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W. V. Quine was born in Akron, Ohio to his father, a manufacturing engineer, and his mother, a school teacher (Follesdal, 2).
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Quine entered Oberlin College in 1926 (Orenstein, 3) Quine acquired his B.A. in mathematics from Oberlin College in 1930 and then received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1932 from Harvard (Follesdal, 2).
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During WWII, Quine served the U.S. Navy in an intelligence role breaking German submarine code. Through which, he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander (Orenstein, 8).
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Published in 1951 (Orenstein, 7). This paper can be seen as the most influential paper of twentieth-century philosophy (Godfrey, 31). Quine called for a holistic theory of testing arguing that one must look at the larger whole to understand a particular thing. The thought is that when one is testing a single idea, they are actually testing a long conjunction of statements. If a test results in failure, it may be that one of the items in the conjunction or network of ideas is wrong (Godfrey, 32).
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Appearing in 1971 (Orenstein, 8), Quine's paper "Epistemology Naturalized" is often thought to be the beginning of modern naturalism (Godfrey, 150). He thought that philosophers should not give "foundations" to their scientific knowledge. In a more radical thought, he argued that epistemological questions are so closely related to psychology, that psychology should absorb epistemology altogether (Godfrey, 151).
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At age 92, W. V. Quine died in Boston, Massachusetts (Lambert).
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Willard Van Orman Quine can be argued to be the most influential philosopher on the latter half of the twentieth-century (Orenstien, 1). He sought to unify philosophy and natural science and his holistic empiricism changed the philosophy of science (Orenstein).
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Watch this short video to learn more about Quine's views on Ontology!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhHIVEN839s -
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. "Theory and Reality : An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science". University of Chicago Press, 2003. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip&db=nlebk&AN=324622&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
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Lambert, K. (2001). "In memoriam: Willard van orman quine". Erkenntnis, 54(3), 273-276. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy1.apus.edu/10.1023/A:1010620609858
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Orenstein, Alex. "W. V. O. Quine", Routledge, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3060909. Accessed 06 April 2019
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FØLLESDAL, DAGFINN. “Willard Van Orman Quine.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 156, no. 1, Mar. 2012, pp. 99–104. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip&db=i3h&AN=86229367&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 06April2019