On what Quine was… 22 Jun 2008 Willard Van Ormond Quine was, I believe, one of the best of the 20th century philosophers, and is someone who has greatly influenced me. Here is a TV interview by Brian Magee, from the 1970s, if I am right. They discuss the nature of philosophy. This year marks the centenary of Quine’s birth. “The Ideas of Quine” on Youtube:Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Hat tip to Calculemus. The heading is a bad pun on one of Quine’s most famous essays: “On What There Is”. General Science
Ecology and Biodiversity The mind of the ecological engineer 27 Oct 201127 Oct 2011 I watched a very interesting documentary episode recently, entitled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (a phrase of poet Richard Brautigan’s), in which the maker Adam Curtis put forward the view that ecology was founded (at least in its modern iteration) in direct analogy with the view of… Read More
Education How to learn about science… 12 Dec 200818 Sep 2017 I received a query from reader Jodi, of Nova Scotia (I so want to visit there one summer) about how to learn about a scientific subject as a layperson. Of course being a philosopher I was able to answer her quickly, but readers may wish to comment more authoritatively and… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity “Systematics is sick” 21 Aug 2008 So says a committee of the UK House of Lords: Systematic biology and taxonomy – the science of describing and identifying plants and animals – is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must act before it is too late. Of course, this is not… Read More
One of my philosophy professors had a Quine Story. He was in town for a symposium on the somethingth anniversary of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and she was assigned to ferry him around, take him to dinner and fend off the grad students fawning at his feet (one brought Quine’s entire backlist for the man to sign). He had been given some little plaque or award thingy and in all the rushing about had been misplaced, and as my professor was driving him back to look for it, she ran a yellow on a left-hand turn and was almost hit by oncoming traffic… She told us ruefully that she almost became known as The Woman Who Killed W. V. O. Quine.
I took a semester focusing on philosophy at Harvard while Quine was there. But retired and unwilling to visit our seminars, so we never met. And all this was among phiso-symps in the anthro department. But it was kind of cool imagining that Quine might pay us a visit…
Jeez, Brian Magee is the spitting image of Jim Broadbent (he plays Indy’s Department Head in the “Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls”).