Zen Once Again

Originally posted by Starrman
Well, I'm a huge WV Quine fan, but he's not to everyone's taste. He was a behaviouralist and mathematician who had a challenging and yet no-nonsense view of the universe. I think you'd like his stuff, he has a certain enlightened peaceful quality to an otherwise cutting edge way of dealing with the subject. Alas, he's dead now, which was a great disappoi ...[text shortened]... worth a look might be Carnap (a contemporary of Quine), Frege and of course Russell.

For those who don't know about Quine, here is a 50 cent tour:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Van_Orman_Quine

Originally posted by sonhouse
For those who don't know about Quine, here is a 50 cent tour:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Van_Orman_Quine

All of these quotes of his are wonderful to me:

* "No entity without identity".
* "Ontology recapitulates philology". (Attributed to James Grier Miller in the epigraph of Word and Object)
* "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough".
* "To be is to be the value of a bound variable". (From "On What There Is"😉
* "The Humean predicament is the human predicament".
* "We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language" (Quiddities is chock-full of similar sentiments).
* When asked what the correct collective noun for logicians was, he replied "It is a sequitur of logicians".
* "Life is algid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time" (interview in Harvard Magazine, quoted in Hersh, R., 1997, What Is Mathematics, Really?).
* "'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word--'Everything'--and everyone will accept this answer as true." (From "On What There Is".)
* "...in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience." (From "Two Dogmas of Empiricism".)

Originally posted by Starrman
Well, I'm a huge WV Quine fan, but he's not to everyone's taste. He was a behaviouralist and mathematician who had a challenging and yet no-nonsense view of the universe. I think you'd like his stuff, he has a certain enlightened peaceful quality to an otherwise cutting edge way of dealing with the subject. Alas, he's dead now, which was a great disappoi ...[text shortened]... worth a look might be Carnap (a contemporary of Quine), Frege and of course Russell.

I'd recommend his book of short essays 'From a Logical Point of View' in which the ground breaking 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' appears.

They didn’t have that at the bookstore the other day, so I picked up his Philosophy of Logic; haven’t started it yet, though.

Originally posted by vistesd
[b]I'd recommend his book of short essays 'From a Logical Point of View' in which the ground breaking 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' appears.

They didn’t have that at the bookstore the other day, so I picked up his Philosophy of Logic; haven’t started it yet, though.[/b]

Good luck, it's a heavy old read. He was a student of Carnap so you're in for a mental shredding 🙂

Originally posted by Starrman
Good luck, it's a heavy old read. He was a student of Carnap so you're in for a mental shredding 🙂

Has happened before... I'm not embarrassed to take a step or three back when it does. I'll keep on the look-out for your recommendations.

I think I heard a tree fall .. it might have been in the forest.

discuss

Originally posted by jammer
I think I heard a tree fall .. it might have been in the forest.

discuss

Maybe it was in your mind... 😉

Now, if you told me you’d heard a dardyvart...

Originally posted by vistesd
Maybe it was in your mind... 😉

Now, if you told me you’d heard a dardyvart...

deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

Originally posted by jammer
deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

I’m not one of those who deny the existence of the phenomenal world. I am quite willing to accept a tree as a referent, and your hearing one fall in the forest as evidence of the event. I hear trees fall all the time (much of our property is forested), and feel no need to start Om-ing when it happens (more likely to grab the chainsaw).