Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine, the most consequential American philosopher of the late twentieth century, was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1908. He became an atheist at nine and remained one for life. He graduated from Oberlin College summa cum laude in mathematics in 1930, and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1932 under Whitehead.

A Harvard Junior Fellowship freed him to travel Europe in 1932-33. In Prague he met Rudolf Carnap, whom he later called his "only true maitre a penser." In Warsaw he worked with Tarski and Lesniewski. In 1939 he arranged for Tarski to be invited to a Cambridge conference; Tarski sailed on the last ship out of Danzig. During the war Quine served in the U.S. Navy decoding German submarine traffic, reaching lieutenant commander.

He held the Edgar Pierce Chair from 1956 to 1978. His students included David Lewis, Daniel Dennett, Gilbert Harman and Dagfinn Follesdal. His 1951 paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism toppled two pillars of logical positivism. The first dogma — the distinction between analytic statements true by meaning and synthetic statements true by fact — collapses because synonymy can be defined only circularly. The second — that each statement is verified separately — gives way to confirmation holism: statements face experience as a corporate body, the Duhem-Quine thesis.

In Word and Object (1960) he introduced the indeterminacy of translation. A field linguist hearing a native say "gavagai" while a rabbit appears cannot decide whether the term means "rabbit," "undetached rabbit parts" or "rabbit time-slice." Meaning and ontology are theory-relative. Quine then proposed naturalised epistemology: knowledge becomes continuous with empirical psychology, not a higher tribunal. He won the Schock Prize (1993) and Kyoto Prize (1996). Suffering Alzheimer's, he quipped: "I do not remember whether my illness is Althusser or Alzheimer, but since I cannot remember it, it must be Alzheimer."