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Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) was an American philosopher and logician and one of the leading representatives of analytic philosophy.His body of work consists of a series of theoretical developments in such diverse areas as logic, foundations of mathematics, epistemology, theory of meaning, reference theories and ontology. The fundamental question driving Quine’s work is that of scientific potential, the possibility of a world-view and of its expression in language. What Quine sought to understand was by what means we might acquire a legitimate and sound knowledge of the world which could be shared in verbalised theories, rather than relying solely on our sensorial data. Quine tackles this issue within a philosophic tradition which was largely dominant from 1930 to 1950 – that of his teacher Carnap’s logical empiricism – which in turn was an extension of the new tradition of analytic philosophy founded by Frege.Quine thus pioneered a genuine upheaval within the analytic philosophy tradition – the one overwhelmingly dominant in today’s world – whose first conceptual revolution can undoubtedly be attributed to Quine.
