W. V. QUINE AND THE ORIGINS OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it is a part remained unexamined by historians and philosophers alike. In the last decade or so, however, analytic philosophers have begun to assess the history of their enterprise, and Quine's place within it. Building on this welcome development with the tools of intellectual history, this essay examines Quine's philosophical apprenticeship in the late 1920s and 1930s.The basic tenets of Quine's mature thought set in early in his studies. Most notably, he displayed in his student writings a commitment to science as the primary theory of the world within which philosophical inquiry should take place. Yet he found the uncertain direction of interwar American philosophy uncongenial to his views. During a year of postdoctoral research in Europe, Quine encountered the work of analytic philosophers and logicians such as Rudolf Carnap and Alfred Tarski. Their scientific program for philosophy captivated Quine, who returned to Harvard a champion of their work. For the rest of the 1930s, Quine was an indefatigable advocate of the analytic tradition; he brought news of European logic and scientific philosophy to American universities. His purpose in doing so was to move American philosophy towards science and away from what he saw as its metaphysical entanglements. The reception and transformation of analytic philosophy in the United States is shown to have involved a complex dynamic between foreign and domestic conceptions of philosophy.