Authors:
  1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. W
  4. Willard Van Orman Quine
  5. Philosophy

Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes about Philosophy

All Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes Belief Language Logic Mathematics Philosophy quotes Science
My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to

My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.

Willard Van Orman Quine
Philosophy, Philosophical, Sea

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

Willard Van Orman Quine
Philosophy, Reality
W. V. Quine, Willard Van Orman Quine (1981). “Theories and Things”, p.21, Harvard University Press

It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.

Willard Van Orman Quine
Philosophy, Doe, Benefits
Willard Van Orman Quine, Patricia Smith Churchland, Dagfinn Follesdal (2013). “Word and Object”, p.173, MIT Press

The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

Willard Van Orman Quine
Philosophy, Reality, Views

The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy.

Willard Van Orman Quine
Philosophy, Philosophical, Party

You May Also Like: