# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/willard-van-orman-quine
# Generated: 2026-09-01T05:04:24.807Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/willard-van-orman-quine"
name: "Willard Van Orman Quine"
slug: "willard-van-orman-quine"
description: "He dismantled the analytic-synthetic distinction that had propped up logical positivism, argued that philosophy is just the abstract end of empirical science, and left behind \"To be is to be the value of a variable\" — a line that still defines what it means to say something exists."
tagline: "American philosopher and logician (1900–2000)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Willard_Van_Orman_Quine_on_Bluenose_II_in_Halifax_NS_harbor_1980.jpg"
gender: "male"
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category:
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  slug: "academics"
profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1908-06-25"
deathDate: "2000-12-25"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "RISING"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Willard Van Orman Quine held Harvard's Edgar Pierce Chair from 1956 to 1978, teaching logic and set theory while insisting first-order logic was the only kind that mattered. In 1951 his paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" attacked reductionism and the analytic-synthetic divide, pulling the rug from under logical positivism and replacing it with semantic holism. With Hilary Putnam he built the indispensability argument for mathematical realism; alone he developed New Foundations, his own set theory, and pushed a naturalized epistemology that treated knowledge as science explaining itself. Word and Object in 1960 introduced the indeterminacy of translation — the claim that meaning is radically underdetermined by behavior — and cemented his view that philosophy and science are continuous. He died on Christmas Day 2000, having spent five decades reshaping how analytic philosophy understands reference, meaning, and what counts as real.