Willard Van Orman Quine
American Logician and Philosopher. He finished his graduate study at Harvard and started as a logician, but encounters with Carnap (1933), in particular, and with other logical empiricists, led him more to philosophy of language and philosophy of science, eventually to holistic philosophy.
Quine gained a reputation, as a philosopher, by his persistent criticisms against modal or intensional concepts, as well as by his citicisms of "the two dogmas of empiricism", i.e. (1) analytic-synthetic distinction and (2) reductionism (semantic reductionism, we should say). However, strong preferences for parsimony and ecomomy of thought seem to be at the heart of his philosophy, and this is quite in common with Carnap, and one of the logical positivists's ancestors, Ernst Mach.
Criticsms of the two dogmas led Quine to a "blurring of the boundary" between philosophy and natural science, as well as to additional Quinean banners such as "indeterminacy of translation" or "ontological relativity". Recently, Quine's proposal for "naturalized eistemology" (that is, epistemology using scientific results in order to clarify the nature of scientific knowledge) has been taken seriously, and many philosophers of science are working on that line.
He was awarded a Kyoto Prize in 1996; his talk on the parsimony of thought was relatively brief but crisp and clear, and impressed the audience. He died on December 25, 2000.
