Willard Van Orman Quine also known as W V Quine

By RGuidry

  • Date of Birth

    He was born in Akron Ohio to Cloyd Robert Quine, who was a manufacturing entrepreneur and an engineer, and to Harriet Ellis Van Orman who was a teacher. Føllesdal, Dagfinn. “WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 156, no. 1, American Philosophical Society, Mar. 2012, pp. 99–104, http://search.proquest.com/docview/1266033448/.
  • Period: to

    U. S. Naval Officer

    He left Harvard to become a naval intelligence officer and served in Washington DC. He first was a Lieutenant and them was promoted to Lieutenant Commander. He assisted in decrypting messages off the coast from German submarines. He wrote later that "the Germans had a replica Enigma breaking complicated ciphers." https://plato.Stanford.edu/entries/quine/
    http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Quine.html
  • Period: to

    Harvard Professor

    He became a professor at Harvard University and stayed there until he retired. He was a theoretical philosophy professor who was also a mathematical logician. He was possibly best known for his arguments against Logical Empiricism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/

  • wrote "Methods of Logic"

    According to Follesdal & Parsons, "He is careful to distinguish use and mention and variables proper, ranging over a domain of objects from schematic letters, dummies that replace expressions of different syntactic categories."
    Follesdal, Dagfinn, and Charles Parsons. “In Memoriam: Willard Van Orman Quine, 1908-2000.” The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 8, no. 1, 2002, pp. 105–110. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2687745. Accessed 5 Apr. 2020.

  • wrote the paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"

    "He had attacked the distinction between ‘analytic’ & ‘synthetic’ that played such a crucial role with Kant and throughout modern philosophy" per Clark.
    Clark, Chalmers C. "Willard Van Orman Quine." Great Thinkers A-Z, Julian Baggini, and Jeremy Stangroom, Continuum, 1st edition, 2004. Credo Reference, https://search-credoreference-com.ezproxy1.apus.edu/content/entry/contgt/willard_van_orman_quine/0. Accessed 05 Apr. 2020.

  • became Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard

    He became the Edgar Peirce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and kept it until his retirement in 1978.
    http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Quine.html

  • Watch Willard Van Orman Quine Interview with Bryan Magee

    (https://youtu.be/Pf91msFW7ds)

  • wrote autobiography

    He wrote his autobiography, "The Time of my Life" in 1985 https://plato.Stanford.edu/entries/quine/

  • Rolf Schock Prize

    He received this prize from the "King of Sweden with a laurel wreath and a cannon salute [first award in 'Logic and Philosophy' for his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning - in particular the works From a Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), and Pursuit of Truth (1990, 1992)'.]"
    www.wvquine.org

  • Received the Kyoto Prize in Tokyo

    He received the "Kyoto Prize for the Creative Arts and Moral Sciences focused on the field of philosophy and made the award to Quine as one of America's pre-eminent 20th century philosophers" in Tokyo in 1996. http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Quine.html

  • Date of Death

    He passed away at the age of 92 on Monday at the hospital in Boston where he resided. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/29/arts/w-v-quine-philosopher-who-analyzed-language-and-reality-dies-at-92.html