Willard Van Orman Quine, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, at Harvard, author of twenty-one books and scores of journal articles and reviews, made many significant contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, logic, philosophy of logic, and set theory, and ethics (and ethical theory). These contributions are of a stature that firmly places Quine among the titans of twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy.

In most of his publications following Word and Object (1960), Quine sought to sum up, clarify, and expand on various themes found in that book. Quine can occasionally be seen changing his mind regarding some detail of his prior thought, but by and large he remains remarkably consistent.

Naturalism

The keystone of Quine's systematic philosophy is naturalism. Roughly, naturalism is the view that there is no suprascientific justification for science and...