Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine [Paperback]

Through the first half of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy was dominated by Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap. Influenced by Russell and especially by Carnap, another towering figure, Willard Van Orman Quine (19082000) emerged as the most important proponent of analytic philosophy during the second half of the century. Yet with twenty-three books and countless articles to his creditincluding, most famously, Word and Object and Two Dogmas of Empiricism Quine remained a philosopher's philosopher, largely unknown to the general public.

Quintessence for the first time collects Quine's classic essays (such as Two Dogmas and On What There Is ) in one volumeand thus offers readers a much-needed introduction to his general philosophy. Divided into six parts, the thirty-five selections take up analyticity and reductionism; the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences and the inscrutability of reference; ontology; naturalized epistemology; philosophy of mind; and extensionalism. Representative of Quine at his best, these readings are fundamental not only to an appreciation of the philosopher and his work, but also to an understanding of the philosophical tradition that he so materially advanced.

Specialists...will be grateful for this well-modulated selection of Quine's most important essays and articles, which reflect his thinking up to the end of his life.This new collection of published essays by Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000) is presented by its editor, Roger F. Gibson (following a suggestion of Nelson Goodman's) as a meta-anthology or anthology of anthologies, that is to say, an anthology of previously anthologized material. It contains twenty-five original essays by Quine that were published, in various venues, over a span of over sixty years in Quine's career...Quine's sharpness and lucidity, the depth of his confrontation with the empiricist tradition, as well as the strength of his alternative (physicalist and extelÓ0