The philosopher who said science is philosophy enough also decoded U-boat messages
Willard Van Orman Quine could lecture in six languages, cracked German submarine signals for the US Navy, and helped rescue the logician Alfred Tarski on the last ship out of Danzig in 1939. He also argued that philosophy has no special vantage point above science: it is simply science at its most abstract.
Quine was born on June 25, 1908, and grew up in Akron, Ohio, where his father made tyre moulds; he decided he was an atheist at about nine. He took a mathematics degree at Oberlin and a Harvard PhD under Alfred North Whitehead by 1932, then toured Europe meeting the Vienna Circle and Polish logicians. In Prague he fell for philosophy thanks to Rudolf Carnap, whom he called his true and only master. He later held Harvard's Edgar Pierce Chair from 1956 to 1978.
In 1939 he arranged Tarski's invitation to a congress in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Tarski, who was Jewish, left Danzig on the last ship before Germany invaded Poland and went on to work 44 more years in America. During the war Quine taught logic in Brazil in Portuguese and served in naval intelligence, rising to lieutenant commander.
His fame as a philosopher came after the war. In Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) he attacked the long-accepted split between truths of meaning and truths of fact, undermining logical positivism in favour of a holistic picture in which beliefs face experience together. On What There Is (1948) tied existence to logic with the slogan that whatever exists is what a bound variable can range over. Word and Object (1960) introduced the indeterminacy of translation. He rejected any first philosophy standing prior to natural science, and with Hilary Putnam argued that mathematics' indispensability to science gives reason to believe in mathematical objects.
He was also a practical logician. He wrote his textbook Elementary Logic in six weeks because nothing suitable existed, compressed much of Principia Mathematica's thousand-plus pages into 250, and with Edward McCluskey devised an algorithm for simplifying Boolean expressions used in electrical engineering. He lost one big fight, against quantified modal logic, when Saul Kripke's semantics prevailed. In old age he joked that he could not remember whether his illness was called Althusser or Alzheimer, so it must be Alzheimer. He died of it on Christmas Day 2000.
Source: Willard Van Orman Quine
