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June 03, 2005
Where Did That Come From?
See, here's (one of the many reasons) why I love Kevin. This is a text message I got from him (note the time):
From: Kevin
Quine is still my
hero. Love, kev
2:16 am 6/3/05
The Quine of whom he was speaking is, of course, the late Willard Van Orman Quine, professor of philosophy at Harvard University for the last half the 20th century. In case you were wondering (and of course you were), WVO Quine is indeed the father of Robert Quine, guitarist for Richard Hell & The Voidoids.
After Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, Quine's corpus contained some of the acmes of philosophical achievement in the last century. His most widely circulated ideas being those of ontological relativity, and the so-called "web of belief." The latter turning on the equally important notion of meaning holism that Quine uses to reject the notion of analytic truth (in the seminal "Two Dogmas of Empiricism")--this being one of the few instances in the history of philosophy where a reasonable quorum of philosophers think an argument actually settled an important question.
Quine will always be a bugbear for more traditionally-minded analytic philosophers. His critiques of that strand of thought, unlike those from France and continental Europe, are firmly rooted in the discipline's own vocabulary and methodology. It's so easy to blow off somebody who brings up some bullshit Wittgensteinian "critique" of whatever it is you're trying to establish. When your interlocutor throws "Two Dogmas" at you, however, there's genuine cause for concern.
At the same time, he was fully prepared to accept consequences of his arguments that contravened his worldview. Despite his relentless quest to rid the world of abstract objects, he nonetheless reluctantly admitted sets into his ontology since he could honestly see no way of having math without them.
All of this is to say, yeah Kev, Quine is still my hero, too.
PS Speaking of philosophy, I want to congratulate Robert Cummins on his new job at U of I Urbana/Champaign. Back in my academic days, I waged what could only be described as a small holy war to get Cummins's mounmentally underrated work (particularly his 1996 Representations, Targets, and Attitudes) more widely discussed.
Posted by matt at June 3, 2005 09:26 AM
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