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
Administrative More roundup 15 Sep 2008 Mohan Matthen, a philosopher of biology, has a very nice takedown of Thomas Nagel’s qualified support for teaching creationism on his blog. Hat tip Leiter. Richard Losick has an excellent piece on the problems of using cultured lab strains when studying microbes, at Small Things Considered. A new blog on… Read More
General Science Oops, a slight error never killed anyone 16 Apr 2008 Or so you might think NASA is saying, after a 13 year old kid showed they’d miscalculated the odds of an asteroid hitting earth by a factor of 3. Read More
Biology The difference between philosophy and biology 6 Jun 2010 Robert Paul Wolf continues his fascinating, and dare I say name-naming and body-locating, autobiobiographical memoirs of the academy and his place in it. In the latest episode he mentions Ed Wilson, the famous ant specialist, sociobiologist, and promoter of science. Brian Leiter cites the passage in which Wolf has a… 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”).