Quine W(illard) V(an) O(rman) (b.1908), American philosopher and logician, renowned for his rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction and for his advocacy of extensionalism, naturalism, physicalism, empiricism, and holism. Quine took his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard in 1932. After four years of postdoctoral fellowships, he was appointed to the philosophy faculty at Harvard in 1936. There he remained until he retired from teaching in 1978. During six decades Quine published scores of journal articles and more than twenty books. His writings touch a number of areas, including logic, philosophy of logic, set theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Among his most influential articles and books are ‘New Foundations for Mathematical Logic’ (1936), ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951), ‘Epistemology Naturalized’ (1969), and Word and Object (1960). In ‘New Foundations’ he develops a set theory that avoids Russell’s paradox without relying on Russell’s theory of types. Rather, following Ernst Zermelo, Quine drops the presumption that every membership condition determines a set. The system of ‘New Foundations’ continues to be widely discussed by mathematicians. ‘Two Dogmas’ sets out to repudiate what he sees as two dogmas of logical empiricism. The first is the so-called analytic–synthetic distinction; the second is a weak form of reductionism to the effect that each synthetic statement has associated with it a unique set of confirming experiences and a unique set of infirming experiences. Against the first dogma, Quine argues that none of the then-current attempts to characterize analyticity (e.g., ‘a statement is analytic if and only if it is true solely in virtue of its meaning’) do so with sufficient clarity, and that any similar characterization is likewise doomed to fail. Against the second dogma, Quine argues that a more accurate account of the relation between the statements of a theory and experience is holistic rather than reductionistic, that is, only as a corporate body do the statements of a theory face the tribunal of experience. Quine concludes that the effects of rejecting these two dogmas of empiricism are (1) a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science and (2) a shift toward pragmatism. In ‘Epistemology Naturalized’ Quine argues in favor of naturalizing epistemology: old-time epistemology (first philosophy) has failed in its attempt to ground science on something firmer than science and should, therefore, be replaced by a scientific account of how we acquire our overall theory of the world and why it works so well. In Word and Object, Quine’s most famous book, he argues in favor of (1) naturalizing epistemology, (2) physicalism as against phenomenalism and mind–body dualism, and (3) extensionality as against intensionality. He also (4) develops a behavioristic conception of sentence-meaning, (5) theorizes about language learning, (6) speculates on the ontogenesis of reference, (7) explains various forms of ambiguity and vagueness, (8) recommends measures for regimenting language so as to eliminate ambiguity and vagueness as well as to make a theory’s logic and ontic commitments perspicuous (‘to be is to be the value of a bound variable’), (9) argues against quantified modal logic and the essentialism it presupposes, (10) argues for Platonic realism in mathematics, (11) argues for scientific realism and against instrumentalism, (12) develops a view of philosophical analysis as explication, (13) argues against analyticity and for holism, (14) argues against countenancing propositions, and (15) argues that the meanings of theoretical sentences are indeterminate and that the reference of terms is inscrutable. Quine’s subsequent writings have largely been devoted to summing up, clarifying, and expanding on themes found in Word and Object. See also ANALYTIC – SYNTHETIC DISTINC — TION , EMPIRICISM , EXTENSIONALISM , HOL — ISM , NATURALISM , NATURALISTIC EPISTE — MOLOGY, PHYSICALIS. R.F.G.