Portal:Philosophy/Selected philosopher/18

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) was an analytic philosopher who became a main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis. His paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" attacked two central aspects of logical positivism by blurring the line in the analytic-synthetic distinction and by rejecting reductionism. He propounded the indeterminacy of translation thesis through ontological relativity, a holist view that all theories are under-determined by empirical data. Quine also made contributions to logic, particularly set theory. He popularized the phrases "hold come what may" and "hold more stubbornly at least."