Newsgroup: it.discussioni.folli
Titolo: morto quine in tre minuti, anche meno..

boston
il grande, due metri e due, logico e matematico americano willard van orman
quine è morto sembra contro la sua volontà a 92 anni dopo che per quasi
mezzo secolo ha ricoperto la cattedra di filosofia e logica alla prestigiosa
unidiversità di harvard
le sue analisi del linguaggio hanno contribuito in maniera determinante allo
sviluppo della filosofia del linguaggio. tra i suoi allievi più famosi ad
harvard figurano i filosofi donald davidson e burton dreben, il matematico
tom lehrer e theodore kaczynski, ma anche il famigerato unabomber, il
terrorista solitario che per anni, prima di finire in carcere, ha seminato
il panico negli usa e getta con i suoi attentati agli antenati
nato il 25 giugno 1908 a akron, nello ohio bollente, quine si laureo' ad
harvard in matematica e studiò per un certo periodo in europa (vienna,
praga, idf e varsavia), dove ebbe un incontro determinante con il celebre
filosofo rudolf carnap
i suoi più importanti contributi logici sono legati ad alcuni sviluppi della
teoria degli insiemi - insieme è meglio che da soli - tentando di eliminare
le antinomie riducendo al minimo il ricorso alle classi e/o sezioni e ai
concetti astratti, rifiutando la divisione concettuale tra proposizioni
analitiche e proposizioni sintetiche del paraflù
negli anni sessanta e settanta quine e' stato anche il piu' convinto
oppositore di noam chomski, il famoso linguista pomiciatore americano
propugnatore della teoria della grammatica generativo-trasformazionale. a
quella di Chomsky, il filosofo scomparso ha opposto la teoria e pratica
della indeterminazione del concetto di intraducibilità totale del linguaggio
fai-da-te
' j

quine è morto sembra contro la sua volontà a 92 anni [cut]
Willard Van Orman Quine hat keine singuläre These in die Welt gesetzt,
aus der sich simple Ableitungen hervorzaubern lassen. Vielmehr hat er
in den zentralen Bereichen der theoretischen Philosophie - von der
modernen Logik über die Erkenntnistheorie und die Sprachphilosophie -
derart gewaltige Meilensteine hinterlassen, dass er noch zu
Lebenzeiten als Klassiker der Philosophie gehandelt wurde. Sein
Einfluss auf den amerikanischen Neopragmatismus, der sich um die Namen
Hilary Putnam und Richard Rorty, aber auch Nelson Goodman und Donald
Davidson rankt, ist unbestreitbar. 
Die Beiträge zur Analytischen Philosophie waren bahnbrechend. Keine
Seite konnte Quine für sich vereinnahmen. Überhaupt ist der Logiker
Quine reflektiert genug gewesen, der "süßen Simplizität der
zweiwertigen Logik" skeptisch gegenüberzustehen: Für ihn muss ein Satz
keineswegs entweder wahr oder falsch sein, weil es keinen externen
Maßstab gibt, der als "tertium quid" darüber befinden könnte. Vielmehr
konnte es für Quine überhaupt kein Kriterium geben, das als
Richtschnur über Wahrheit oder Falschheit empirischer Theorien
entscheiden könnte. Wie schon bei Kant lassen sich nur Vorstellungen
mit Vorstellungen, Sätze mit Sätzen, Theorien mit Theorien
vergleichen. Ein subjektunabhängiger Standpunkt, eine
perspektivenfreie Neutralität ist niemals in Sicht. In welcher auch?
Die Wissenschaften sind eine "Begriffsbrücke" 
Was immer wir in unseren Blick rücken, es sind hochgradig
theoriebeladene Kontexte: Die Natur, die Realität oder die
Wirklichkeit selbst, sozusagen nackt und unbefleckt, neutral oder
unschuldig, steht uns nicht zur Verfügung; eine Entsprechung von
Sachverhalt und Theorie gibt es nur innerhalb von Theorien. Deshalb
konnte Quine sagen, "das System der Wissenschaft mit seiner Ontologie"
sei eine "von uns selbst gebaute Begriffsbrücke". Die so genannten
Tatsachen, die angeblichen "harten Fakten", sind allesamt Tat-Sachen;
sie sind, viel wörtlicher, als einem lieb sein kann, nur Sachen der
Tat, womit zumindest der artifizielle Charakter der Wissenschaft, ihr
ontologischer Relativismus, in Erinnerung gerufen wird. Dass hierbei
Kant und Nietzsche, aber auch Hegel Pate stehen, beginnt sich in der
amerikanischen Philosophie nach Quine herumzusprechen. Rorty schlägt
diese Brücke über den Atlantik mit seinen Hinweisen auf Dewey und lädt
dazu ein, Quine nicht nur mit Sellars, sondern auch mit Heidegger und
Gadamer zu verbinden.
Für Quine selbst, der 1908 in Akron (Ohio) geboren wurde und in
Harvard Mathematik und Philosophie studiert sowie bei Whitehead
promoviert hat, lagen die frühen Wurzeln seines Denkens im Umfeld der
Theorien von Bertrand Russell, danach von Rudolf Carnap und Alfred
Tarski, die er während eines Europa-Aufenthaltes in Prag und Warschau
kennen gelernt hat. Dieser Zugang zur Philosophie lässt sich bis in
sein Spätwerk verfolgen. Insbesondere seine Berührung mit dem
logischen Positivismus des Wiener Kreises hat ihn zu einer kritischen
Einschätzung des metaphysischen Empirismus veranlasst und seither dazu
bewogen, den von ihm analysierten "Dogmen des Empirismus" eine
konstruktive Alternative zu etablieren. Waren da zunächst noch die
Auseinandersetzungen mit Fragen zur Logik und Mathematik, die sich in
den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren unter anderem in Texten wie A
System of Logic (1934) oder Mathematical Logic (1940) sowie Elementary
Logic (1941) niedergeschlagen haben, kam es Anfang der fünfziger Jahre
- nach einem dreijährigen kriegsbedingten Intermezzo bei der US-Navy -
zum ersten großen Wurf, der ihn als Harvard-Philosoph über Amerika
hinaus berühmt gemacht hat. Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) und From A
Logical Point of View (1953) waren neben vielen anderen Schriften die
Ausgangspunkte für Quines Beschäftigung mit der Sprachphilosophie und
der Ontologie, die dann in Word and Object (1960) in einem kohärenten
empiristischen Gesamtentwurf mit provozierenden Stellungnahmen
einmünden.
Wie in allen großen denkerischen Leistungen finden sich bei Quine
vorwiegend Fragestellungen, die zur Reflexion anregen, und keine
fertigen Wahrheiten, die sich in die Welt hinausposaunen lassen. Sein
letztes Werk trägt die Überschrift Unterwegs zur Wahrheit, was an
Lessings berühmte Formel erinnert, derzufolge die "Wahrheit keine
Münze" wäre, sondern ungemünzt bleiben muss, um sich bedarfsgerecht
ummünzen zu lassen oder "Wert einer Variablen" zu bleiben. Zugleich
erinnert uns dies an Nietzsche, für den es aufgrund unserer
Schematisierungen keine Wahrheit gibt: "Es gibt keine Wahrheit", sogar
"um der Wahrheit willen", und "der Werth für das Leben entscheidet
zuletzt". 
Die Suche nach ewiger Wahrheit ist fruchtlos 
Und doch war für Quine die Wahrheit ein heuristisches Ideal; sie
bleibt zu sich selbst unterwegs, weil ihr der Zugang zu einer externen
Realität, die ihre jeweiligen Bedingungen und Voraussetzungen
überschreiten könnte, verwehrt ist. Darum nannte Quine "die
Wissenschaft nichts weiter als eine höchst ausgefeilte Form des
gesunden Menschenverstandes", der an "unterschiedlichen Stellen in
unterschiedlichem Maße fehlbar ist". Die Wissenschaft "kann jederzeit
einmal berichtigt werden müssen, doch bietet sich uns eben schlicht
und einfach keine andere Zugangsmöglichkeit zur Wahrheit". 
Welche Gegenstände für die Wissenschaft relevant sein können,
entscheidet sich jedoch nicht unabhängig vom historischen,
pragmatischen und kulturellen Zusammenhang, innerhalb dessen eine
Bestimmtheit aus dem "Sperrfeuer sinnlicher Reize" isoliert wird.
Deshalb kann es für Quine auch keine neutralen Fakten geben, die dem
Relationengeflecht von Empirie, Sprache und Theorie entzogen wären.
Was immer uns erscheint, erscheint uns bereits interpretiert als
etwas, das sich unserer eigenen Zurüstung und Einteilung durch
zweckmäßige Auswahl, Abgrenzung und Isolation verdankt. Die Suche nach
ewigen Wahrheiten, nach einer gesicherten Erkenntnisbasis oder nach
letzten Begründungen außerhalb unserer eigenen Welterzeugungen ist
fruchtlos.
Die philosophische Wahrheitssuche ist für Quine keineswegs obsolet -
doch sie findet nur innerhalb von Beschreibungssystemen statt. Das
heißt: Die metaphysische Wende, die sich alle großen Philosophen
zugute halten, besteht darin, dass die jeweils erreichte und wirksame
Wahrheit ihre ganze Realität ausmacht, jedenfalls solange sie sich auf
ein reflexiv einholbares Wissen stützt. Dann verwandelt sich eine
naive Wahrheit in eine philosophische Weisheit; immanente Relevanz
ersetzt transzendente Realität, und die Objekte der Wissenschaft
verhärten sich zu kulturellen Erfindungen, die wir um ihrer
Plausibilität willen aus der metaphorischen Wirklichkeit in eine
begriffliche Realität projizieren. So glauben wir an einen
Fortschritt, der von Homer bis Einstein stattgefunden hat oder
stattgefunden haben könnte. "Was mich angeht", schrieb Quine schon
1951, "glaube ich ... an physikalische Objekte und nicht an die Götter
Homers ... Doch hinsichtlich ihrer epistemologischen Fundierung
unterscheiden sich physikalische Objekte und Homers Götter nur
graduell und nicht prinzipiell. Beide Arten Entitäten kommen nur aus
kulturellen Setzungen in unser Denken. Der Mythos der physikalischen
Objekte ist epistemologisch den meisten anderen darin überlegen, dass
er sich darin wirksamer als andere Mythen erwiesen hat, dem Fluss der
Erfahrungen eine handliche Struktur aufzuprägen." 
Für Quine gab es immer "mehr als nur eine angemessene Möglichkeit,
sich die Welt zu denken". Die Welt besteht eben aus verschiedenen
Kontexten, und auch in diesen artikuliert sich eine Plausibilität, die
sich "unterwegs zur Wahrheit" befindet. Dabei geht es nicht um ein
"endgültiges Richtig oder Falsch", sondern "eher um ein Besser oder
Schlechter", womit sich das Wahrheitskriterium in ein
Meliorationskriterium verschiebt. Das mag eingefleischten
Wahrheitsfanatikern als erbärmlich wenig erscheinen. Aber mehr als
Plausibilität im Kontext der Kultur zu erwarten, hieße, jene massiven
Dogmen zu vertreten, die Quine erfolgreich verabschiedet hat.
Am ersten Weihnachtsfeiertag ist Quine im Alter von 92 Jahren in
Boston verstorben.

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." 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

quine è morto sembra contro la sua volontà a 92 anni [cut]
Willard Van Orman Quine, who has died aged 92, was arguably the
greatest American philosopher of the second half of the 20th century.
He revolutionised developments in epistemology, metaphysics, logic,
philosophy of language and philosophy of maths. 
In 1951, his article Two Dogmas Of Empiricism caused a furore in the
philosophical world. It challenged received notions of knowledge,
meaning and truth, and exceeded even the extreme empiricism of logical
positivism by arguing that logic and maths, like factual statements,
are open to revision in the light of experience. Experience, added
Quine, does not confirm or falsify individual statements, but instead
confronts an interlocking theory-laden system of statements, which has
to be adjusted as a whole. And there cannot be any universally-held
system of beliefs, he argued in his major work Word And Object (1960),
since the way any theory describes the world is relative to that
theory's linguistic background. Quine revised and clarified such
theses in more than 20 books and numerous articles, all written in a
distinctive crisp, witty style. He taught at Harvard from 1936 -
becoming a full professor in 1948 - until his retirement in 1978, and
lectured all over the world. 
The youngest son of an engineer, Quine was born in "a modest frame
house" in Akron, Ohio. He chose scientific courses at his local high
school. An ardent stamp collector and list-maker, he was fascinated by
etymology, and obsessed with maps and faraway places. His interest in
philosophy began when, aged nine, he became worried by the absurdity
of heaven and hell, and only stopped being worried about the
dangerousness of his doubts when he realised that they might be
justified. Late in high school his brother, already a student at
Oberlin College, gave him William James's Pragmatism, which he read
compulsively, along with Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga. But he always
said it was reading Eureka, a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, when
aged 14, that first filled him with a desire to understand the
universe. 
When he went to Oberlin, a fellow poker-player told him about a
philosopher of mathematics called Bertrand Russell, and he decided to
major in maths, with philosophy of mathematics as a supplement.
Quine's years at Oberlin were idyllic. His rooming house, full of
kindred spirits, was "an ideal setting in which to wax articulate".
His "appetite for cosmic understanding" was sharpened by reading
Russell. In the summer of 1928 he and two friends crossed the
continent, jumping on to moving boxcars, and spending nights on
benches or in prisons. He also found time, somewhat reluctantly, to
marry a fellow-student. 
Quine was awarded a scholarship to Harvard, where he did a PhD in only
two years. During his first year, Bertrand Russell gave a lecture, and
afterwards Alfred Whitehead (who had co-written Principia Mathematica
with him) introduced Russell to the young philosopher, leading to an
exchange of books and letters. The following year, Quine visited
Europe on a travelling fellowship, and met members of the Vienna
Circle (the anti-metaphysical Logical Positivists), their British
disciple AJ Ayer, and the young Kurt Gödel, who had just produced his
renowned incompleteness theorem. 
The next three months were "intellectually the most rewarding" of his
life - six weeks in Warsaw with Alfred Tarski and other innovatory
Polish logicians, and six in Prague, where, taken up by the prime
logical positivist Rudolf Carnap, Quine discovered what it was to be
"intellectually fired by a living teacher rather than by a dead book".
They conducted endless discussions together in German, and Quine was
lent the typescript of the book Carnap was writing, handed to him
sheaf by sheaf from the typewriter as Carnap's wife Ina typed it. He
became Carnap's "ardent disciple", and although they were to become
increasingly combative philosophically, they remained firm friends. 
Quine returned to a junior fellowship at Harvard and to the
publication of his thesis - his first book, A System Of Logistics.
During the 1930s he developed his ideas in many articles, mainly on
logic and set theory (most distinctively propounded in New Foundations
Of Mathematics, 1937, and Mathematical Logic, 1940), and on existence
and ontology. On What There Is (1948) contained his famous typically
succinct formula: "To be is to be the value of a variable." 
When Carnap visited Harvard in 1940, Quine and Tarski (also visiting)
challenged him on the view crucial to logical positivism that, while
most of what we say is verified or falsified by experience, there are
some statements (in logic and mathematics) that are necessarily true
come what may, by virtue of the meaning of their terms. (This was the
only way the positivists could cater for the fact that the latter sort
of statements are so obviously incapable of being tested by
experience.) In his seminal Two Dogmas Of Empiricism, however, Quine
declared it "folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements,
which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements, which
hold come what may". By denying the analytic-synthetic distinction,
Quine made even the "truths" of logic and mathematics empirical. No
longer the central planks around which our beliefs are arrayed,
logical and mathematical statements can (in principle) be modified,
even abandoned, in the light of experience, as factual statements are.
This was heresy in all philosophical camps. What experience, it might
be asked, could lead anyone remotely to query the apparently
adamantine logical law of excluded middle (that every proposition is
necessarily either true or not true, and each thing either has or
lacks any given property)? Even that law might, said Quine, be
revisable as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics, and so might
the principle of causality. "Any statement can be held true come what
may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system [of
our beliefs]." For the "totality of our so-called knowledge or
beliefs, from the most causal matters of geography and history to the
profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and
logic, is a manmade fabric which impinges on experience only along the
edges", so that "a conflict with experience at the periphery occasions
readjustments in the interior of the field". But, said Quine, "no
particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in
the interior of the field", contrary to what empiricists had
dogmatically assumed. Locke and Hume had held that the basic
ingredients of our knowledge are sensory impressions (or the terms for
them). For Bentham and later Frege, and the logical positivists, it
was the individual statement, not the individual term, that was to be
matched against experience. 
Quine argued that "our statements about the external world face the
tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate
body". Since any observation sentence is theory-laden, the "unit of
empirical significance is the whole of science". Later, Quine would
argue for a more "moderate holism" in which not the whole of science,
but sizeable chunks of it, were the units for empirical revision. And
he urged the "maxim of minimum mutilation" in revising. But he always
declared that philosophy and science were in the same boat, a boat
which, as in Neurath's simile, we are forced to rebuild plank by plank
while staying afloat in it. For "there is no external vantage point,
no first philosophy" by which to remodel it from outside - it is never
docked and crewless on dry land. 
Two Dogmas Of Empiricism established his reputation universally. It
was published with other articles in From A Logical Point Of View (the
title being suggested by a calypso number of Harry Belafonte's) in
1953, while Quine was Eastman professor at Oxford. Word And Object
(1960) attacked prevailing philosophical theories which see meanings
as objects in a museum of ideas, with verbal expressions as their
arbitrary, interchangeable labels. Quine agreed with Wittgenstein and
with the pragmatist John Dewey that language is a form of behaviour.
He introduced the concept of an utterance's "stimulus meaning" - the
set of stimulations which would prompt a person to assent to that
utterance. 
But, he said, whereas assent and dissent are ascertainable in kindred
or culturally similar languages, there is no guarantee that just
because the speaker of a radically foreign language ("Jungle") always
says "Gavagai" when a rabbit runs past, he means "Rabbit" or "Lo, a
rabbit". The word could equally well mean "undetached rabbit-part" or
"rabbithood", and a Jungle-speaker's assent or dissent in the presence
of assorted stimulations proves inconclusive. 
The usual checks against other parts of a language are impossible,
since they involve the use of parts of speech, identity concepts, and
"if thens", which are also all up for grabs when translating Jungle
into English. In such cases of "radical translation", different
translators, working independently on Jungle, could thus produce quite
divergent manuals of translation, each compatible with the totality of
the native-speakers' verbal behaviour, but incompatible with one
another. And furthermore, Quine argued, the reason for this is not
that we can never know which of these translations is correct. The
"indeterminacy of translation" he had diagnosed also involves "the
inscrutability of reference". Since there is no language-independent
meaning of "Gavagai" or any other expression, there is no determinate
classification of what exists, only ontological relativity: what a
theory says exists is relative to the manual of translation it uses. 
Quine's prolific output and obsession with travelling continued up to
and beyond his retirement. He preferred to learn his audience's
German, Spanish, Portuguese or whatever, and lecture in that rather
than English. He was distinguished by his openness and generosity to
students, acknowledging the "close collaboration" on Word and Object
of Donald Davidson, then a Harvard classics student, later to be a
renowned philosopher. 
Quine is often considered a behaviourist (someone who sees all mental
life as nothing more than observable behaviour). Certainly he claimed
that behaviourism is essential in linguistics, but he eventually
adopted Davidson's anomalous monism, which holds that, although there
is nothing over and above the physical, our mental states cannot
neatly be identified with our brain states, or subsumed under physical
laws. 
As for the immemorial problem of how we can know about the world
around us, his "naturalised epistemology" relocated the problem as
that of how we learn to talk about things. If there is any dualistic
split, it is not that between mind and body, but between physical
objects, including humans, and the concepts that refer to them. 
"I have been accused of denying consciousness," Quine said, "but I am
not conscious of having done so." Indicatively, however, his 1985
autobiography, The Time Of My Life, is little more than a travel
itinerary, so devoid of emotion and internality as almost to suggest
not only that he had neither, but hardly even knew what they might be.
Quine had many friends, a very happy second marriage, loved Dixieland
jazz and played the banjo in jazz groups. He is survived by two
daughters from his first marriage, and a son and daughter from his
second, and several grandchildren. Willard Van Orman Quine,
philosopher, born June 25 1908; died December 25 2000 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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. 

quine è morto sembra contro la sua volontà a 92 anni [cut]
Willard Van Orman Quine, 92, for decades one of the luminaries of the
American academic world, a philosopher who did his thinking about
thought itself, died on Christmas Day in Boston, where he lived. The
cause of death was not reported. 
Dr. Quine taught at Harvard University for more than 40 years,
publishing more than 20 books and winning a reputation as one of the
foremost figures in American philosophy, as a specialist in
mathematical logic and in the meaning of language. 
Although perhaps little known to the public, Dr. Quine, with his more
than 150 scholarly articles, took a vigorous hand in the struggles
that roiled his discipline, and continued to be active long after his
formal retirement in 1978. He was widely read in college courses and
was renowned for his penetrating criticism of some established
doctrines. He was a man of mathematical precision, logical exactitude
and formidable mental stamina. He lived on Boston's Beacon Hill, rode
the subway to his office in Cambridge, and dealt with questions that
might trouble any of his fellow passengers in some way at some time,
but that few of them could deal with at such intellectual depth. His
life's work was to find answers to questions such as these: What do we
Know? Can we Know? How do we know that we Know? What things do we take
for granted in trying to know -- and how does the language we use
determine how we think and how we view the world? What occupied him,
he said, was this: "How is it possible that we, on the basis of just
the triggering of our sense receptors, have developed this elaborate
theory about the world all the way out to the distant constellations
and down to the imperceptibly small?" 
Dr. Quine was known for expressing himself in a way that often sliced
through academic verbiage. "The lore of our fathers is a fabric of
sentences," he once wrote. "A pale gray lore, black with fact and
white with convention." 
Among philosophers, Dr. Quine was known in particular for his effort
to wipe out what was once thought to be an important distinction
between varieties of truth. One type was said to be analytic, the
other synthetic. Dubbed analytic were statements that seemed innately,
inherently, linguistically true. Those dubbed synthetic were
statements considered true because they reflected the way things are.
Some philosophers viewed this distinction as a boundary between two
distinct kinds of knowledge. One kind was knowledge that could be
deduced by reason. The other was knowledge that could be obtained
empirically, through experience. 
In one of the works for which he was best known, "Two Dogmas of
Empiricism," published in 1951, Dr. Quine argued against the validity
of this distinction. Perhaps an even more influential book was "Word
and Object," which he published in 1960. It elaborated on his idea
that how people talk about the external world determines how they see
it. "The idea of reducing the unfamiliar to the familiar -- that's
what we have in science," he once said. Dr. Quine was born in Akron,
Ohio, studied mathematics at Oberlin College, and earned a philosophy
doctorate at Harvard. 
Although he was hired at Harvard to teach philosophy, he said, he was
strongly attracted to mathematics "because of it being less a matter
of opinion. Clarifying, not defending. Resting on proof." He taught
mathematical logic and set theory, and a course on logic in
philosophy. During World War II he was a Navy officer, helping to
decipher communication codes used by German submarines. It turned out
that one of those who had taken one of his classes was Theodore J.
Kaczynski, who was convicted in the Unabomber case. 
"Just the other day," a Boston area newspaper quoted him in 1996, "I
took out my old records. I did teach Kaczynski, although I don't
remember him. He tied for top, 98.9 percent." In addition to important
figures in the world of academic philosophy, his students also
included Tom Lehrer, the song satirist. Set theory, in which Dr. Quine
worked, could be used in analyzing philosophical propositions, and as
an underpinning for the functioning of computers. 
ears ago, he told a reporter that "I'm pretty sure I'm not interested
in computers." He said that he was "only interested in theory. Not its
application." His marriage to Naomi Clayton ended in divorce. He
married his second wife, Marjorie Boynton, in 1948. She died in 1998.
Survivors include two children from his first marriage and two from
his second. 

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

 Morto Anthony Quine, padre del famoso attore Aidan, figlio d'arte di
padre attore.
I funerali si svolgeranno stamattina alle 19 di sera nella chiesa di
San Giuliano. 
Per necrologie: PUBLIKOMPASS 090/776633