Work
Quine's Ph.D. thesis and early publications were on formal logic and set theory. Only after WWII did he, by virtue of seminal papers on ontology, epistemology and language, emerge as a major philosopher. By the 1960s, he had worked out his "naturalized epistemology" whose aim was to answer all substantive questions of knowledge and meaning using the methods and tools of the natural sciences. Quine roundly rejected the notion that there should be a "first philosophy", a theoretical standpoint somehow prior to natural science and capable of justifying it. These views are intrinsic to his naturalism.
Quine could lecture in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German, as well as his native English. But like the logical positivists, he evinced little interest in the philosophical canon: only once did he teach a course in the history of philosophy, on Hume. Quine has an Erdős number of 3.
Read more about this topic: Willard Van Orman Quine
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Let’s holler and ask him if he won’t prescribe
For all humanity a complete rest
From all this wagery. But what’s the use
Of asking any sympathy of him?
That class of people don’t know what work is....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“This life is a war we are not yet
winning for our daughters’ children.
Don’t do your enemies’ work for them.
Finish your own.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)