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
General Science Rodney Stark’s idiotic history 6 Sep 200818 Sep 2017 Thony Christie, a regular commenter on this blog, is also a historian of science, and he sent the following guest post that I thought well worth publishing. Commentator “Adam” asked John’s opinion on a book he is reading, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western… Read More
Evolution Vagabonds in taxonomy 27 Jul 2008 A new genus name for water mites, from a recent paper in Zootaxa: Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word ‘vagabundo’ that means ‘wanderer’. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time ago (Valdecasas et al. 2000) that the popularity of the Science… Read More
Evolution Other adaptive landscape papers 8 Aug 2008 Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn’t seen until now) on Gavrilets’ view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First: Massimo Pigliucci has a very nice historical summary of Sewall Wright’s… 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”).