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American philosopher and logician, born in Akron, Ohio, taught at Harvard. Quine was influenced by Russell, the empiricism of the Vienna Circle, and pragmatism. He made numerous original contributions to logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. He modified Russell and Whitehead's logicist program of reducing mathematic to logic, rejected the possibility of a formalized intensional logic, and resisted Kripke's turn to modality. Quine is most famous for seeking to undermine the traditional analytic/synthetic distinction as a dogma of empiricism. The Quine-Duhem thesis argued that empirical tests can be applied only to the whole web or network of hypotheses and not to single theoretical sentences. His theory of radical translation and principle of the indeterminacy of translation attempted to account for language without invoking abstract or mental entities. His claim that “to be is to be the value of a variable” determines our ontological commitments according to our choices about logic and language. His books include From A Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), Set Theory and Its Logic (1963), The Ways of Paradox (1966), Ontological Relativity (1969), The Roots of Reference (1974), and Theories and Things (1981). ... log in or subscribe to read full text