Willard Van Orman Quine

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…