Willard Van Orman Quine
American philosopher and logician (1900–2000)
AI overview
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician who lived from 1900 to 2000 and made influential contributions to how we understand language, logic, and knowledge. His ideas shaped modern philosophy by challenging traditional assumptions about meaning and the relationship between what we believe and what we can know for certain.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 1
- Total plays
- 2
Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as "Van") was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continuously affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of mathematics, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Willard+va
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python
· 2020 · cited 34,710x
- Densely Connected Convolutional Networks
· 2017 · cited 32,858x
- Molecular dynamics with coupling to an external bath
· 1984 · cited 28,494x
- MrBayes 3.2: Efficient Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference and Model Choice Across a Large Model Space
Article
Willard Van Orman Quine (/kwaɪn/ KWYNE; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American logician and philosopher in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He was the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.
Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. He was famous for his position that first-order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and 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 was the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis, but continuous with science; it is 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 holism in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis.