Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine,Patricia Smith Churchland &Dagfinn Føllesdal -1960 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.detailsWillard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is asocial art.
Ontological Relativity and Other Essays.Willard Van Orman Quine -1969 - New York: Columbia University Press.detailsThis volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.
From a Logical Point of View.Willard Van Orman Quine -1953 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.detailsSeveral of these essays have been printed whole in journals; others are in varying degrees new. Two main themes run through them. One is the problem of meaning, particularly as involved in the notion of an analytic statement. The other is the notion of ontological, commitment, particularly as involved in the problem of universals.
(4 other versions)Two Dogmas of Empiricism.Willard V. O. Quine -1951 -Philosophical Review 60 (1):20–43.detailsModern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)
The web of belief.Willard Van Orman Quine &J. S. Ullian -1970 - New York,: Random House. Edited by J. S. Ullian.detailsA compact, coherent introduction to the study of rational belief, this text provides points of entry to such areas of philosophy as theory of knowledge, methodology of science, and philosophy of language. The book is accessible to all undergraduates and presupposes no philosophical training.
Theories and things.W. V. O. Quine (ed.) -1981 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.detailsThings and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...
The ways of paradox, and other essays.Willard Van Orman Quine (ed.) -1976 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.detailsA respected Harvard logician and philosopher gathers together twenty-nine writings dealing with the foundations of mathematics, Rudolf Carnap, lin-guistics, ...
(1 other version)Pursuit of truth.Willard Van Orman Quine -1992 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.details" This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth ...
(1 other version)The roots of reference.W. V. Quine -1973 - LaSalle, Ill.,: Open Court.detailsOur only channel of information about the world is the impact of external forces on our sensory surfaces. So says science itself. There is no clairvoyance. How, then, can we have parlayed this meager sensory input into a full-blown scientific theory of the world? This is itself a scientific question. The pursuit of it, with free use of scientific theory, is what I call naturalized epistemology. The Roots of Reference falls within that domain. Its more specific concern, within that domain, (...) is reference to concrete and abstract objects: what such reference consists in, and how we achieve it. (shrink)
Quiddities: an intermittently philosophical dictionary.Willard Van Orman Quine -1987 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.detailsQuine's areas of interest are panoramic, as this lively book amply demonstrates.
(5 other versions)On what there is.Willard Van Orman Quine -1948 -Review of Metaphysics 2 (5):21-38.detailsSuppose now that two philosophers, McX and I, differ over ontology. Suppose McX maintains there is something which I maintain there is not. McX can, quite consistently with his own point of view, describe our difference of opinion by saying that I refuse to recognize certain entities. I should protest of course that he is wrong in his formulation of our disagreement, for I maintain that there are no entities, of the kind which he alleges, for me to recognize; but (...) my finding him wrong in his formulation of our disagreement is unimportant, for I am committed to considering him wrong in his ontology anyway. When I try to formulate our difference of opinion, on the other hand, I seem to be in a predicament. I cannot admit that there are some things which McX countenances and I do not, for in admitting that there are such things I should be contradicting my own rejection of them. (shrink)
(1 other version)From stimulus to science.Willard Van Orman Quine -1992 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.detailsFor the faithful there is much to ponder. In this short book, based on lectures delivered in Spain in 1990, Quine begins by locating his work historically.
Philosophy of Logic (2nd Edition).W. V. Quine -1986 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.detailsWith his customary incisiveness, W. V. Quine presents logic as the product of two factors, truth and grammar--but argues against the doctrine that the logical truths are true because of grammar or language. Rather, in presenting a general theory of grammar and discussing the boundaries and possible extensions of logic, Quine argues that logic is not a mere matter of words.
Carnap and logical truth.Willard van Orman Quine -1954 -Synthese 12 (4):350--74.detailsKant's question 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' pre- cipitated the Critique of Pure Reason. Question and answer notwith- standing, Mill and others persisted in doubting that such judgments were possible at all. At length some of Kant's own clearest purported.
(2 other versions)Philosophy of Logic.Willard V. O. Quine -1986 -Philosophy 17 (3):392-393.detailsWith his customary incisiveness, W. V. Quine presents logic as the product of two factors, truth and grammar-but argues against the doctrine that the logical truths are true because of grammar or language. Rather, in presenting a general theory of grammar and discussing the boundaries and possible extensions of logic, Quine argues that logic is not a mere matter of words.
Two Dogmas in Retrospect.Willard van Orman Quine -1991 -Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (3):265 - 274.detailsIn retrospecting "Two Dogmas" I find myself overshooting by twenty years. I think back to college days, 61 years agao. I majored in mathematics and was doing my honors reading in mathematical logic, a subject that had not yet penetrated the Oberlin curriculum. My new love, in the platonic sense, was Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.
(2 other versions)Set Theory and its Logic.Willard van Orman Quine -1963 - Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press.detailsThis is an extensively revised edition of Mr. Quine's introduction to abstract set theory and to various axiomatic systematizations of the subject. The treatment of ordinal numbers has been strengthened and much simplified, especially in the theory of transfinite recursions, by adding an axiom and reworking the proofs. Infinite cardinals are treated anew in clearer and fuller terms than before. Improvements have been made all through the book; in various instances a proof has been shortened, a theorem strengthened, a space-saving (...) lemma inserted, an obscurity clarified, an error corrected, a historical omission supplied, or a new event noted. (shrink)
Confessions of a confirmed extensionalist: and other essays.Willard Van Orman Quine -2008 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Edited by Dagfinn Føllesdal & Douglas B. Quine.detailsThese essays, along with several manuscripts published here for the first time, offer a more complete and highly defined picture than ever before of one of the ...