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Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine

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This handsome and useful volume is an anthology of selections from the work of W. V. O. Quine, who is arguably the most important analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, a few years after his death, he has an anthology of his own--and, unsurprisingly, it's a good one. The influence of his doctrines and methods within contemporary analytic philosophy, especially in the United States, has been pervasive and profound, and that influence is present in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of science. (The only figures of comparable influence I can think of are, in no particular order, Kuhn, Putnam, Kripke, Lewis, and Davidson. And several of them have been deeply influenced by Quine.)

But, unlike some philosophers, Quine's importance isn't so much a matter of the views he defends, even though many of them have played a prominent role in recent discussions. Many of his most distinctive views have the form of forceful challenges to certain widely held assumptions, including the idea that there are determinate facts about what our sentences mean, the idea that our words refer to particular things in the world, the idea that we have minds (in the ordinary sense), the idea that there are de re modal truths, the idea that we can draw a distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, the idea that there can be a normative epistemology, and so on. Quine's negative arguments against all these common assumptions share a single general strategy: the problem with these ideas, he claims, is that they are inconsistent with a suitably naturalistic conception of the world and its relation to human theorizing. And this reveals that true source of Quine's influence on contemporary philosophy--his radical and unrepentant naturalism. So his most important influence has been on general conceptions of what philosophy is, how it should be done, and what relations it stands in to other disciplines, and especially to the natural sciences. You'd better know Quine's work if you want to understand the origin and motivations of all the following trends, attitudes, and assumptions in contemporary philosophy: the ascendancy of various forms of naturalism and physicalism, attempts to connect philosophy and language and philosophy of mind to scientific works in those fields, the common conception of how ontological debates should be conducted, the dismantling of the assumptions of logical positivism, the general disillusionment with conceptual analysis as a method for conducting philosophy, skepticism about a priori knowledge and justification, the rise of coherentist epistemological views, and the influence of holistic semantics. Indeed, two opposed contingents in contemporary philosophy, hardcore naturalists and global anti-realists and relativists, both claim Quine one of their key forebears. And you know someone is a major figure in philosophy when there are opposed groups of philosophers who disagree about everything and yet both claim to be carrying on your research.

The selections in this volume come from throughout Quine's long and distinguished career. Most of the selections are from essays that originally appeared in journals or collections, though a few of them are selections from longer works. The twenty-five selections here are arranged topically rather than chronologically, and five general topics are covered here: analyticity, the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference, ontology, naturalized epistemology and Quine's behaviorist/eliminativist philosophy of mind, and modality and other intensional notions. But this anthology is not intended as a collection of Quine's "greatest hits." While several of these papers (viz. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," "On What There Is,""Epistemology Naturalized") are oft-reprinted classics, not all of them are among his most famous work. The editorial decisions here have been guided by an overriding aim of presenting Quine's characteristic doctrines on his own works, and not by the aim of collecting his most widely read works in a single volume.

The avowed intention here is to provide the reader with an introduction to Quine's thought through his own writings. The selections are, of course, well-chosen for that purpose, in that most of them are clear, relatively accessible, and largely non-technical. However, the reader should be aware that there is almost no editorial material here--just a very short introduction--and that the papers in this volume are expected to speak for themselves. Some context is provided by Quine himself, as several of these pieces include his own account of the elements of then-current philosophy to which he was responding and what he thought was wrong with them. He is, moreover, also quick to point out the general outlines of his thought and his overriding motivations. But, as helpful as this is, I doubt this is enough background to make many of these selections accessible to people with little background in contemporary analytic philosophy and its concerns. If the reader is looking for some more background on Quine's views, it might help to read his short books The Pursuit of Truth and From Stimulus to Science in conjunction with this volume. In both those works Quine himself attempts to provide a general overview of certain important elements of his thought on the various subjects here. And although this collection does not involve any of Quine's work in formal logic, some familiarity with first-order logic is going to be essential to understanding many of these selections. If you can't at least read the symbolism, parts of this are going to be tough going.

This is a good volume for advanced undergraduates and graduate students who want to acquire familiarity with the main outlines of Quine's positions. It's also just nice to have a collection of short works form Quine on his main theses. Yet there's really no reason that this is a necessary purchase for people who already possess Quine's prior collections of essays, because all but a few of these selections come from articles already collected in From a Logical Point of View, The Ways of Paradox, and Theories and Things. (The remaining selections include a few of his papers that haven't yet been reprinted along with a couple of selections from his books.)

This is one of the best collections of a major analytic philosopher (or any 20th century philosopher) I've ever seen, and the price is right.

There is one EXTREMELY major problem though - Quine's mathematical logic and philosophy of language writings are really not represented well and mathematical logic, not at all - which is a gross oversight. While some (like the editor) consider these writings "difficult" (presumably because they generally involve math and Quine's idiosyncratic style of notation, which the editor likely didn't feel like modernizing), the editor included "2 Dogmas of Empiricism" (which is an equally difficult read to someone only casually acquainted with the history of modern philosophy - and completely indecipherable to the educated layperson).

The writings omitted are at the heart of Q's philosophy of language and modern mathematical and analytic philosophy. This isn't really a Quine collection, more accurately it's "Quine - sans all of Formal Logic and Philosophies of Mathematics and much of Language".

Still, a very strong, but qualified, recommendation. What's in the book is uniformly excellent and this is an extremely affordably priced volume.

This is not an anthology collection for Quine aficionados, who will undoubtedly already own all of his many books (which, typically, are somewhat expensive relative to their limited page length, though a bargain at any price relative to their philosophical importance and originality). But for those with general philosophy and science interests who have yet to attend to Quine's indispensable contributions, "Quintessence" offers an ideal opportunity. Editor Roger Gibson, Jr. has brought together twenty-five of Quine's most significant essays, as helpfully ordered by five of the major themes of his life's work: I. Analyticity and Reduction; II. Indeterminacy and Inscrutability; III. Ontology; IV. Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind; V. Extensionalism.

It is worth noting that the volume does not include any of Quine's technical contributions to Logic, but given the laudable aim of bringing Quine's work to a wider readership, this editorial decision surely cannot be faulted. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press is to be commended for producing this essential collection at such an affordable price. Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) is one of the most important thinkers in the history of world philosophy, as anyone who ventures to read a few pages of his work will readily and delightfully discover.