W. V. O. Quine

Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, to a manufacturer and a schoolteacher. He studied mathematics at Oberlin, was captivated by logic after reading Russell, and in 1932 took his doctorate at Harvard in two years with a study of Principia Mathematica under Whitehead. A travelling fellowship then took him for a year to Vienna, Prague and Warsaw, where he heard Carnap lecture and met Tarski and the Polish logicians; that year fixed his direction.

He became a Harvard instructor in 1936 and stayed for over sixty years, professor from 1948, Peirce Professor from 1956 until his retirement in 1978. During the war he did cryptanalysis for the Navy. He wrote several logic textbooks and built his own set theory, New Foundations, while changing philosophy with a series of short papers. 'On What There Is' (1948) gave the criterion of ontological commitment: a theory is committed to whatever its quantifiers must range over; 'to be is to be the value of a bound variable'.

'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951) is among the most influential philosophical papers of the century. The first dogma is the analytic–synthetic distinction, and Quine argued that 'analytic' cannot be defined without circularity; the second is reductionism, the idea that each statement can face experience alone. He replaced both with holism: our knowledge is a web that touches experience only at its edges, any statement can be held true given enough adjustment elsewhere, any can be given up, and the difference between logic and physics is one of degree. There is no boundary between philosophy and science.

Word and Object (1960) proposed the 'indeterminacy of translation': a linguist facing a wholly unknown language hears a native say 'gavagai' as a rabbit runs past and cannot settle whether it means rabbit, a rabbit time-slice or undetached rabbit parts; several incompatible translation manuals fit all the behavioural evidence, so there is no fact of the matter about meaning itself. 'Epistemology Naturalized' (1969) argued that epistemology should become a chapter of psychology, studying how people get from sensory stimulation to scientific theory. He visited over a hundred countries, spoke many languages and wrote all his life on the same typewriter. Davidson, Kripke, Putnam and the whole of contemporary analytic philosophy are replies to him.