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[SafeSurf Rated All Ages]Obituaries, memorials, symposia, and photographs of Willard Van Orman Quine, mathematician and philosopher. Professor Quine was born June 25 1908 (anti-Christmas) and died December 25 2000 (Christmas). The last paper he presented was Three Networks: Similarity, Implication, and Membership in Boston (August 1998); it was published in Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 6. Extensive visitor comments regarding his philosophy may be read in the read in the W V Quine guest book where you may sign into (email) the guestbook: [guestbook] to post your comments & questions . This page is maintained by Douglas Boynton Quine; please e-mail recommended additions, or corrections to the webmaster: [webmaster]

News Media Obituary Texts (sources R-Z)

La Repubblica obituary for W V Quine - Dec 30 2000

È morto Quine filosofo e logico - Lo studioso aveva 92 anni
di Franco Volpi

Se ne va con Willard Van Orman Quine - logico, matematico e filosofo statunitense - uno dei grandi maestri della filosofia del Novecento, un pensatore lucido e geniale che con la sua opera ha dato un contributo determinante allo sviluppo della filosofia analitica, di cui era considerato uno dei capiscuola. Nato il 25 giugno 1908 ad Akron, nell'Ohio, aveva conseguito il dottorato ad Harvard con Whitehead, e aveva poi trascorso un periodo di studi in Europa, venendo in contato con la Scuola di Varsavia e il Circolo di Vienna. Aveva conosciuto personalmente a Varsavia Lesniewski, Lukasiewicz e Tarski, a Vienna Gödel e Schlick, a Praga Carnap. Tornato ad Harvard nel 1933, vi aveva insegnato fino al 1977, prima come professore associato e dal 1948 come full professor, svolgendo nel corso degli anni anche un'intensa attività di visiting professor, tra l'altro a São Paulo, Oxford, Adelaide, Tokio, Parigi e Uppsala. Confrontandosi specialmente con Carnap, Quine intende liberare l'empirismo logico del Circolo di Vienna dai suoi presupposti dogmatici, arricchendolo nel contempo con argomenti tratti dalla tradizione del pragmatismo americano. Inizialmente si era dedicato soprattutto a studi di logica e matematica (Methods of Logics, 1950), allargando però il suo orizzonte di ricerca già in From a Logical Point of View (1953), una raccolta di saggi tra cui due fondamentali: On what there is (1948), che propone un'ontologia minimale, in cui è ammesso solo il minor numero possibile di entità, e Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951), che suscitò una vasta controversia e aprì nuove prospettive della filosofia analitica. Quine vi mette a nudo due presupposti dogmatici dell'empirismo logico: la distinzione tra "giudizi analitici" e "giudizi sintetici" - sostenendo l'impossibilità di conseguire un concetto chiaro di "analiticità" - e il cosiddetto "riduzionismo", secondo cui tutte le nostre proposizioni si possono ridurre a proposizioni empiriche verificabili. Per Quine nessuna proposizione può essere verificata isolatamente, ma tutti i nostri enunciati si presentano per così dire "di fronte al tribunale dell'esperienza sensibile come un collettivo".

Negli anni Cinquanta fu sempre più attratto da questioni di ontologia e filosofia del linguaggio, maturando una sua originale posizione esposta nella sua opera maggiore: Word and Object (1960). Cercando di spiegare come il nostro uso del linguaggio ci connetta con il mondo, egli sostiene, contro Noam Chomsky, la tesi che il nostro comportamento linguistico è una reazione a stimoli del nostro apparato percettivo, e illustra le sue argomentazioni con un celebre e controverso esempio: che cosa deve fare un linguista per compilare il vocabolario di un linguaggio a lui del tutto sconosciuto? L'osservazione empirica del comportamento linguistico, unico strumento a sua disposizione, è insufficiente a stabilire una corrispondenza precisa di significati con la propria lingua. Quine giunge allora a sostenere la tesi dell'indeterminatezza della traduzione, quindi dell'indeterminatezza del significato e infine dell'indeterminatezza delle nostre teorie. Congetture, ipotesi scientifiche ed edifici teorici che noi costruiamo rimangono sempre sottodeterminati rispetto alla base empirica cui si riferiscono, e ciò spiega perché ci possano essere due teorie fra loro incompatibili e tuttavia entrambe accordabili con i dati empirici.

Quindi ha proposto un'intera serie di strategie per evitare o superare pragmaticamente questa indeterminatezza, pubblicando una serie di studi che sono tra quanto di migliore il dibattito filosofico mondiale ha offerto negli ultimi decenni : The Ways of Paradox (1966), Ontological Relativity (1969), The Roots of Reference (1974), Theories and Things (1981), il brillante e gustosissimo dizionario filosofico Quiddities (1987), The Pursuit of Truth (1990) e From Stimulus to Science (1995). Tutti questi scritti, alcuni vere e proprie pietre miliari del pensiero analitico, tracciano un solco chiaro e profondo nell'accidentato territorio della filosofia del nostro tempo, e forniscono un orientamento metodologico che è quanto di più prezioso egli ci lascia in eredità.

The Review of Metaphysics obituary for W V Quine (September, 2001)

IN MEMORIAM: WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE (1908-2000)

On Christmas day 2000, Willard Van Orman Quine passed away at the age of ninety-two. With Quine's death, philosophy is deprived of the presence of a man whose intellectual force shaped Anglo-American philosophy for the last fifty years. Colin McGinn noted how Quine's "uncompromising consistency of purpose made his doctrines impossible to ignore. You either go with him or define your position in reaction to his." "And that," he wrote, "is one mark of a great philosopher." In the following few paragraphs, I will suggest another such mark.

William James famously drew the distinction between tough-minded and tender-minded. Those concerned first with the hard facts and empirical method are the tough guys, while those more concerned with wholes and the unity of things are tender-minded. There are few better examples of a hard fought effort to reconcile these drives than Quine.

Philosophically, Quine grew up among the tough-minded logical positivists, or logical empiricists as they called themselves. The positivists reveled in disparaging metaphysics. If a claim wasn't empirically verifiable or a question of logical relations, it was metaphysical bluster.

The field was neatly divided: verification fell to empirical science and philosophy was left to sort out confusions philosophers had foisted upon themselves over the centuries.

But Quine had a natural suspicion of broad scale dichotomies and his wariness showed impressively in 1935 with "Truth by Convention." Quine argued that to say logical truth is "true by convention" is not so much to introduce a new species of truth as to shift the topic to rules of reduction.

In 1948, Quine's landmark essay, "On What There Is," reintroduced talk of "metaphysics" under cover of bound variables and ontological commitments. But the major break with the polemics of positivism awaited "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"(1951). Logical empiricism was charged with harboring two unempirical dogmas: analyticity and reductionism.

Of analyticity, or "true in virtue of meaning," Quine argued that analyticity could only make sense if sense could be made of sameness of meaning or "synonymy." But in his survey of contenders of the day, Quine found only "dead ends." A similar demise awaited radical reductionism, the doctrine that terms carry their own empirical content. The unit of empirical significance, excessively phrased, became the whole of science. Quine later moderated the point.

But the damage was done. The sharp boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science was noticeably shaken. The point was driven home most vividly with a thought experiment in radical translation (Word & Object, 1960). Facing an unknown language, linguists might produce translation manuals with empirically equivalent terms but incompatible meanings. If Quine was right, we could never sort out whether it was correct to translate, "gavagi" as "rabbit" or as "undetached rabbit part." There just wasn't a fact of the matter to be decided for such cases. "Synonymy," like Einstein's "simultaneity," was relative to a frame of reference.

Quine was a force for fundamental change. Earlier systematic theorizing in philosophy had become subject to suspicion or worse. Following Wittgenstein, many found philosophy anew by using conceptual analysis as therapy for metaphysical bewitchment. But for Quine, philosophy was continuous with science and differed only by degree (as with breadth of categories or the more speculative reach of theories). In the aftermath of "Two Dogmas," scientific philosophers began crossing the speculative divide. Cognitive science is a noteworthy result.

Quine's blurred boundary signaled not only an end to the grand division between epistemology and science, but a shift toward pragmatism and James's tender-minded quest for unity and system; an interest in wholes. This time the drive toward holistic philosophy was spearheaded by a tough-minded logical empiricist.

Quine's systematic philosophy is bound to disappoint old school metaphysicians. Holism is confirmational, ontology is relative to background theory, and, like science, judgment of truth is not immutable but revisable always. Quine tried to get the message across using the figure of Neurath's boat; a ship at sea incapable of being rebuilt from scratch. In place of a Cartesian foundation, Quine naturalized epistemology as a web-like surface structure or a field of force. In Pursuit of Truth (1990), Quine wryly embraced the slogan of Sherwin-Williams Paint: "Save the surface and you save all."

True, Quine's intellectual insight, endurance, and consistency of purpose might well have made his views impossible to ignore. But in the spirit of Kant, we have recaptured a vision of philosophy, from Quine, that mightily attempts to reconcile deeply divided intellectual drives. And that, we must say, is another mark of a great philosopher.

On a personal note, I met with Quine several times and corresponded with him. He was kind, immeasurably helpful, and above all, very gracious. The last time we met, I interviewed him in his study. It was a sunny summer afternoon and after our meeting I went walking the trails of Harvard Yard. Circling back, I saw Quine straightening his beret as he began heading down the steps of Emerson Hall. I hurried to catch him and we strolled together and talked until we parted in Harvard Square. Later, someone said how wonderful it would have been to have a photograph of that walk. I agreed, but the picture is not lost. I have it housed safely in my collection of fondest memories.--Chalmers C. Clark, College of Staten Island, CUNY.

The Review of Metaphysics 54 (September 2000): 245-246. (Copyright 2000 by The Review of Metaphysics, reprinted by permission) [actually year 2001 but issue is dated 2000]

San Francisco Chronicle obituary for W V Quine - Dec 30 2000

W.V. Quine, a logician and Harvard philosophy professor whose analysis of language and its relation to reality made him one of the influential philosophers of the 20th century, died Monday in a hospital in Boston, where he lived. He was 92.

As a mathematical logician who wrote and published prolifically, Mr. Quine was often perceived as a philosopher who focused his analytic talents on a multiplicity of apparently disparate doctrines and theses. Yet those who understand him best insisted on his status as a system builder, or a thinker who addressed and attempted to answer the larger questions of philosophy. Indeed, Stuart Hampshire, a fellow philosopher, called him in 1971, "our most distinguished living systematic philosopher."

Like most philosophers throughout the ages, Mr. Quine set out to define the reality of the world and how human beings fit into that reality. The conclusion he arrived at was that a person can only understand the world empirically, or through our direct experience of it.

In "The Philosophy of W.V. Quine: An Expository Essay," a study that the subject himself endorsed, Roger F. Gibson Jr. wrote that if Mr. Quine's project could be summed up in a single sentence, that sentence would read: "Quine's philosophy is a systematic attempt to answer, from a uniquely empiricistic point of view, what he takes to be the central question of epistemology, namely, 'How do we acquire our theory of the world?' "

Mr. Quine's answer, in a nutshell, began by rephrasing the question to read,

"How do we acquire our talk about the world?" In his radically empiricist view, nothing that humans know about the world lies outside the realm of language, and so he insisted that any theory of knowledge depended on a theory of language, which he duly set about to develop and which became the framework of his philosophy.

Willard Van Orman Quine -- or Van to his friends -- was born on June 25, 1908, in Akron, Ohio, the second son of Cloyd Robert Quine, a machinist and successful businessman, and Harriet (Van Orman) Quine.

He took a liking to mathematics in high school and majored in it at Oberlin College, although philology and philosophy also interested him early. During his junior year at college, his mother presented him with Whitehead and Russell's "Principia Mathematica," and his honors thesis at Oberlin used the system of "Principia Mathematica" to prove with 18 pages of symbols a law having to do with ways of combining classes.

His thesis landed him at Harvard, where he switched to philosophy in order to study with Alfred North Whitehead.

Only two years later, in 1932, he had earned his Ph.D., his dissertation being an attempt, in his words, "like 'Principia,' to comprehend the foundations of logic and mathematics and hence of the abstract nature of all science."

Il Sole 24 Ore obituary for W V Quine - Dec 31 2000

Il Michelangelo dell'empirismo
Formatosi entro la cornice del neopositivismo ne ha distrutto gli assunti facendone risorgere lo spirito di fondo
di DIEGO MARCONI

Willard Van Orman Quine é morto alla fine dell'ultimo anno del Novecento, il secolo che ha coinciso con la sua vita (era nato nel 1908) e che egli ha segnato, per quanto riguarda la filosofia, in modo così profondo e caratteristico. Il suo pensiero e il suo inimitabile stile intellettuale si erano formati nella meditazione di un libro pubblicato novant'anni fa - i Principia Mathematica di Whitehead e Russell - e nelle discussioni con Carnap, Neurath e gli altri esponenti del Circolo di Vienna, quasi settant'anni fa. A quelle discussioni, e ai problemi che vi si agitavano, Quine rimase sempre legato, anche quando la stella del neopositivismo era da tempo tramontata e anzi da più parti se ne contestava la luminosità. Quine stesso aveva contribuito in modo determinante al "superamento" del neopositivismo; eppure, a molti decenni di distanza, egli continuava a riconoscere la complessità e la profondità della discussione dei filosofi di Vienna, e a ricondurre a essa la maggior parte delle sue idee. Solo oggi siamo tornati a dargli ragione, a vedere quanto lunga è stata la fermata che il treno dello Spirito ha fatto alla "stazione di Vienna" (come dice il titolo del bel libro di Alberto Coffa sulla Tradizione semantica da Kant a Carnap); Quine l'aveva sempre saputo.

Il contributo di Quine alla dissoluzione del programma neopositivista (o di una delle sue versioni) può essere raccontato, ad esempio, così. I neopositivisti - in particolare, Rudolf Carnap - perseguivano una sorta di fondazione del sapere scientifico. Come già Hume, essi pensavano che tutte le verità scientifiche fossero tali o in virtù del significato dei simboli, (come quelle della logica e della matematica) o in virtù dei fatti, come quelle delle scienze naturali. Erano cioè o analitiche, o sintetiche. Le verità fattuali, sintetiche, si fondavano in ultima analisi sulle sensazioni: erano riformulazioni, in molti casi straordinariamente complesse, di combinazioni di enunciati elementari di sensazione, come "Questo è blu". Fondare la conoscenza scientifica voleva dire far vedere che tutte le verità fattuali erano riducibili a sensazioni (più operazioni logiche), mentre le verità logiche e matematiche erano mere esplicitazioni dei significati dei simboli logici e matematici (per esempio il principio di non contraddizione, "non (A e non A)", non è altro che un'esplicitazione del significato dei simboli logici "non" e "e").

Su questo programma, che metteva i potenti strumenti della logica contemporanea al servizio dell'empirismo classico (non senza importanti correzioni kantiane), si esercitò, fin dalla metà degli aani Trenta, la critica sovversiva di Quine. In primo luogo, egli fece vedere che la nozione di "vero in virtù del significato dei simboli", cioè la nozione di verità analitica, era sostanzialmente incomprensibile. In secondo luogo, mostrò che il programma carnapiano di riduzione delle verità fattuali a enunciati di sensazione era irrealizzabile. In terzo luogo, e di conseguenza, sostenne che la stessa distinzione humiana tra verità di ragione (analitiche) e verità di fatto (sintetiche) era nebulosa e insostenibile: tutte le verità dipendono sia dal linguaggio in cui sono formulate, sia dai fatti. E nessuna proposizione è in un rapporto diretto con l'esperienza, così da poter essere individualmente confermata o smentita a seconda di come stanno le cose: la conferma di una proposizione chiama sempre in causa altre proposizioni, sicché qualsiasi proposizione può essere trattata come vera, a condizione di modificare in modo opportuno la verità o falsità di altre proposizioni. Nessuna proposizione affronta da sola il tribunale dell'evidenza: è la nostra conoscenza come un tutto (as a corporate body, come un'istituzione integrata) a mettersi in rapporto con l'esperienza e ad adattarsi a essa, modificandosi in base a criteri di semplicità, economia e bellezza. Non esistono quindi "esperimenti cruciali" nel senso di Popper, e nessuna singola proposizione è falsificabile, nel senso che i fatti o l'esperienza ci obblighino a rinunciare a quella particolare proposizione.

La nozione di significato è stata centrale nella filosofia di questo secolo: non solo nel neopositivismo, ma anche nella filosofia del linguaggio ordinario, nel pensiero di Wittgenstein, e in qualche modo anche nell'ermeneutica di derivazione heideggeriana. E' la nozione centrale di quella che chiamiamo "filosofia del linguaggio". Ma Quine ha mostrato quanto è difficile fame una nozione scientifica, rigorosamente definita. I neopositivisti avevano cercato di ricondurla alla verità di certi speciali enunciati, quelli analitici; ma si è visto come Quine mettesse in dubbio la nozione stessa di verità analitica. Un altro tentativo - ancor oggi perseguito da filosofi come Jerry Fodor, ma originato anch'esso dal neopositivismo riconduceva il significato all'esperienza: le parole "giallo", "gatto" e "acqua" significano ciò che significano perché sono sistematicamente connesse alla nostra esperienza del giallo, dei gatti e dell'acqua. Ma Quine ha fatto vedere che anche questo tentativo è destinato al fallimento. Un ingegnoso esperimento mentale, esposto nell'opera più ampia del filosofo, il libro Parola e oggetto (1960), mostra che l'esperienza non riesce a determinare univocamente i significati: le stesse esperienze possono essere sistematicamente connesse con significati differenti delle stesse espressioni linguistiche.

Ancor oggi, le due principali teorie del significato che si contendono il campo della filosofia del linguaggio - le teorie dette "del ruolo inferenziale" e quelle causali - devono affrontare le devastanti obiezioni di Quine. Sembrano questioni "tecniche" (come dicono i filosofi che amano pensare all'ingrosso), obiezioni di dettaglio, che colpiscono tesi molto specifiche. Non è così: quelle obiezioni se sono valide - bastano a demolire interi programmi filosofici. Per esempio, nessuna filosofia che si definisca come "analisi dei significati" è in grado di sopravvivere alla critica di Quine. E quanta filosofia del Novecento non è - in ultima istanza - analisi dei significati?

E' stata dunque, quella di Quine, una pratica filosofica puramente distruttiva? In un certo senso è così, ma nel senso in cui lo è la pratica dello scultore, che fa emergere la statua per sottrazione dal blocco di marmo. Attraverso la sua battaglia contro le "creature dell'ombra" (le entità astratte, i significati, le possibilità) Quine, che dichiarava di amare i paesaggi desertici, ha fatto emergere ciò che veramente gli stava a cuore: la scienza, e la filosofia come parte della scienza. La filosofia di Quine è stata uno scientismo radicale, e al tempo stesso lontano dalle mitologie fondazionaliste del positivismo vecchio e nuovo.

Quine non aveva alcuna tenerezza per presunte forme di sapere alternative alla scienza: né l'arte né l'etica hanno avuto spazio nella sua riflessione, e la sua visione del mondo era apertamente irreligiosa. E tuttavia, la scienza di Quine non è il maestoso edificio dalle incrollabili fondamenta di cui molti hanno sognato, ma un complesso tessuto di esperienze e argomentazioni, radicato nel linguaggio comune e continuamente ricostruito a seconda di come il mondo "agisce sulle nostre terminazioni nervose". Semplicemente, è il meglio che abbiamo, tutto il resto essendo fantasie ed errori. Con spietata lucidità, Quine ha identificato e colpito nel loro nucleo molti di questi errori. Non ci ha convinto sempre, ma ci mancherà il suo scalpello.

Il Sole 24 Ore obituary and article on W V Quine - Dec 31 2000

La stoffa del reale è intessuta di fatti convenzioni
di GLORIA ORIGGI

Difficile giudicare l'eredità filosofica che ci lascia Willard Van Orman Quine, uno dei maggiori filosofi del Novecento, insieme a Kant il più grande critico e riformatore della tradizione empirìsta. E' ìmpossibìle non fare i conti con il suo pensiero (addirittura l'aggettivo quinean è una voce dell'Oxford English Dictionary) eppure si potrebbe anche definire la sua filosofia come una serie dì sconfitte influenti. Da un lato gli attacchi di Quine hanno fatto tremare le fondamenta della filosofia del Novecento, ma dall'altro lato essi hanno raramente impedito il procedere di quelle stesse direzioni di ricerca a cui avrebbero dovuto sbarrare la strada. Ne hanno semmai - e questo è uno dei suoi grandi meriti - corroborato lo spirito.

Per esempio, il suo celebre argomento sull'impossibilità di distinguere tra verità di ragione e verità di fatto: tutte le verità secondo Quine dipendono sia dal linguaggio sia dall'esperienza, perché linguaggio ed esperienza sono inestricabilmente correlatí nella teoria del mondo che costruiamo a partire dai magri stimoli che colpiscono i nostri sensi. Tout se tient e semantica e scienze empiriche non possono rivendicare oggetti di indagine radicalmente differenti. Ciò non ha impedito però che la semantica teorica sia oggi una disciplina ben sviluppata e autonoma. Oppure prendiamo l'ostilità di Quine per tutti i sistemi di logica alternativi alla logica classica, l'unica a suo parere adatta ad esprimere le verità della fisica: un altro suo celebre argomento tentava di bloccare la strada allo sviluppo della logica modale, ossia di quell'estensione della logica che rende conto di nozioni come possibilità e "necessità", per Quine dispensabili dal vocabolario della scienza. Quine mostra che lo sviluppo di una logica modale si basa sulla reintroduzione surrettizia della distinzione aristotelica tra proprietà necessarie e proprietà contingenti di un oggetto. Ciononostante la logica modale gode di ottima salute.

La lista potrebbe continuare a lungo: l'austerità ontologica di Quìne, secondo cui compito del filosofo è quello di "ripulire i bassifondi ontologici" di entità sospette o ridondanti, come per esempio i concetti, i pensieri, non sembra essere lo stile del dibattito filosofico contemporaneo, popolato di entità mentali di ogni genere. Cosa resta dunque di Quine? Il merito di aver dissolto con argomentazioni di una straordinaria sottigliezza molte distinzioni filosofiche di "principio" in semplici questioni pragmatiche di "grado" (merìto che gli è valso un verbo a suo nome nel dìvertentissìmo e ìrrìverente Philosophìcal Lexicon di Daniel Dennett: "quineare: negare risolutamente l'esìstenza o l'ìmportanza dì qualcosa di reale o significatìvo"). Il suo naturalismo radicale, che vede ìl compito della filosofia in continuità con gli scopi della scienza, che nega qualsiasi possibilità di 'esilío cosmico' da cui guardare il mondo al di fuori della teoria che abbiamo costruito per osservarlo. L'abilità di "dissolvere in modi di parlare il mobilio del nostro mondo", come un Prospero della filosofia, dichiarando che "Essere è essere il valore di una variabile" all'interno della teoria in cui ci ìmpegnamo a descrivere il mondo, e ìnsieme di difendere una posizione realista. Il suo stìle dì scrittura dì rara eleganza, l'immenso corpus di esempi di enunciati filosoficamente problematici di cui sono ancora sature le riviste di filosofia. Il suo pragmatismo e la sua raffinatezza nello "sdrammatizzare" le dicotomie filosofiche che gli facevano concludere, in risposta all'amico e maestro Rudolf Carnap: "La cultura dei nostri padri è una stoffa di enunciati. Nelle nostre mani essa si evolve e muta .... E' una cultura grigia, nera di fatti e bianca di convenzìoni. Ma non ho trovato alcuna ragione sostanziale per concludere che vi siano in essa fili del tutto neri e altri del tutto bianchi".

La Stampa obituary for W V Quine - Dec 30 2000

Quine, il gioco della logica - Morto il filosofo americano
di ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

Willard Van Orman Quine se n'è andato qualche giorno prima che finisse il suo secolo, che ha attraversato quasi per intero (era nato nel 1908) e spesso da protagonista. Non è stato in questi cent'anni il filosofo americano più brillante o creativo, ma è stato il più longevo, il più prolifico e forse il più potente. Famoso già negli Anni Trenta e da allora professore a Harvard (fra i suoi allievi ci fu anche l'"Unabomber" Theodore J. Kaczynski), si era dato da fare poco prima della seconda guerra mondiale per trovare posto in varie università americane a molti membri del Circolo di Vienna, innescando un processo che in breve tempo avrebbe soppiantato il pragmatismo indigeno di James, Dewey e C. I. Lewis sostituendolo con la "filosofia analitica": un impasto di attenzione alla scienza e al linguaggio, rifiuto della metafisica e della tradizione "continentale" e suprema accettazione del professionalismo accademico che al seguito dell'economia americana imperversa oggi per l'universo mondo. Dei suoi amati scienziati e filosofi della scienza Quine non aveva né la profondità né la complessità concettuale. Aveva invece, paradossalmente, uno stile sciolto e arguto, che ben si sarebbe sposato a una sapiente critica sociale e ne avrebbe potuto fare un bell'esempio della migliore categoria di intellettuale americano: il giornalista di ricerca e di denuncia. Ma la società non lo interessava (quando lo intervistai, un paio d'anni fa per La Stampa , mi disse che la sua filosofia non aveva in proposito nessun contributo da dare), preferiva la teoria degli insiemi, la logica e la filosofia del linguaggio (a quest'ultima dedicò nel 1960 il memorabile Parola e oggetto , in cui affermava l'irrimediabile indeterminatezza della traduzione da una lingua all'altra e proponeva un generale comportamentismo linguistico, di segno opposto al razionalismo innatista di Chomsky). In ambito puramente tecnico, peraltro, non aveva le doti per primeggiare e così la sua concisa sentenziosità finì per esprimersi con efficacia soprattutto in formule proibitive, destinate a porre limiti a fantasie più sbrigliate. "Gli oggetti non esistenti sono incorreggibili", proclamava Quine, oppure "Niente entità senza identità", oppure "Tanto peggio per la logica modale", e generazioni di studiosi rimiravano con soggezione i paletti che queste frasi lapidarie conficcavano sul percorso dell'antica "ricerca della saggezza". Nessuno di quei paletti ha tenuto, alla lunga; la filosofia ha dimostrato ben altra vitalità ed è sopravvissuta a un secolo in cui in tanti hanno fatto a gara per annunciarne la morte o per chiuderla in un serraglio. Un secolo cinico e sparagnino, nel quale tutto sommato non sfigura il caustico, remoto, imperturbabile Willard Van Orman Quine.

(Spain) Teorema (Revista internacional de filosofía) obituary for W V Quine - (?) Feb 2001

Un gigante de la filosofía: W.v.O. Quine: 1908-2000
Manuel Garrido

El día de Navidad del ultimo año del siglo veinte falleció a la edad de noventa y dos años en Boston, su ciudad de residencia, el lógico y filósofo norteamericano Willard van Orman Quine.

Con el pierden América y el mundo uno de los más grandes y originales pensadores que han brillado desde la guerra contra el nazismo. Por su edad, que recorre como la de Popper o Gadamer el siglo transcurrido, Quine tuvo el privilegio de poder visitar Europa cuando aún no estaba dividida, justo cuando, al filo de la década de los treinta, vivía uno de sus mejores momentos el desarrollo de la lógica matemática como herramienta por excelencia de la ciencia y la filosofía. El joven americano frecuentó en Viena los círculos del positivismo lógico y visitó a los miembros de las escuelas lógicas de Varsovia y de Praga, codeándose desde temprana edad con grandes del pensamiento del calibre de Alfred N. Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski, Rudolf Carnap, de quien se consideraba discípulo directo, Kurt Gödel o Alfred J. Ayer. Un revolucionario y ya legendario artículo suyo de 1937 sobre la fundamentación de la lógica y la teoría de conjuntos ("Nuevos fundamentos para la lógica matemática") lo acreditó prontamente en la comunidad científica como lógico de primera magnitud. Andando el tiempo este trabajo se expandió en las obras de madurez de Quine sobre lógica (Lógica matemática, 1940) y teoría de conjuntos (Set theory and its logic, 1963) que aportó uno de los sistemas más originales y elegantes de cuantos se conocen sobre esta materia..

El resultado de una prolongada discusión ya iniciada por entonces entre Carnap y Quine sobre los principios del empirismo -discusión en la que el discípulo, impelido por el rumbo de sus argumentos, se revelaría como parricida del maestro- vino luego a plasmarse en el también revolucionario y seminal ensayo "Dos dogmas del empirismo", que vio la luz por vez primera en 1951. Sin abandonar el marco filosófico empirista, Quine desafiaba en este escrito hasta ponerlo del revés al positivismo lógico. Su primer objetivo lo cumplía relegando al desván de las oscuridades la luminosa distinción de principio (cuya raíz se remonta a Kant) establecida como dogma número uno por los positivistas lógicos entre proposiciones analíticas y sintéticas, que les permitía trazar una clara demarcación entre la lógica y la ciencia empírica. Y el dogma número dos de los positivistas lógicos, según el cual la última instancia decisoria de la verdad de nuestro conocimiento son las proposiciones particulares de la ciencia, aislada o atomísticamente consideradas, quedó asimismo puesto en tela de juicio ante la propuesta holista de Quine, cuya raíz se remonta a Frege, de que no es en tales proposiciones donde reside esa instancia, sino en el estatuto global de nuestras teorías merced al cual decidimos, en nuestra diaria confrontación con la experiencia, aceptar o rechazar cualquier proposición empírica particular. El que abandona o sacrifica su creencia, sea en Júpiter o en las leyes de Newton, lo hace, concluía Quine, siguiendo un mismo proceso, consistente en balancear el conjunto global de nuestras creencias con el conjunto actual de nuestras evidencias.

Los dos ensayos mencionados pasaron a formar parte en 1953 del volumen Desde un punto de vista lógico (título que se le antojó a su autor escuchando cantar esas palabras en un calipso a Harry Belafonte). Este libro puso bien de relieve ante la comunidad intelectual que quien lo escribió no sólo era un importante lógico sino también un filósofo importante, émulo sin comparación con ningún otro del afán de Russell por vincular la lógica a la filosofía. Los hombres que han vivido las décadas de la guerra fría han asistido luego al imperturbable y esplendoroso desarrollo del pensamiento maduro de Quine y al lanzamiento de sus tan bien trabadas como controvertidas tesis, desde "el compromiso ontológico" o su slogan "ser es ser el valor de una variable" , pasando por la "la indeterminación de la traducción" y "la relatividad ontológica", a la "naturalización de la epistemología". Todas ellas afectan gravemente a la filosofía de la lógica y del lenguaje, a la filosofía de la ciencia, a la epistemología y a la ontología.

La más crucial de esas tesis, la indeterminación de la traducción aparecería canónicamente expuesta en Palabra y objeto (1960), la principal de las obras de Quine. El hecho de que en zonas del conocimiento científico tan bien reputadas como la física o la teoría de conjuntos no sepamos decidir unánimente entre teorías rivales -por ejemplo, que no sepamos decidir unánimente entre la teoría de conjuntos de Zermelo-Fränkel y la teoría de conjuntos de von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel o entre la interpretación determinista y la indeterminista de la física cuántica- pudo verosímilmente ser, al menos en parte, el motivo inspirador y la corroboración de esa audaz tesis de Quine, propuesta por él con ayuda de su celebérrimo experimento mental de la "traducción radical" en que un explorador trata de descifrar en la jungla el lenguaje radicalmente extraño de una tribu. Según esa tesis es posible, en general, elaborar dos manuales de traducción de un mismo lenguaje que sean incompatibles entre sí y cumplan sin embargo satisfactoriamente las condiciones requeridas que garanticen su eficacia. O dicho en términos más científicos que lingüísticos: ante un mismo cuerpo de evidencias resulta posible elaborar teorías distintas que son, por una parte, equivalentemente satisfactorias y, por otra, mutuamente incompatibles.

Si el principio de relatividad y el de indeterminación han acreditado ser inicialmente antagónicos en física, en la ontología de Quine integran propuestas conexas. De la misma manera que no hay, por parte de la realidad, hecho alguno que permita superar la brecha de ambigüedad semántica que se abre entre toda teoría científica y su base empírica (tesis de intederminación semántica), tampoco hay hecho real alguno que permita liberar a cualquier teoría de una doble dependencia que la hace simultáneamente relativa a una teoría de fondo anterior que le sirve de marco o sistema de coordenadas desde el cual se la formula y a un manual de traducción entre la teoría marco y la formulada (tesis de relatividad ontológica). La consecuencia de ello es que la ontología de esta última teoría formulada es decir, el universo o población de objetos cuya existencia hemos de reconocer si la teoría en cuestión es verdadera, resulta ser radicalmente inescrutable.

El efecto eliminativo de las tesis de Quine es devastador. En sus manos la lógica simbólica introduce, más aún que en las de Russell, un formidable factor de despoblación ontológica, una iconoclasta navaja de Occam que da al traste con las teorías filosóficas tradicionales ("mitos" y fantasmas en el lenguaje quineano) del significado, la intencionalidad y los actos mentales y con los fenómenos de la intensionalidad y la modalidad en lógica. Pero quien así reduce a tan desolador desierto el paisaje de su ontología, nos da luego la sorpresa de repoblarlo, por modo similar al Russell de los Principia Mathematica, con la infinita variedad de objetos abstractos que son las clases lógicas, en pacífica coexistencia con los individuos particulares.

Esta paradójica yuxtaposición de nominalismo y platonismo en Quine responde, por supuesto, a su doble talante, respectivamente, fisicalista y logicista , pero también a su original, radical e idiosincrásica visión del empirismo, que mete en una misma barca en trance de tener que reconstruirse en alta mar -por usar la metáfora que tantas veces él tomó de Neurath- la ciencia y la filosofía. La estrategia adecuada en este apurado trance no consiste para Quine, que se opone diametralmente a Descartes, en la busca de un lugar privilegiado que pudiera servir, como el cogito, de punto arquimédico a la filosofía. La estrategia adecuada no estaría, a su juicio, en sucumbir a ninguna ilusión fundacionalista, sino en "naturalizar" pragmáticamente a la epistemología. Si los empiristas clásicos vieron en el atomizado dato sensible el suelo del conocimiento, y los empiristas del Círculo de Viena hicieron del empirismo tradicional, al aceptar la dicotomía kantiana, un empirismo lógico, la proeza de Quine, el más grande y original pensador empirista de la segunda mitad del siglo veinte, ha consistido en radicalizar el empirismo de dos maneras: disolviendo, al estilo de Mill, la frontera entre lo lógico y lo empírico, lo cual tiene por resultado la reducción de la lógica, como asunto empírico, a la más general de las contingencias, y cambiando de manera casi hegeliana, al estilo falibilista de Peirce, la perspectiva atomista por la holista.

Los resultados seguramente no queridos, aunque no del todo inconsistentes con ellas, de las radicales tesis de Quine, quien las atemperó bastante en los últimos años de su vida, no se han hecho esperar. La apelación a esas tesis por parte de Kuhn en apoyo de su teoría del progreso científico, las múltiples y similares invocaciones de la autoridad de las mismas por parte del neopragmatismo de Rorty o el posmodernismo francés, su sintonía con la onda antifundacionalista mundialmente irradiada por la obra del segundo Wittgenstein, o el sorprendente retorno actual de lo reprimido que se manifiesta en la forma de un nuevo y explosivo interés en el seno de la filosofía analítica por las lógicas modales o por los temas del significado y la filosofía de la mente, tópicos todos ellos proscritos por dichas tesis, dejan intacta la talla del gigante que las diseñó.

Mencionar la relación de Quine con España y con la lengua española parece indicado en un obituario escrito para quienes la hablan. Puede que fuese el anciano Ortega el español que por primera vez escribió en letra impresa ese nombre, lo cual tuvo lugar en este pasaje de la postrer lección póstuma sobre la razón histórica que dictó en Lisboa en 1944: "...si se abre el último libro importante -que yo sepa- sobre lógica matemática -que es la lógica máxima- el del americano Willard van Orman Quine, Mathematical Logic, New York, 1940..." Los orteguianos peninsulares, de quienes Julián Marías es modelo, han ignorado el pensamiento analítico en general y el de Quine en particular, pero sus congéneres transatlánticos testimonian lo contrario: Ferrater , paradigma de estos últimos, tiene contraída con Quine una considerable deuda. Entre las nuevas generaciones posteriores a la guerra civil, más interesadas y desde más pronto por la filosofía analítica, probablemente fue, en la España de los sesenta, Manuel Sacristán (excelente e imaginativo traductor de Desde un punto de vista lógico y de Palabra y objeto) el primer introductor serio aquí de Quine, quien visitaría en la década siguiente la Universidad de Valencia, donde dictó conferencias en olor de multitud, con su idiosincrásico uso de nuestro idioma, y pasó a formar parte, desde los primeros años de su fundación, del Consejo asesor de la revista Teorema. Un simposio sobre su pensamiento volvió a traerlo a España, esta vez a Granada, en los años ochenta y posteriormente dictaría el texto de su último libro, Del estímulo a la ciencia (1995), en un ciclo de conferencias pronunciado en la catalana Cátedra Ferrater, de Girona. Al interés que mostraron estas últimas generaciones de profesionales españoles de la filosofía por su pensamiento respondió generosamente Quine apadrinándolas de alguna manera en los círculos internacionales. Su autobiografía, The Time of My Life (1985), guarda el recuerdo de sus vivencias en España.

La figura humana de Quine fue también, como su obra, grande y original, sencilla y paradójica. Nacido de modesta familia en Akron, Ohio, en 1908, autor de más de veinte libros y una infinidad de artículos, sobrecargado de honores y premios, tan revolucionario en teoría como su antípoda Descartes y tan conservador como éste en materia de costumbres, amante de la música de jazz, que él tocaba, y del folklore mexicano, capaz de dialogar en media docena de idiomas, vinculado durante toda su vida académica a la Universidad de Harvard, donde fue colega del psicólogo conductista Skinner, pero viajero infatigable y curioso cuya resistencia a explorar los rincones del alma dejaba a la suya lista para pasear límpidamente la mirada por todas las esquinas de los más de cien países que visitó, frugal y ordenado según le gustó autodescribirse, su ya provecta silueta más parecía la estampa de uno de esos inolvidables personajes salidos de las páginas de Mark Twain que la de un mandarín de la tecnología que tan al uso está hoy entre los profesores de las universidades americanas y entre los profesores de las universidades no americanas que los imitan. Para revolucionar el mundo de la teoría le bastó su vieja máquina de escribir, una Remington portátil que el mismo modificó en 1927 agregándole unos cuantos signos lógicos y quitándole otros tantos, entre ellos el signo de interrogación, con el que no congeniaba su instinto de certezas. La principal razón de que valorase tanto la nueva lógica no residía, según propia declaración, en el triunfo cosechado por ésta en la tecnología de los computadores (a la que también contribuyó Quine con un conocido algoritmo de teoría de circuitos que lleva su nombre), sino en los resultados obtenidos por la aplicación del punto de vista lógico a la filosofía.

Su talante natural, abierto al diálogo, lo situaba ordinariamente a cien leguas de la pedantería; pero sus lacónicas respuestas noqueaban a veces al interlocutor por su contundencia. En cierta ocasión, en un congreso iberoamericano en México, allá por los años ochenta, le reconoció en conversación privada a un compañero de mesa que era una ironía, que él no vacilaba en calificar de triste, el hecho de que su personal comportamiento lingüístico (dominio de múltiples idiomas con sorprendentemente mínimo tiempo de entrenamiento) parecía confirmar las teorías de su más joven y furibundo adversario Chomsky (que atribuye el aprendizaje de los lenguajes naturales a un mecanismo creador innato en el niño) y desconfirmar las suyas propias, de sabor más conductista, según las cuales el aprendizaje del lenguaje reside en el reforzamiento de su práctica. En otra ocasión menos privada ("Una carta a Mr. Ostermann", 1964) contestó a la pregunta por las obligaciones sociales del filósofo negando tajantemente la venerada opinión de que la filosofía, empresa para él puramente teórica, sea una medicina social: "En un tiempo de crisis nacional se me antojó que podía ser más útil dejar a un lado mis intereses teóricos y servir en la marina. Y así lo hice, pero éste fue un asunto de conciencia privada, que no guarda la más remota relación con ningún deber especial que tuviera que cumplir como filósofo", mientras que "toda contribución teórica que sea sustancial es casi un milagro. Nadie tiene la menor obligación de aportar la más leve cosa de tal género. Y todo aquel que, de un modo u otro, contribuya a hacerlo merece simplemente nuestro reconocimiento, sin que por ello incurra en obligación sobreañadida alguna".

El propio lenguaje parece haber rendido su tributo al hombre a quien tanto obsesionó de por vida el problema de las palabras y su referencia. La página web de Internet dedicada a Quine nos recuerda que este último vocablo (su apellido celta paterno "Quine", oriundo de la Isla de Man), ha pasado a enriquecer dos léxicos: en el diccionario inglés de Oxford la voz quinean, "quineano" designa "lo perteneciente a, o característico de Willard van Orman Quine o sus teorías"; y en un diccionario de hackers (The New Hackers Dictionary) el término quine, tomado del nombre del filósofo, bautiza a un programa autorreproductivo en lenguaje Lisp que divierte a los miembros de este gremio. Sabido es, por otra parte, que en su breve diccionario humorístico de filósofos actuales Dan Dennett ha acuñado el verbo to quine ("quinear") para referirse, con aprobador regocijo del pensador de cuyo nombre procede ese verbo, a la acción de repudiar las distinciones claras.

W V Quine photo in Times

(UK) The Times obituary for W V Quine - Dec 30 2000

W.V.Quine
Philosopher who changed the way we think about language and its relation to the world

A powerful critic of much that other philosophers held dear, W. V. Quine had a career as teacher, author and thinker spanning seven decades. In the course of it he became the most famous and probably the most influential analytic philosopher of his time.

Willard Van Orman Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, where he spent the first 18 years of his life, and years later showed his affection for the city and the state by delighting in the song (from Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town) , "Why, oh why, oh why-oh, Did I ever leave Ohio?" His undergraduate years were spent at Oberlin, but for his graduate study (with A. N. Whitehead) he migrated to Harvard, which was his academic anchor ever after. Quine paid two visits to Oxford: in 1953-54 as Eastman Visiting Professor, and in 1973-74 as Savile Fellow of Merton College and Wolfson Lecturer. The first of these visits had a tremendous impact. At that time Oxford philosophers knew very little logic and were unaware of the subtlety of much contemporary American philosophy. By the time of the second visit, Quine's work was widely known in Oxford.

Quine's career was initially as a mathematical logician. His first five books were all devoted to logic. But he had no great pretensions about his achievements in this field; on his first visit to Oxford, he described himself as a member of the Second XI of logicians. He proved some interesting minor theorems, but no important ones. His principal contribution was the invention of the heterodox system of set theory known as NF, after the article of 1936, New Foundations for Mathematical Logic, in which he originally expounded it.

The system teased the logical community by the difficulty of finding a model for it, or of proving it consistent in any other way. It reflected an important facet of Quine's intellectual character, for it is an example of a mathematical theory conceived, most unusually, in a purely formalist spirit. Quine proposed it without even the vaguest conception of a model for it, that is, of the sort of mathematical structure in which its axioms would hold good. Rather, he simply had a hunch that a certain formal restriction on the assumptions embodied in it about which sets existed would suffice to guard against contradiction.

Quine never abandoned mathematical logic, but from 1953 onwards, with his collection of previously published essays From a Logical Point of View, he acquired a wide reputation as a leading philosopher of language in the analytic tradition. His initial motivation was a reaction against the doctrines of Rudolf Carnap, the influential former member of the Vienna Circle who had settled in the United States. Quine engaged in powerful criticism of basic doctrines of analytic philosophy, as it had developed out of logical positivism. In particular, he attacked a Kantian dichotomy which had become a basic tool of analytic philosophy, the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements: those whose truth rested solely on the linguistic conventions determining the meanings of the words used to express them, as against those conveying genuine information about the world. His attack was supported by other American analytic philosophers such as Morton White and Donald Davidson, but strongly resisted by the philosophical school then dominant in England and particularly at Oxford. The rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction posed far-reaching threats to other cherished notions. If any pair of expressions had the same meaning, say "paternal grandfather" and "father's father", then a statement such as "Anyone's paternal grandfather is that person's father's father", asserting their equivalence, must be analytic. So, conversely, if no statement is unambiguously analytic, it can never be determinate that any two expressions have the same meaning. If, thus, the notion of synonymy crumbles, that of meaning itself is in jeopardy. With the assault upon the notion of meaning went an attack upon modality. Not only did Quine suspect modal logic, which deals with the operators "Possibly" and "Necessarily", of being pseudo-logic; he dismissed as incapable of clear explanation sentences of natural language containing modal verbs such as "can", "may" and "must". Not only was the necessity supposedly deriving wholly from the meanings of words to be repudiated: necessity of any kind was to be repudiated also.

Quine's status as the most respected philosopher in the United States was confirmed with the publication in 1960 of his magnum opus, Word and Object. The most celebrated thesis advanced in this book was the indeterminacy of translation. Two schemes for translating from one language to another might both satisfy all the constraints imposed by the empirically observable behaviour of the speakers of both languages upon an adequate translation scheme; and yet some sentence of the first language might translate under the first scheme into the contradictory of the sentence into which it translated under the second scheme.

This of course could not happen if the sentences of the two languages had determinate meanings and it were a requirement upon an adequate scheme for translating between them that it take a sentence of the one language into a sentence of the other with the same meaning; but Quine contended that no empirically observable facts about the speakers' linguistic and other behaviour determined any such meanings. Contentions such as these might suggest to those unfamiliar with his writings that Quine was some species of Post-Modernist. Nothing could be further from the truth. His writing was always crystal sharp; he never had the slightest doubt about the value of philosophy, nor did he call the concept of truth in question. Sir Michael Dummet vividly remembers Quine's disgust as they both listened to a talk in which Donald Davidson's philosophy was compared to that of Jacques Derrida.

Quine criticised ideas dear to earlier philosophers and apparently obvious to common sense, not in the interests of cultural relativism or any of the other fashionable varieties of relativism, but in the service of what he saw as a strictly scientific methodology, in fact of a behaviouristic methodology. Where Wittgenstein saw philosophy as an activity wholly unlike scientific enquiry, Quine saw it as ancillary to it and governed by the same canons: it was to his mind just a branch of science. He professed more than once a liking for desert landscapes, and his intellectual landscape was bare indeed: more accurately, bleak.

A commonsense diagnosis is that two factors combine to dispose us to accept as true any statement we do so accept: our grasp of its meaning, and our experience of the world. Quine maintained that these two factors can never be disentangled: we cannot distil out separately the contributions made to our judgments of truth by our knowledge of the language and by our experience of reality. This doctrine of inextricability was extended to a broader holism about language: we do not give to our sentences meanings which allow us to judge them individually as in accord with our experience or otherwise; we can judge as being or not being in accord with experience only the totality of all that we hold to be true. If we judge it not to accord with our experience, we need to revise our total set of beliefs one way or another; but it may be that there is more than one way in which to revise it so as to bring it into harmony with experience once more, where those two or more possible revisions are not equivalent by any standards.

With speculations of this kind, Quine crossed from the philosophy of language into the realm of epistemology, with which he came to occupy himself greatly. Epistemology, he claimed, should be naturalised; and, with this claim, Quine became responsible for a new fashion in philosophy, the so-called naturalisation of its theories. Though naturalised theories treat of certain questions traditionally posed by philosophers, the answers they give may invoke scientific facts and replace a priori speculation with empirical explanation. Quine retired in 1978 from a teaching career in which his pupils had included not only influential philosophers but also the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer and Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called "Unabomber". He continued for two decades to do active work in philosophy, attending conferences and publishing papers. He must have collected far more prizes and honorary degrees than any other contemporary philosopher or than almost any other academic; but what he most rejoiced in collecting were the countries that he had visited. He was immensely vain about their number, and vain, too, about his ability to speak a number of languages. He liked etymology and unusual facts about words. His writing was distinguished by a feeling for words and an often witty use of them. His political opinions were on the Right, but he was tactful in not voicing them in the presence of people he knew to be of a different inclination.

Quine was an important philosopher, though posterity may not class him as a great one. He was important because he advanced bold theses for which he never produced proofs but only highly suggestive considerations: but they were theses which it was very difficult to refute, and he therefore stimulated a great deal of fruitful philosophical inquiry. Analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century would have been greatly the poorer without him. In 1930, just on arrival at Harvard, Willard Quine married Naomi Clayton, whom he had met at Oberlin. They had two daughters, in 1935 and 1937, but the marriage came to an end in 1945, when they separated. They divorced two years later. Then, in 1948, Quine married Marjorie Boynton, whom he had first known as a woman volunteer during his time as a Navy lieutenant in Washington during the war. She predeceased him in 1998. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage and a son and daughter from his second. W. V. Quine, philosopher, was born in Akron, Ohio, on June 25, 1908. He died in Boston on Christmas Day aged 92.

Times article about W V Quine and philosophy - Jan 3 2001

Have we all lost the nerve to think?
by SIMON JENKINS

When a philosopher dies there is one less star in Heaven. Or so we were once told. Philosophers guard the spyholes in the firmament. They are supposed to tell us of the Great Beyond. As the taxidriver asked Bertrand Russell: "So what's it all about then, Bert?"

Last Saturday, The Times carried an obituary of one of the most celebrated philosophers of our age, the American Willard Quine. I understood hardly a word of it. Quine's work was not a window on the Great Beyond but an intellectual microscope applied to games he played with others. He was, it seemed, another of Keats's dullards who "will clip an Angel's wings". If ever there were a philosopher's philosopher it was Quine. He prowled the frontiers of set theory and mathematical logic. In the 1950s he crossed swords with Viennese logical positivism and questioned the "Kantian dichotomy which had become a basic tool of analytical philosophy", between statements "whose truth rested solely on the linguistic conventions determining the meanings of words used to express them, as against those conveying genuine information about the world". This sort of distinction well demonstrates the distance philosophy had travelled from public accessibility. To be fair, Quine protested it as a naturalist who held that "physical facts are all the facts there are". Philosophy is no more or less than a science. Yet to what effect? I can think of economists and political theorists whose ideas have changed my life. I can think of engineers, inventors, jurists, even artists, who have upset the equilibrium of my days, not always for the better. But the philosopher wanders the scholastic desert alone, skirting any oasis where he might find beings who speak a common tongue. The heirs of Socrates and Aristotle, Erasmus and Hume wrestle with each other apart. Not surprisingly, Quine's obituarist said of him: "He professed a liking for desert landscapes, and his intellectual landscape was bare indeed, indeed bleak." Why then was Quine awarded more awards and honours "than any other contemporary philosopher or than almost any other academic"? What is it about philosophers that values them so highly? Perhaps we have dumbed so far down that we celebrate sheer abstruseness. Philosophers embody pure learning, pure irrelevance. We value them not as intellectual snobs but as ascetics, hermits defying the draconian quantification of David Blunkett's quality auditors. Yet showering philosophers with awards lets them off the hook.

There is work for them to do, urgent work that they seem to funk.

I doubt if public policy has ever had a longer agenda for them to tackle, problems that would have delighted a Locke or a John Stuart Mill. How far does our responsibility really extend to the poor? What should be the limits of redistributive taxation? What entitles us to interfere in the lives of strangers, or of foreign states? (Does whatever it is extend to bombing their cities without declaring war?) Does it extend to criminalising their governments for growing narcotic crops of which we disapprove? Does it extend to the unborn child? Crime and punishment at present suffer acute philosophy starvation. What right do we have to deprive of liberty teenagers whose misdeeds may be the result of our own or their parents' negligence? We hurl an unprecedented barrage of rules against individuals. We stop them bringing up children as they wish. We discriminate in favour of some groups at the expense of others. Is there no point at which this should stop? The philosophy of identity seems silent. The greatest threat to personal liberty no longer comes from the traditional enemies of war, poverty and disease. It comes from ever more intrusive organs of the State, the more insidious because often unintended and even denied. I am sure Tony Blair genuinely believes himself to be something called a liberal. Yet the boundaries to state action laid down by English philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries are being overrun by stealth. Hayek and Popper warned against socialism's abuse of state power. Their socialism may have been laid to rest, but the extension of state power continues unabated. The presses thunder out ever more laws, filling prisons with those who break them. Each day a growing tide of buff falls through every letterbox. The Stuart Mills of today say nothing. The "death of ideology" seems to darken rather than brighten the gloom. Philosophers should hold up their tapers in this gloom.

What is the philosophy behind the present Court of Appeal's eagerness to monetarise every personal hurt and match compensation to every injury irrespective of fault? A sort of communism is being reborn in the guise of cradle-to-grave insurance. Is this fine? Nothing is discussed. Or take the conundrum of the rights of the family vis-à-vis the State. Families are said to underpin social morality, supplanting religion in this respect. But why the family? Are familial rights not pagan, a reactionary genetic construct that stands in the way of equal opportunity and a fairer society? Appeals to kinship have caused social conflict from the Tribes of Israel through the Wars of the Roses to the ethnic upheavals of today. If the family is to "underpin" modern morality, some philosopher had better redefine it fast. What of the violent family, the family that wants to keep Siamese twins, or wants to eat beef-on-the-bone? As politicians talk gibberish, where are the philosophers calling them to account? Some have sought to engage these arguments. Bernard Williams has worked on theories of personal identity, Jonathan Glover on the concept of "life", Roger Scruton on aesthetics and sexual desire, John Rawls on justice and fairness. But they seem like aliens beating on the locked door of Babel. When John Prescott took power last year to imprison Britons for freeing budgerigars into the wild or building steps to their front doors, I realised that the debate over the rights of individuals versus the State had not advanced since Plato's day. A Renaissance prince would not have presumed such authority, nor any government before the 20th century. The dictatorship of liberty is the more odious since its major premises are left unspoken. We can play with human life in a test tube and throw over it the umbrella of liberalism. We can do the same with policy towards prisons. Government can tax and regulate in ways unimaginable to those who formed the British constitution in the ages of Revolution and Enlightenment. Political and economic innovation moves with the speed of light, yet is debated in terms of numbed vacuity. Read any political speech or read any political book. With the supposed death of ideology, they offer no recourse to theoretical concepts to help to resolve the natural conflicts that make up politics - just as fudged buzzwords of the "Third Way" or "One Nation". Fierce battles are about to be fought over refashioning the English countryside, battles over long and short-term costs and benefits, over the rights of newcomers over established residents. Philosophy should be shouting aloud about this. Is it? Britain's leaders may have studied philosopy at Oxford. But that school cannot be what it was. They have lost touch not just with the ideology of liberty but with the idea of ideology at all. They have lost faith in ideas as a guide to action. Lost in short-term self-interest, in the sovereignty of the opinion polls, they fall back on liberty's line of least resistance, and find it ceding ground to the advancing battalions of big government. The tyranny of Marx has given way to the tyranny of accountancy. I have no doubt that philosophers such as Quine enjoyed their mental calisthenics. But they fiddled while Rome burned. Their successors must rally to the colours. The linguistic analysts must deconstruct the new authoritarians. The moralists must expose the hypocrisies of "value politics". Epistemologists must reveal politicians' speech codes that appear devoid of meaning.

Philosophers of mind need constantly to exorcise renascent "ghosts in the machine". Nobody expects philosophers to agree, any more than do economists or political scientists. They merely need to make their voices heard. The philosopher should once more be what Nietzsche called the "terrible explosive, in the presence of which everything is in danger". He should dare to make the earth move.

Time Magazine obituary for W V Quine - Jan 8 2001

W V Quine Time obituary

UselessKnowledge.com obituary for W V Quine - Dec 14, 2004

In Praise Of A Philosopher: Willard Van Orman Quine
By KC Mulville
December 14, 2004

This Christmas Day, pause to revere a man who had no time for religion. His name was Willard Van Orman Quine, and he died four years ago on Christmas Day. He was many things: teacher, writer, mathematician, linguist, et al. Above all, he was the greatest philosopher America has yet produced. That alone deserves respect.

Why was Quine so good? The philosophical world Quine inherited was breaking up..... [full text at hot link]

W V Quine Christmas Useless Knowledge obituary

Wall Street Journal obituary for W V Quine - Jan 4 2001

Truth Before Relevance
By Roger Scruton, a writer and philosopher who lives in England. He is the author of "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture" (St. Augustine Press, 2000).
(original also includes one of the Wall Street Journal's unique drawings), page A18

The death, on Christmas Day, of Willard Quine deprives America of its greatest contemporary philosopher. It also prompts us to reflect on the place of philosophy -- or at any rate of Quine's kind of philosophy -- in American culture.

Quine was a lucid writer, with a refined use of language and an ability to summarize difficult thoughts in entrancing aphorisms. He was also a metaphysician, with a view of the world as comprehensive, in its way, as that of Hegel. In almost all areas of logic, metaphysics and the philosophy of science, there is a distinctive "Quinean" position -- a position so fortified by the internal coherence of the system as to be virtually unassailable from outside. This ought to make Quine one of the most widely read and pondered of American philosophers. In fact the discussion of his views is now largely confined to the professional journals.

One reason for this comparative neglect is that Quine had no social or political agenda. His was an honest, logical philosophy, and his theories, however radical, eschew all moral exhortations. He was profoundly influenced by the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce, which sees truth as a species of utility and scientific method as the route to it. But Quine's pragmatism, like that of Peirce, stands at one remove from all first-order disputes, and recognizes no avenue to knowledge apart from scientific method. That Quine also cast serious doubt on the absolute claims of science in no way tells against his view that it is science, not philosophy, that answers our first-order questions.

That is one reason why Quine is worth reading. He belonged to the intellectual tradition which included Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Godel and Alfred Tarski, and which was, collectively, one of the outstanding achievements of modern philosophy. Like his predecessors, Quine saw philosophy as an extension of logic -- a realm of pure enquiry, concerned to clean up the tools with which we reason and to wipe away the shadows cast by words. In face of the pretentious theories of Being with a capital "B" -- with which the phenomenologists enrolled their congregations -- Quine's robust insistence that "to be is to be the value of a variable" had a cheekily iconoclastic air.

Yet behind that simple remark lies a whole philosophy, remarkable for its range, its consistency, and its comprehensive vision of human knowledge. Central to this philosophy was the thesis of "ontological relativity," which holds that all tenable statements about existence depend upon a theory, and no theory is uniquely determined by the empirical data. Hence you and I can live in the same empirical world, even though mine is haunted by gods, and yours by electromagnetic waves.

Quine was a philosophical, but not a political, iconoclast, and he would surely have been appalled by the recent attempts to make philosophy socially and politically "relevant." The suggestion that pragmatism might provide a philosophical vindication of radical politics would have gone against the grain both emotionally and intellectually. In this he was a far cry from those philosophers who now have an audience among the general reading public -- and notably from Richard Rorty, who makes striking and (in my view) outrageous claims, linking the pragmatist tradition to fashionable "liberationist" causes.

I never knew Quine. But I am sure that he would have regarded Mr. Rorty's feminist pragmatism as an intellectual betrayal -- not because Quine was a conservative (though he was), but because agenda-mongering is incompatible with the purity of philosophical argument, as he conceived it. It is for this reason that no one would be able to guess, from reading his "Word and Object" or "From a Logical Point of View," that Quine was a political conservative.

Outside departments of philosophy it is difficult to advance in the American academy without showing one's political colors, and they must be the right (which is to say left) ones. Thinkers like Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Peter Singer, each of whom has swept to eminence on the crest of some political wave, are known to all students of the humanities, and to the reading public at large. They are the salesmen of philosophy to the non-philosophical, but none of them compares, for rigor, depth or truthfulness, with Quine. Intellectually and stylistically he occupies a pinnacle far above their clouds of murky rhetoric, and it is sad to reflect that only students of philosophy today have any inkling of this.

Nevertheless, thanks in part to Quine's influence, philosophy remains one of the glories of the American academy. His extraordinary combination of intellectual austerity and metaphysical boldness set the example that Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and others have followed. If the general public knows nothing of those philosophers it is not because they are narrow specialists with no feel for the larger issues. It is because, like Quine, they have upheld the dignity of philosophy, as a discipline in which truth, not relevance, is the goal.

Washington Post obituary for W V Quine - Dec 31 2000

U.S. Philosopher Willard Quine Dies at 92
By Martin Weil, Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 31, 2000; Page C06

Willard Van Orman Quine, 92, for decades one of the luminaries of the American academic world, a philosopher who did his thinking about thought itself, died on Christmas Day in Boston, where he lived. The cause of death was not reported.

Dr. Quine taught at Harvard University for more than 40 years, publishing more than 20 books and winning a reputation as one of the foremost figures in American philosophy, as a specialist in mathematical logic and in the meaning of language.

Although perhaps little known to the public, Dr. Quine, with his more than 150 scholarly articles, took a vigorous hand in the struggles that roiled his discipline, and continued to be active long after his formal retirement in 1978. He was widely read in college courses and was renowned for his penetrating criticism of some established doctrines. He was a man of mathematical precision, logical exactitude and formidable mental stamina. He lived on Boston's Beacon Hill, rode the subway to his office in Cambridge, and dealt with questions that might trouble any of his fellow passengers in some way at some time, but that few of them could deal with at such intellectual depth. His life's work was to find answers to questions such as these: What do we Know? Can we Know? How do we know that we Know? What things do we take for granted in trying to know -- and how does the language we use determine how we think and how we view the world? What occupied him, he said, was this: "How is it possible that we, on the basis of just the triggering of our sense receptors, have developed this elaborate theory about the world all the way out to the distant constellations and down to the imperceptibly small?"

Dr. Quine was known for expressing himself in a way that often sliced through academic verbiage. "The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences," he once wrote. "A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention."

Among philosophers, Dr. Quine was known in particular for his effort to wipe out what was once thought to be an important distinction between varieties of truth. One type was said to be analytic, the other synthetic. Dubbed analytic were statements that seemed innately, inherently, linguistically true. Those dubbed synthetic were statements considered true because they reflected the way things are. Some philosophers viewed this distinction as a boundary between two distinct kinds of knowledge. One kind was knowledge that could be deduced by reason. The other was knowledge that could be obtained empirically, through experience.

In one of the works for which he was best known, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," published in 1951, Dr. Quine argued against the validity of this distinction. Perhaps an even more influential book was "Word and Object," which he published in 1960. It elaborated on his idea that how people talk about the external world determines how they see it. "The idea of reducing the unfamiliar to the familiar -- that's what we have in science," he once said. Dr. Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, studied mathematics at Oberlin College, and earned a philosophy doctorate at Harvard.

Although he was hired at Harvard to teach philosophy, he said, he was strongly attracted to mathematics "because of it being less a matter of opinion. Clarifying, not defending. Resting on proof." He taught mathematical logic and set theory, and a course on logic in philosophy. During World War II he was a Navy officer, helping to decipher communication codes used by German submarines. It turned out that one of those who had taken one of his classes was Theodore J. Kaczynski, who was convicted in the Unabomber case.

"Just the other day," a Boston area newspaper quoted him in 1996, "I took out my old records. I did teach Kaczynski, although I don't remember him. He tied for top, 98.9 percent." In addition to important figures in the world of academic philosophy, his students also included Tom Lehrer, the song satirist. Set theory, in which Dr. Quine worked, could be used in analyzing philosophical propositions, and as an underpinning for the functioning of computers.

ears ago, he told a reporter that "I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in computers." He said that he was "only interested in theory. Not its application." His marriage to Naomi Clayton ended in divorce. He married his second wife, Marjorie Boynton, in 1948. She died in 1998. Survivors include two children from his first marriage and two from his second.

Die Zeit obituary for W V Quine - Jan. 3 2001

Nicht mehr, aber auch nicht weniger. Zum Tode des Philosophen Willard Van Orman Quine
Von Eberhard Döring

Willard Van Orman Quine hat keine singuläre These in die Welt gesetzt, aus der sich simple Ableitungen hervorzaubern lassen. Vielmehr hat er in den zentralen Bereichen der theoretischen Philosophie - von der modernen Logik über die Erkenntnistheorie und die Sprachphilosophie - derart gewaltige Meilensteine hinterlassen, dass er noch zu Lebenzeiten als Klassiker der Philosophie gehandelt wurde. Sein Einfluss auf den amerikanischen Neopragmatismus, der sich um die Namen Hilary Putnam und Richard Rorty, aber auch Nelson Goodman und Donald Davidson rankt, ist unbestreitbar.

Die Beiträge zur Analytischen Philosophie waren bahnbrechend. Keine Seite konnte Quine für sich vereinnahmen. Überhaupt ist der Logiker Quine reflektiert genug gewesen, der "süßen Simplizität der zweiwertigen Logik" skeptisch gegenüberzustehen: Für ihn muss ein Satz keineswegs entweder wahr oder falsch sein, weil es keinen externen Maßstab gibt, der als "tertium quid" darüber befinden könnte. Vielmehr konnte es für Quine überhaupt kein Kriterium geben, das als Richtschnur über Wahrheit oder Falschheit empirischer Theorien entscheiden könnte. Wie schon bei Kant lassen sich nur Vorstellungen mit Vorstellungen, Sätze mit Sätzen, Theorien mit Theorien vergleichen. Ein subjektunabhängiger Standpunkt, eine perspektivenfreie Neutralität ist niemals in Sicht. In welcher auch?

Die Wissenschaften sind eine "Begriffsbrücke"

Was immer wir in unseren Blick rücken, es sind hochgradig theoriebeladene Kontexte: Die Natur, die Realität oder die Wirklichkeit selbst, sozusagen nackt und unbefleckt, neutral oder unschuldig, steht uns nicht zur Verfügung; eine Entsprechung von Sachverhalt und Theorie gibt es nur innerhalb von Theorien. Deshalb konnte Quine sagen, "das System der Wissenschaft mit seiner Ontologie" sei eine "von uns selbst gebaute Begriffsbrücke". Die so genannten Tatsachen, die angeblichen "harten Fakten", sind allesamt Tat-Sachen; sie sind, viel wörtlicher, als einem lieb sein kann, nur Sachen der Tat, womit zumindest der artifizielle Charakter der Wissenschaft, ihr ontologischer Relativismus, in Erinnerung gerufen wird. Dass hierbei Kant und Nietzsche, aber auch Hegel Pate stehen, beginnt sich in der amerikanischen Philosophie nach Quine herumzusprechen. Rorty schlägt diese Brücke über den Atlantik mit seinen Hinweisen auf Dewey und lädt dazu ein, Quine nicht nur mit Sellars, sondern auch mit Heidegger und Gadamer zu verbinden.

Für Quine selbst, der 1908 in Akron (Ohio) geboren wurde und in Harvard Mathematik und Philosophie studiert sowie bei Whitehead promoviert hat, lagen die frühen Wurzeln seines Denkens im Umfeld der Theorien von Bertrand Russell, danach von Rudolf Carnap und Alfred Tarski, die er während eines Europa-Aufenthaltes in Prag und Warschau kennen gelernt hat. Dieser Zugang zur Philosophie lässt sich bis in sein Spätwerk verfolgen. Insbesondere seine Berührung mit dem logischen Positivismus des Wiener Kreises hat ihn zu einer kritischen Einschätzung des metaphysischen Empirismus veranlasst und seither dazu bewogen, den von ihm analysierten "Dogmen des Empirismus" eine konstruktive Alternative zu etablieren. Waren da zunächst noch die Auseinandersetzungen mit Fragen zur Logik und Mathematik, die sich in den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren unter anderem in Texten wie A System of Logic (1934) oder Mathematical Logic (1940) sowie Elementary Logic (1941) niedergeschlagen haben, kam es Anfang der fünfziger Jahre - nach einem dreijährigen kriegsbedingten Intermezzo bei der US-Navy - zum ersten großen Wurf, der ihn als Harvard-Philosoph über Amerika hinaus berühmt gemacht hat. Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) und From A Logical Point of View (1953) waren neben vielen anderen Schriften die Ausgangspunkte für Quines Beschäftigung mit der Sprachphilosophie und der Ontologie, die dann in Word and Object (1960) in einem kohärenten empiristischen Gesamtentwurf mit provozierenden Stellungnahmen einmünden.

Wie in allen großen denkerischen Leistungen finden sich bei Quine vorwiegend Fragestellungen, die zur Reflexion anregen, und keine fertigen Wahrheiten, die sich in die Welt hinausposaunen lassen. Sein letztes Werk trägt die Überschrift Unterwegs zur Wahrheit, was an Lessings berühmte Formel erinnert, derzufolge die "Wahrheit keine Münze" wäre, sondern ungemünzt bleiben muss, um sich bedarfsgerecht ummünzen zu lassen oder "Wert einer Variablen" zu bleiben. Zugleich erinnert uns dies an Nietzsche, für den es aufgrund unserer Schematisierungen keine Wahrheit gibt: "Es gibt keine Wahrheit", sogar "um der Wahrheit willen", und "der Werth für das Leben entscheidet zuletzt".

Die Suche nach ewiger Wahrheit ist fruchtlos

Und doch war für Quine die Wahrheit ein heuristisches Ideal; sie bleibt zu sich selbst unterwegs, weil ihr der Zugang zu einer externen Realität, die ihre jeweiligen Bedingungen und Voraussetzungen überschreiten könnte, verwehrt ist. Darum nannte Quine "die Wissenschaft nichts weiter als eine höchst ausgefeilte Form des gesunden Menschenverstandes", der an "unterschiedlichen Stellen in unterschiedlichem Maße fehlbar ist". Die Wissenschaft "kann jederzeit einmal berichtigt werden müssen, doch bietet sich uns eben schlicht und einfach keine andere Zugangsmöglichkeit zur Wahrheit".

Welche Gegenstände für die Wissenschaft relevant sein können, entscheidet sich jedoch nicht unabhängig vom historischen, pragmatischen und kulturellen Zusammenhang, innerhalb dessen eine Bestimmtheit aus dem "Sperrfeuer sinnlicher Reize" isoliert wird. Deshalb kann es für Quine auch keine neutralen Fakten geben, die dem Relationengeflecht von Empirie, Sprache und Theorie entzogen wären. Was immer uns erscheint, erscheint uns bereits interpretiert als etwas, das sich unserer eigenen Zurüstung und Einteilung durch zweckmäßige Auswahl, Abgrenzung und Isolation verdankt. Die Suche nach ewigen Wahrheiten, nach einer gesicherten Erkenntnisbasis oder nach letzten Begründungen außerhalb unserer eigenen Welterzeugungen ist fruchtlos.

Die philosophische Wahrheitssuche ist für Quine keineswegs obsolet - doch sie findet nur innerhalb von Beschreibungssystemen statt. Das heißt: Die metaphysische Wende, die sich alle großen Philosophen zugute halten, besteht darin, dass die jeweils erreichte und wirksame Wahrheit ihre ganze Realität ausmacht, jedenfalls solange sie sich auf ein reflexiv einholbares Wissen stützt. Dann verwandelt sich eine naive Wahrheit in eine philosophische Weisheit; immanente Relevanz ersetzt transzendente Realität, und die Objekte der Wissenschaft verhärten sich zu kulturellen Erfindungen, die wir um ihrer Plausibilität willen aus der metaphorischen Wirklichkeit in eine begriffliche Realität projizieren. So glauben wir an einen Fortschritt, der von Homer bis Einstein stattgefunden hat oder stattgefunden haben könnte. "Was mich angeht", schrieb Quine schon 1951, "glaube ich ... an physikalische Objekte und nicht an die Götter Homers ... Doch hinsichtlich ihrer epistemologischen Fundierung unterscheiden sich physikalische Objekte und Homers Götter nur graduell und nicht prinzipiell. Beide Arten Entitäten kommen nur aus kulturellen Setzungen in unser Denken. Der Mythos der physikalischen Objekte ist epistemologisch den meisten anderen darin überlegen, dass er sich darin wirksamer als andere Mythen erwiesen hat, dem Fluss der Erfahrungen eine handliche Struktur aufzuprägen."

Für Quine gab es immer "mehr als nur eine angemessene Möglichkeit, sich die Welt zu denken". Die Welt besteht eben aus verschiedenen Kontexten, und auch in diesen artikuliert sich eine Plausibilität, die sich "unterwegs zur Wahrheit" befindet. Dabei geht es nicht um ein "endgültiges Richtig oder Falsch", sondern "eher um ein Besser oder Schlechter", womit sich das Wahrheitskriterium in ein Meliorationskriterium verschiebt. Das mag eingefleischten Wahrheitsfanatikern als erbärmlich wenig erscheinen. Aber mehr als Plausibilität im Kontext der Kultur zu erwarten, hieße, jene massiven Dogmen zu vertreten, die Quine erfolgreich verabschiedet hat.

Am ersten Weihnachtsfeiertag ist Quine im Alter von 92 Jahren in Boston verstorben.

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