remark lies a whole philosophy, remarkable for
its range, its consistency, and its comprehensive vision of human
knowledge. Central to this philosophy was the thesis of "ontological
relativity," which holds that all tenable statements about existence
depend upon a theory, and no theory is uniquely determined by the
empirical data. Hence you and I can live in the same empirical world,
even though mine is haunted by gods, and yours by electromagnetic
waves. 
Quine was a philosophical, but not a political, iconoclast, and he
would surely have been appalled by the recent attempts to make
philosophy socially and politically "relevant." The suggestion that
pragmatism might provide a philosophical vindication of radical
politics would have gone against the grain both emotionally and
intellectually. In this he was a far cry from those philosophers who
now have an audience among the general reading public -- and notably
from Richard Rorty, who makes striking and (in my view) outrageous
claims, linking the pragmatist tradition to fashionable
"liberationist" causes. 
I never knew Quine. But I am sure that he would have regarded Mr.
Rorty's feminist pragmatism as an intellectual betrayal -- not because
Quine was a conservative (though he was), but because agenda-mongering
is incompatible with the purity of philosophical argument, as he
conceived it. It is for this reason that no one would be able to
guess, from reading his "Word and Object" or "From a Logical Point of
View," that Quine was a political conservative. 
Outside departments of philosophy it is difficult to advance in the
American academy without showing one's political colors, and they must
be the right (which is to say left) ones. Thinkers like Richard Rorty,
Jacques Derrida and Peter Singer, each of whom has swept to eminence
on the crest of some political wave, are known to all students of the
humanities, and to the reading public at large. They are the salesmen
of philosophy to the non-philosophical, but none of them compares, for
rigor, depth or truthfulness, with Quine. Intellectually and
stylistically he occupies a pinnacle far above their clouds of murky
rhetoric, and it is sad to reflect that only students of philosophy
today have any inkling of this. 
Nevertheless, thanks in part to Quine's influence, philosophy remains
one of the glories of the American academy. His extraordinary
combination of intellectual austerity and metaphysical boldness set
the example that Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and
others have followed. If the general public knows nothing of those
philosophers it is not because they are narrow specialists with no
feel for the larger issues. It is because, like Quine, they have
upheld the dignity of philosophy, as a discipline in which truth, not
relevance, is the goal. 

 conceived it. 
At one point, you need to get into the real world...
-- 
Electra
*
Beauty fades, Dumb is forever
*

 conceived it. 
At one point, you need to get into the real world...
