Book Description
Language consists of dispositions, socially instilled, to respond observably to socially observable stimuli. Such is the point of view from which a noted philosopher and logician examines the notion of meaning and the linguistic mechanisms of objective reference. In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our language's referential apparatus, clarifies semantic problems connected with the imputation of existence, and marshals reasons for admitting or repudiating each of various categories of supposed objects. He argues that the notion of a language-transcendent "sentence-meaning" must on the whole be rejected; meaningful studies in the semantics of reference can only be directed toward substantially the same language in which they are conducted.
Customer Reviews:
Empiricism Squared.......2006-09-03
Quine tells a fascinating story about translation. His is not a lazy mind.
His assumption (or belief) that language is learned completely through experience is simply false. Ample evidence drawn from experiments in psychology, neuro-physics, and even common sense demonstrate otherwise. Like the English philosophers who wrote about language and cognition centuries before him, his work will be found to be historically interesting, but ultimately dated; one might say, in the field of linguistics, pre-Copernicus.
Probably wrong but great nonetheless.......2006-06-22
First of all, unless you specialize in self-torture, don't try to read past chapter 2. (I myself died in the middle of chapter 5.) Chapters 1 and 2, however, are fantastic. You've probably heard the story before...it seems we can't tell whether by "Gavagai" the natives mean "rabbit", or "undetached rabbit part." The reason is, every single time a native is stimulated by the one, he is stimulated by the other...or something like that. That much is a fairly amusing observation, and Quine has a field day with it, suggesting that it's impossible in principle to discriminate between these putative "referents". Hmm. Well, let's just see. Say you and I are observing a "source"...a black box, out of which ticks a stream of letters. Say that, occasionally, the string of characters "R-A-B-B-I-T" appears in the stream. You have noticed that whenever this happens, I announce (gleefully) "Gavagai!" It seems you're stuck. You can never tell whether by "Gavagai!" I take myself to "refer" to "R-A-B-B-I-T" or to the rabbit-embedded "B-B" appearing in the stream. At least, not by passive observation. Once you can ask me questions about what I do take myself to be "referring" to, it seems that we can clear this issue up, but fast. Or not? Quine thinks not, and that's where things get interesting. I'm pretty sure he's wrong, but I'm not (exactly) sure why. Probably you can employ a meta-language to artificially attach referential information to sentences...more interesting, however, is the question why you would want to. Indeed, wouldn't a philosopher versed in the paradox just say "what's the difference?" when asked whether he "referred" to "R-A-B-B-I-T" or a rabbit-embedded "B-B"? The moral seems to be that you aren't stuck at all...you know what I *mean* either way, you just don't know what I'm referring to: reference, in short, doesn't contribute in the way we usually think it does to meaning. But, whatever the answers are, the puzzles are here, so read it.
A Seminal Book in Contemporary Pragmatism.......2005-11-14
This book is Quine's first full-length book, and it sets forth his most elaborate statement of his wholistic thesis of language. Instead of the metaphorical statement in "Two Dogmas" written a decade earlier, here in Word and Object Quine expresses his thesis in the literal vocabulary of behavioristic psychology with his idea of "stimulus meaning".
Much of the book is an exposition of his thesis of semantic indeterminacy as it is manifested in translation between languages, which thus appears as his indeterminacy of translation thesis sometimes called his "radical translation" thesis. In fact there is nothing radical about it; linguists have long known of such translation problems. As has long been said: translate est traduttore. But Quine uses it to critique positivism, and it is essential to his pragmatism.
In the translation situation he portrays the field linguist in the same situation that the positivist Carnap postulates in "Meaning and Synonymy in Natural Language", where Carnap attempted to describe how the field linguist can ascertain a term's "intension" or meaning by identifying its extension or range of application from the observed behavior of native speakers of an unknown language. Carnap admitted that this determination of extension involves uncertainty and possible error due to vagueness, but he excused this uncertainty and risk of error, because it occurs even in the concepts used in empirical science. While this admission of extensional vagueness in science made the fact unproblematic for Carnap, it had just the opposite significance for Quine.
For Quine extensional vagueness is an inherent characteristic of language that he calls "referential inscrutability", and which he later calls "ontological relativity." And what Carnap called intensional vagueness, Quine prefers to consider as a semantical indeterminacy in stimulus meaning but without admitting intensions.
For more on my views on Quine, please Google my book History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science, which is also on my web site philsci with free downloads by chapter - especially BOOK III, and my other reviews of Quine's books at this AMAZON site.
Thomas J. Hickey
An Essential Read for Philosophy of Language Enthusiasts.......2002-12-30
In this incomparable and engaging book Quine takes up many of the questions he raised in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and in his other early papers. In Word and Object, he levels an attack against the traditional notion of meaning that is accepted by so many, because it is understood by so few. Though the position defended here is alomost completely wrong, it is wrong for interesting reasons and, along with Quine's other works, establishes a position regarding matters semantic that, from his ultra-empiricist positivist perspective is nearly inevitable. If you don't find his position at least a little compelling, then your heart is made of stone.
Pinnacle of Philosophical Clarity.......2001-06-20
This book is a true classic, both in content and presentation; Quine's pithy style, sometimes ironic, is singular in the literature of analytic philosophy. This book describes the generation of reference and logical categories out of the confluence of "sense-data" and "stimulus synonymy", and proceeds to plow through every permutation of problems which can arise from such an endeavor. Chapter two (the [in-]famous "indeterminacy of translation" thesis) is a fascinating linguistic reformulation of the "other minds" problem, demonstrating that one must conclude a type of "ontological relativity" amongst speakers. Along with Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations," Ryle's The Concept of Mind," and Sellars' "Philosophy and the Empiricism of Mind," Quine's major work completes the quadrivium of mid-20th century analytic philosophy.
Book Description
The most influential philosopher in the analytic tradition of his time, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) changed the way we think about language and its relation to the world. His rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, his scepticism about modal logic and essentialism, his celebrated theme of the indeterminacy of translation, and his advocacy of naturalism have challenged key assumptions of the prevailing orthodoxy and helped shape the development of much of recent philosophy.
This introduction to Quine's philosophical ideas provides philosophers, students, and generalists with an authoritative analysis of Quine's lasting contributions to philosophy. The major themes covered include the adaptation of the language of modern logic to formulate a criterion of ontological commitment; Quine's own ontological commitments; Duhemian-Holistic empiricism and the attendant rejection of a priori knowledge; the nature and grounds of logical truth; Quine's criticisms of such notions as meaning, synonymy, analyticity, and necessity; the conjecture of the indeterminacy of translation; modal logic; propositional attitudes; and Quine's work on naturalized epistemology.
Quine's ideas throughout are contrasted with more traditional views, as well as with contemporaries such as Frege, Russell, Carnap, Davidson, Field, Kripke, and Chomsky, enabling the reader to grasp a clear sense of the place of Quine's views in twentieth-century philosophy and the important criticisms of them.
Book Description
A compact, coherent introduction to the study of rational belief, this text provides points of entry to such areas of philosophy as theory of knowledge, methodology of science, and philosophy of language. The book is accessible to all undergraduates and presupposes no philosophical training.
Customer Reviews:
Semantics Relativized .......2005-11-15
The title of this book is a figurative expression of one of the fundamental theses of the contemporary pragmatist philosophy of language - the thesis of the contextually relativized determination of meaning. An example is any ordinary unilanguage dictionary, which displays our most tenaciously held beliefs with each term defined in relation to other terms that are as it were nodes in the "web" that constitutes the dictionary. But beyond the dictionary we also hold many additional beliefs, such as in current school textbooks, which make our semantics much richer and more complex than the simple dictionary meaning. More generally all of our shared and conventional beliefs taken together are in effect a dictionary that glues our language together.
Quine attacked the positivists, who maintained that observation language is not determined contextually - that observation terms have independent, invariant and special meanings by which they are distinguished from theory language. In the chapter titled "Observation" he argues that what qualifies a sentence as observational is not the lack of theoretical terms, but rather is that the sentence taken as a whole commands assent consistently or dissent consistently when the same global sensory stimulation is repeated. This behavioral characterization enabled Quine to avoid referencing semantics in his characterization of observation language, and thereby to separate his view from the positivists, who defined observation language by its distinctive semantics.
But in attempting also to avoid a cultural relativist view of truth that he erroneously thought he found in Russell Hanson's philosophy of observation, Quine reverted to the semantics of observation with the very positivist objective of keeping the semantics of observation uncontaminated by theory language. In this effort Quine failed to recognize that a pragmatically defined relativistic semantics for observational description is necessary to avoid a relativistic view of truth. Contextually relativized semantics implies that the same statement cannot be both true and false due to contradictory contexts, because the contradictory contexts produce partial equivocation, such that it is not exactly the same statement in both contexts. Google my book titled History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site philsci with free downloads by chapter, and see my other reviews of Quine's books.
Thomas J. Hickey
Very much worth the challenge.......2005-09-20
Williard V. Quine (1908-2000), a brilliant mathematician and philosopher from Akron, Ohio and Joseph S. Ullian (1930-), currently a professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, composed The Web of Belief for "freshmen courses in English" (p. v) in 1970. The small book contains 145 pages divided into ten chapters that look promising but quickly become intimidating.
The Web of Belief is worth one's time and effort, because The Web of Belief introduces the reader to the goodness of "science" ("Intro.", p. 3), encourages us to weed-out our "conflicting beliefs" (Ch. 2, p. 14), teaches us to appreciate our intuitions since it is "impossible" to prove "every reasonable belief" (Ch. 7, p. 92), and encourages us to find "a common ground of beliefs" when arguing with a person in order to "minimize effort for ourselves" (Ch. 10, p. 129). I particularly welcome this last bit of advice.
Chapter Seven, "Hypothesis", is the goal toward which the first six chapters are headed and is definately worth the price of the book. It is here that Quine and Ullian distinguish an "Observation" and the "direct evidence of the senses" (p. 21) from a "Hypothesis" which is an "enlightened guess" (p. 65), "a plausible story" (p. 66). Chapter Eight, "Confirmation and Refutation", completes chapter seven and discusses how a plausible story and a hypothesis becomes a true "law" of science (p. 98).
For a person who agrees that it is good to think clearly, carefully and independently and who wishes to take the mind seriously, I strongly recommend this book as well as anything written by Aristotle.
Approached as a textbook, this work shines.......2004-12-19
Approached as a textbook, this work by Quine and that other guy stands out as an unusual piece that does just enough to interest the reader in the field, without being tedious and overwhelming.
The book is lucidly written, in relatively short and simple sentences. It is extremely well-organized, etc. Since philosophy is a difficult and complex subject, the degree of clarity that is achieved in the text is impressive and even aesthetically pleasing.
One can make sense out of the book if one treats it as outlining a particular point of view: that of the thinker who sees her intellectual habits as further developments of thought processes and methods that emerge as one tries to make sense out of all facets of life. This willingness to promote philosophy--and science--as fields that contribute to one's ability to make sense out of one's situation shows up, in however subdued a fashion, in the authors' willingness to present philosophy as something that is actively carried out in the real world, about the real world, with members of the real world. The subject matter is not reduced to abstractions.
Overall, worth reading as it will orientate everyone to contemporary philosophy.
Still wonderfully useful as an introduction.......2004-10-07
Considering the many years since this was first written as "a compact introduction to the study of rational belief" it has wonderfully survived as a gem of a little book. Philosophy is a difficult subject to start. If a course starts with ancient philosophy, besides the challenge of critical thinking, there are cultural issues, translation issues, and the matter of explaining contemporary relevance. All of those issues are avoided with this book. It is a clear description of terms necessary for rational thought studiously written by a master logician for beginning students. It is also a wonderful introduction to Quine.
excellent introduction to rational thought.......2003-06-12
This book points to the underpinnings of rational thought and scientific method. There is no such thing as THE scientific method. But all versions of the scientific method have certain basic elements such as hypothesis, evidence, testing of theory and so forth. This book explains all this and from the position of philosophy that invented the scientific method. The authors show the logic behind rational thought which all adds up to eminent common sense. After reading this book many years ago, it became clear to me how Einstein came up with the theory of relativity. The theory is an explanation of why the Miachelson-Morley experiment failed to find the ether. This book makes a lot of sense. Its a bit pricey, but if you like the philosophy behind rational thinking and scientific method, you might consider the purchase of this book.
Book Description
This widely used textbook of modern formal logic now offers a number of new features. Incorporating updated notations, selective answers to exercises, expanded treatment of natural deduction, and new discussions of predicate- functor logic and the affinities between higher set theory and the elementary logic of terms, Quine's new edition will serve admirably both for classroom and for independent use.
Customer Reviews:
the serum of serendipity surrenders us.......2007-01-13
It's Quine, so it seems almost polemical though it's an introductory logic text, which is a bit strange. E.g., he is always promoting his own terminology against what's standard: 'alternation' vs. 'disjunction', 'non-exclusive' vs. 'inclusive', 'singulary' vs. 'unary', and so on. The introduction of non-standard terminology is not as bad as some, however.
In any case, it very much reads like a book on the philosophy of logic rather a current introductory logic text (especially of the mathematical sort). For instance, he goes into the use/mention distinct at length, quotation and quasi-quotation, justification of canonical translations of English sentences into the symbolism of a formal theory, etc. I suppose this is so because the book contains basically *no* metatheory (except the Skolem-Lowenheim theory in the appendix). The purpose of the book is to teach the ability to conduct reasoning *in* some formal theory (rather than about it), and to do so practically, putting aside some of the "eloquence" (as he puts it) found in other texts.
It's old, the philosophy is interesting, but I would not recommend it as an introductory text. Or if you were to use it as an introductory text, then one for something more like a cross between critical thinking and formal logic.
Masterpiece.......2001-04-14
I don't think you get this in a lot of other books. Just look at the Historical Notes; In themselves a guided direction to the most important work on logics. This is truly time saving instead of go wondering what books to read, up to the date of Quine's book of course.
In the end it also contains bibliography, but also a note to a whole other index covering literature up to 1935, this is truly at great value.
I find this book helpful in analysis concerning ideas; Whatever they are, since language usage is the tool for thought, even if not written down.
It's simply a MIND-SPEAKER.
Also more newer books, in for instance computer science, in my personal opinion, skip important questions already asked by scientists which then have been elaborated on.
People who read logic for the first time, like me, ask fundamental questions in order to understand, following Quine's reasoning is surely educational.
A good start.......2001-03-07
Like any great book, this one could be a bit, though not too much, better. By far and away the most useful element of Quine's book is his treatment of translating ordinary English into logical schemata. I have never seen such a lucid and effective presentation of the task, and I recommend the book very highly to anybody on that account. His presentation of truth-functional and quantificational schemata are solid are simply excellent. The book, however, is not without its defects of which I should caution prospective buyers about. First, there are many treatments in the book of historical interest, but to a student of first-order logic they may seem to be a bit excessive. His incorporation of Polish notation, while fascinating in its own right, is not in accorance with Quine's drive for efficiency and conciseness. A similar account goes for his treatment of Boolean algebra. It is in that treatment that Quine introduces many ideas indispensible to quantificational logic, yet it is tempting to skip over those chapters when one can sufficiently delve into quantification theory. Secondly, his notation is, as another reviewer points out, unorthodox. It is very effective and in my opinion superior to the conventional formality, but this could be difficult to deal with, and one wonders if Quine should have been more cautious about varying his symbols from the norm. Finally, Quine's treatment of the Completeness Proof and the Lowenheim Theorem, while quite solid in their own right, could be more effective. Quine seems to be keen on applying a constructivist approach to the proof, and spends many pages on definitions and lemmas that can be avoided. One can provide a proof by contradiction in order to sufficiently demonstrate most of his treatment of the matter, as so much of it is spent proving the "law of infinite conjunction," which is really only an 8 step proof. I won't go into the details here, but keep that in mind when studying the chapter. Nevertheless, Quine's work is as entertaining as it is rigorous.
a great introduction to first-order logic ..........2000-10-19
Quine is well-known in this century for being one of the premier analytic philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. He probably used this book for his upper-division course in logic for philosophy majors. After reading this book, I can see his reputation is well-justified.
This book is more than just a textbook in logic. In his own way, Quine shows in his examples just how difficult it is to break down ordinary language into symbolic logic, and in the process (hopefully), one should learn both rigorous thinking and charity. These are rare commodities today.
Quine has the rather idiosyncratic position that modal logic only confuses matters. However, I would rather read a complete introduction to modal logic, than to receive only a chapter's worth of treatment. Hence, I can deal with his excluding modal logic from this book.
I do wish there was a short chapter or glossary on informal logic, since many other treatments do continue to use those terms (e.g. Copi). Knowing the terminology does help one to communicate in prose one's analysis of an argument. It does help to know all those latin distinctions (e.g. ad hominem, ad nominem, ad populii, petitio principii, etc.).
That being said, I'm a much clearer thinker for having worked through this book, and I would heartily recommend this for anybody.
Good textbook on logic.......2000-08-13
This book is a nice overview of the foundations of modern logic with some additional non-traditional topics, such as modal logic included. Quine is necessary reading for all those interested in mathematical logic, philosophical logic, and theoretical foundations of computer science. By far the best chapter of the book is Chapter 33 which deals with the Skolem-Lowenheim theorem. Even though it is very short, Quine does a good job of explaining what this result is all about, and does so with upmost clarity. Another nice feature of the book is the inclusion of historical notes at the end of each chapter. This gives the reader a general view of just where the results came from, and encourages further reading on the subject. Anyone interested in functional and logical programming will gain a lot in the reading of this book, as it introduces the proper tools and methodologies used in these important programming paradigms.
Book Description
Now much revised since its first appearance in 1941, this book, despite its brevity, is notable for its scope and rigor. It provides a single strand of simple techniques for the central business of modern logic. Basic formal concepts are explained, the paraphrasing of words into symbols is treated at some length, and a testing procedure is given for truth-function logic along with a complete proof procedure for the logic of quantifiers. Fully one third of this revised edition is new, and presents a nearly complete turnover in crucial techniques of testing and proving, some change of notation, and some updating of terminology. The study is intended primarily as a convenient encapsulation of minimum essentials, but concludes by giving brief glimpses of further matters.
Customer Reviews:
The Best Introductory Textbook of Logic.......2000-10-13
I am surprised to be the first one to write a review about this book. However, I can see how this happened - the author himself writes in his preface to this last edition: "Publisher's samples of fifty-five logic textbooks have accumulated in my office, all introductory and in English. Quantification theory or the first-order predicate calculus is covered in one way or another in most of them. Forty years ago it was covered in none." Forty years ago W. O. Quine published his "Elementary Logic" and set some standards in Logic. I would only want to stress the fact that the good thing about this book is not only that it was the first of this kind, chronologically speaking, but that it still is the first, from a logical point of view (this is the title of another one of Quine's books). Usual readers may not realize that the standards that Quine set forty years ago are still the best that one can find in his attempt to learn Logic. I haven't read a better introductory textbook of Logic and I recommend it to anyone who really wants to understand how the Science of all Sciences (as the medieval philosophers called Logic) works.
Average customer rating:
- A look at Quine's philosophy
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Quine and Analytic Philosophy: The Language of Language (Bradford Books)
George D. Romanos
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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Book Description
For fifty years, Willard Van Orman Quine's books and articles have stimulated intense debate in the fields of logic and the philosophy of language. Many scholars in fact, regard Quine as the greatest living English-speaking philosopher; yet his views remain widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. This book provides the first major explication and defense of Quine's systematic philosophy and is ideally suited for use as a required or supplementary text in a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy and linguistics.
The book explores the far-reaching implications of Quine's views on language for contemporary analytic philosophy. It is unique in providing a lucid and rich description and reconstruction of the historical context from which Quine's work grew, focusing in particular on the role that Russell and Wittgenstein played in shaping the problems inherited by Quine. It presents Quine's difficult later views in an accessible fashion, bringing out as no other study has the very radical nature of his position. One of the book's highlights is its careful examination and assessment of Tarski's theory of truth as it relates to the traditions of Russell and Wittgenstein and to Quine's own philosophy.
George D. Romanos took his Ph.D. in philosophy under George D. W. Berry and Paul T. Sagal at Boston University. This book grew out of his dissertation with the active criticism and support of Quine himself.
Customer Reviews:
A look at Quine's philosophy.......1999-11-06
This book looks at Quine's philosophy and the consequences of Quine's conclusions on analytic philosophy. Though it is fairly lucid, his unquestioning acceptance of everything Quine says makes a lot of what is said seem superficial.
Book Description
This expanded edition of The Ways of Paradox includes papers that are among Professor Quine's most important and influential, such as "Truth by Convention," "Carnap and Logical Truth," "On Carnap's Views on Ontology," "The Scope and Language of Science," and "Posits and Reality." Many of these essays deal with unresolved issues of central interest to philosophers today. About half of them are addressed to "a wider public than philosophers." The remainder are somewhat more professional and technical. This new edition of The Ways of Paradox contains eight essays that appeared after publication of the first edition, and it retains the seminal essays that must be read by anyone who seeks to master Quine's philosophy.
Quine has been characterized, in The New York Review of Books, as "the most distinguished American recruit to logical empiricism, probably the contemporary American philosopher most admired in the profession, and an original philosophical thinker of the first rank." His "philosophical innovations add up to a coherent theory of knowledge which he has for the most part constructed single-handed." In The Ways of Paradox new generations of readers will gain access to this philosophy.
Customer Reviews:
a classic.......2007-10-22
in deed indeed, an outstanding classic -- and not only for insiders. the title does tell the tale: one need only have an interest in the topic.
Quine's Two Dogmas: Nominalism and Wholism.......2007-04-02
This small book of 184 pages including an index is a collection of previously published papers. The chapters "On What There Is", "Reification of Universals", "Identity, Ostension and Hypostasis", "Reification of Universals", "Theory of Reference" and "Two Dogmas" expound on two central theses of Quine's philosophy of language. The first thesis is his nominalism, and the second is his wholism (or "holism").
"On What There Is", "Reification of Universals", "Identity, Ostension and Hypostasis", "Reification of Universals", and "Theory of Reference" are several papers that set forth Quine's nominalist philosophy of language, which is due to his fidelity to the predicate calculus created by Whitehead and Russell. Quine had written his Ph.D. dissertation titled A System of Logic under Whitehead, who in his "Foreword" wrote that logic shapes metaphysical thought. Whitehead and Russell had a nominalist agenda, and Quine bought into it.
This shaping with the Russellian symbolic logic is accomplished by combining existence claims with quantification, such that the only relation the symbols can have to the real world is by reference. Elsewhere in his "On Universals" as well as in "Reification of universals" in this book Quine thus argues that in the Russellian logic realism must be expressed by quantifying over predicates so they reference universals (i.e. ideas or meanings) as "entities". And he co-authored with Goodman "Steps toward a Constructive Nominalism", a nominalist manifesto, in which all philosophers are classified as either "platonists" or nominalists depending on whether or not predicates are quantified. Nonnominalists are chagrined at the "platonist" caricature. Furthermore nominalism typically gives philosophers the willies, and Willie Van Quine's appeal to the contrived Russellian logic used as an Orwellian newspeak has caused few to reconsider.
Quine's first statement of his wholistic thesis is set forth in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), which has been much more influential than his nominalism; in fact it is this article that motivates many readers to buy this book. The enabling feature of Quine's wholism is his thesis that language is so empirically "underdetermined" that there is much latitude for choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. The thesis of the empirical underdetermination of language can be traced to Duhem's view of physical theory, which Quine cites in this article. Duhem said that there could be many theories, all equally empirically adequate, that explain the same phenomenon. But Quine furthermore extends Duhem's thesis to include not just theory but all of language including observation language.
Quine's most elaborate statement of his wholistic thesis is set forth in his first full-length book, Word and Object (Studies in Communication) (1960), where he expresses it in the literal vocabulary of behavioristic psychology instead of the metaphorical statement given in "Two Dogmas". His wholistic view went through some retrogression, when he came to think that his earlier and more radical pragmatism implies an unwanted cultural relativistic view of truth. Consequently in the 1970's he attempted to restrict the extent of his semantical wholism, so that the semantics of theory is not viewed as contributing to the semantics of observation language. This is a residual positivism that does not inhibit later pragmatists.
"Two Dogmas" is a seminal document that has guided the way to the contemporary pragmatism, which prevails in academic philosophy today. For more on Quine Google my History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my philsci web site for the book with free downloads by chapter.
Thomas J. Hickey
A Nice Period Piece.......2006-09-20
`From a Logical Point of View' originally published in 1953 in a series of essays by W.V.O. Quine. My comments pertain to the 2003 re-release by Harvard University Press which includes the prefaces to both the 1953 and 1980 editions.
The two best known essays from this text, "On What There Is' and `Two Dogmas on Empiricism' have been reprinted in many anthologies over the years. Although Two Dogmas may strike contemporary readers as trivial, coming at the end of the verificationist era, it did have some historic significance and is worth a look for that reason alone. I also enjoyed some of the other essays, e.g. "Reference and Modality" and "Meaning and Existential Inference". Potential buyers may wish to access the on-line table of contents prior to purchasing.
I enjoyed the book - it is a relatively accessible look back at mid twentieth century analytic thought. That said, it is largely a period piece and probably only of interest to dedicated followers of modern analytic philosophy.
Worth the cost for the first two essays alone........2002-12-30
This collection is worth the price simply for "On What There Is" and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" alone. "The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics" is a gem that (along with the last six essays) is too often overlooked, simply because it occurs after the above two (notorious) essays. If you do not own this book, then you cannot be someone who works in the contemporary, post-positivist philosophy of language.
Metaphysics is dead! - long live the conceptual scheme!.......2000-11-30
With this book, Quine bursts onto the scene of analytical philosophy with claims the boldness and insight of which dealt a deadly strike to the orthodoxy of logical positivism. Being published for the first time in 1953, From a Logical Point of View followed hot on the heels of Wittgenstein's Philosophische Untersuchungen and although it's approach is quite different from that of Wittgestein's work, it has received less attention than P.U. Quine's arguments are transparent and yet very substancial in their claims. Better than anyone before or after him Quine realised that the rejection of traditional metaphysics has much graver consequences than it was imagined by the logical positivists. Quine tries to reconcile empiricism with metaphysics-criticism through a pragmatic view of the theory of reality. The result; - the conceptual scheme, is a fasinating and extremely controversial idea, but it has changed the face of metaphysics and epistemology forever. Long since philosophical classics, the essays "On What There Is" and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" are still the best and most readable expositions of the views, which saw Quine elavate theoretical philosophy to a level of thinking, of which it still benefits tremendously.
Book Description
"Some Pow'r did us the giftie grant/ To see oursels as others can't." With that play on Burns' famous line as a preface, Willard Van Orman Quine sets out to spin the yarn of his life so far. And it is a gift indeed to see one of the world's most famous philosophers as no one else has seen him before. To catch an intimate glimpse of his seminal and controversial theories of philosophy, logic, and language as they evolved, and to hear his warm and often amusing comments on famous contemporary philosophers.
From his beginnings in Akron, Ohio in the early 1900s, Quine takes us on a tour of over 100 countries over three-quarters of a century, including close observations of the Depression and two world wars. Far from a philosophical tract, it is an ebullient, folksy account of a richly varied and rounded life. When he does dip into philosophy, it is generally of the armchair sort, and laced with a gentle good humor: "There is that which one wants to do for the glory of having done it, and there is that which one wants to do for the joy of doing it. One can want to be a scientist because he wants to see himself as a Darwin or an Einstein, and one can want to be a scientist because he is curious about what makes things tick .... In normal cases the two kinds of motivation are in time brought to terms .... In me the glory motive lingered ......
In this book, Quine approaches the details of his life the way he has always approached them with a sharp sense of interest, adventure and fun. And he has a skill for picking a word that is just off-center enough to pull an ordinary event out of the humdrum of daily life and evoke its personal meaning. The result is a book of memories that is utterly mesmerizing.
Willard Van Orman Quine is the author of numerous books, including Word and Object, published by The MIT Press in 1960.
A Bradford Book.
Book Description
The first in the murder series featuring Gil Cunningham, a newly qualified lawyer in medieval Glasgow, who finds the body of a young woman in a cathedral and is asked to investigate.
Customer Reviews:
A good Read.......2007-09-03
This was the first book in this series that I have read. It will not be the last. Great story line. Gives one the feel of being there.
Great start.......2006-06-16
This is an excellent start to a historical mystery series featuring Gil Cunningham, an aspiring lawyer in 1492 Glasgow, Scotland. While Columbus was discovering America, Gil is looking for suspects in the brutal stabbing of a woman who was a member of a traveling troupe of musicians. Since Bess Stewart was killed on church property and Gil finds her body, his uncle the Canon decrees that he should investigate her death. Bess also was the estranged wife of a powerful local landowner, and before Gil can cross the street, the number of people who would benefit from her death are crawling out of the woodwork and he has more possible murderers than he knows what to do with!
While I did guess quite early on who the culprit in the mystery was, I very much enjoyed the author's ability to set you right in the midst of the historical place and time. Another strong suit is an excellent ability to provide well-fleshed and interesting characters. Gil, his uncle, their housekeeper Maggie, the Master Mason who assists Gil in his inquiries and the mason's daughter Alys all felt like real people. Even the transient characters--the murder victim and the suspects--were more developed than the main characters of some series I've tried to read! The author made you care about them all and what happened to them.
I don't know why these books were not published in paperback here in the States, because if this one is any indication, it's an excellent series. I will be looking for more in the series very soon!
Happily, this is the FIRST Gil Cunningham mystery.......2005-05-21
This is an accomplished mystery with a strong sense of history and character. The writing is quite polished, especially for a first novel.
The setting is Glasgow in 1492. The intriguing adventures of the young lawyer, soon to be priest, allow the reader to view a wide section of Scotland - servants, nobles, impoverished gentry. The story touches on points of Scottish law and the intricacies of marital finances, the travels of young scholars, the mingling and separation of lowlander and highlander.
There was a cast of interesting and likeable characters that I look forward to meeting again. The only disappointment is waiting for the second book.
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