Customer Reviews

The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays

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This collection of essays from the great American philosopher is not often cited among his most important works; I think this is a mistake. The reason of the mistake is probably that the book contains material of different kinds; there are "popular" essays, meant for the general educated public, like the title-essay. There are "occasion" pieces, reviews, replies, and the like. There are also some philosophical and logical essays that did not find space in other collections. Nonetheless, I warmly recommend the book. Among the philosophical essays, there are some of Quine's most fundamental contributions, like his two most important pieces on the analytic/synthetic distinction: "Truth by convention" and "Carnap on logical truth" (the view that these two pieces are more important than the much more renowned "Two dogmas.." has been defended by Tyler Burge in his "Logic and Analitycity", Grazer Philosophische Studien 2003). There is also "Quantifiers and propositional attitudes", which was enormously influential in philosophy of language. But the less philosophically central pieces are also very interesting. For example, Quine's review of Strawson's introduction to logical theory is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of 20th century philosophy, as is Quine's discussion of modal logic and his reply to Ruth Barcan Marcus.
The (so-called) popular pieces were also thouroughly enjoyable and stimulating to me - but I am not "general educated public", so I must confess I am not sure how readable they really are for the non-specialist. A special mention is deserved by Quine's "Homage to Rudolf Carnap", a brief obituary dedicated to his mentor, which I found truly touching and inspiring. Overall, the diversity of the works included in this collection ended up being a plus, at least for me.
Quine is a great philosopher and a brilliant writer. Most pieces in the book require some minimal background in logic and/or analytic philosophy, but this is true of all of Quine's work. I recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in philosophy.