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Title: The Philosophy of Logic by Willard V. Quine ISBN: 0-674-66563-5 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good intro to much of Quine's philosophy
Comment: This is indeed easier and better organized than Quine's other books. I think it better written than "Methods of Logic."
Much of "Philosophy of Logic" is about the sort of ideas that should be included in university logic texts, but aren't (Church's 1956 text, is an exception to this sweeping assessment, surprising because written by a mathematician). POL Is also a nice introduction to a range of issues in analytical philosophy.
It is the unusual lay person who would find this a profitable read. I say taht even though I find the philosophical basis of logic and mathematics deeply fascinating, but it is a fascination I can share with almost no one face to face, and I teach college!
I won't deny the weirdness of some of Quine's views. But Quine is less willfully eccentric than many other academic philosphers. Part of the weirdness is that Quine is the closest thing there is to a home grown American member of the Vienna Circle. Be aware that, while Quine never wrote on politics and the affairs of the day, wrote only one essay on ethics, dovorced and remarried, and never joined a church, he shared in the instinctive conservatism of the small town midwest he hailed from (Akron OH). This conservatism extended to his views on logic: eg his disdain for modal logic (for that matter, for the intensional in any form), his dismissal of higher order logic as set theory in disguise. Quine remained pre-Godelian in many of his ways. His Mathematical Logic is a sort of last hurrah for Principia Mathematica. He never appreciated the rise of recursive methods or of model theory (even though he admired Tarski). Even though he admired Carnap, he never understood Carnap's semantical approach.
His 3 logic texts are not a good place to learn metatheory: consistency, completeness, decidability, categoricity, independence. Quine never cottoned on to the semantic turnstile.
Quine took little interest in logic before Frege. In his indifference to the history of ideas, he was typical of analytical types. He was 87 when he finally published a short essay recognizing the achievements of C S Peirce in the 19t h century.. Among British philosophers of his generation, he admired a fine fellow: Peter Geach. Quine co-discovered virtual sets and relations, but ignored mereology. He revered science and math, but it is unclear how much of it he really knew. Privately, he believed that philosophy should limit itself to logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, and the chaste metaphysics he himself practiced.
Quine was not a hopeless conservative. Around 1950, he jumped on the natural deduction bandwagon, and walked away from axiomatics. Later, he walked away from natural deduction, but never cottoned on to truth trees. He was intrigued by Haskell Curry's combinatory logic, and invented a modest rival called to it called predicate functor logic.
Quine's set theory, underappreciated in mathematical circles, is downright radical. Finally, Quine's approach to Godel's Theorem, while very difficult and Tarski-derived, contained the seeds of the much more elegant later approach of Smullyan.
While this is a fine introduction to Quine, the lectures he gave in Spain at 84 years of age, "From Stimulus to Science," may be better.
Rating: 5
Summary: I know what you're thinking about . . .
Comment: . . . but it isn't so, nohow. This is a superb little book, and an ideal introduction not only to Quine's philosophy of logic, but to his entire philosophy. This is so for at least three reasons. One: though written with Quine's usual brilliant style, it is more accessible than, say, "Word and Object", partly because it is based on a college lecture series. Indeed, I think it is one of the very few Quine books ("Methods of Logic" is another) that should be accessible to any motivated and reasonably smart undergraduate who has had a first course in logic, though there is much for the professional to learn, too. Two: it covers many topics that are important not just in the philosophy of logic, but in (among other areas) philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics--most of the range of Quine's philosophical concerns, in fact. Yet all the material is woven together with consummate skill and clarity, so much so that one needs no special familiarity with the issues to understand them or to perceive their connections. Three: no one understands the topics of this book better than Quine. (This is not to say that his philosophical views are right, of course.)
There is little need for me to explain the topics of this book, since the contents page (which is available from Amazon) is pretty self-explanatory. Nor do I want to spoil the experience of reading a master logician and philosopher by producing a ham-handed summary of this book. But if you are interested in understanding logic and language, as well getting acquainted with Quine (or indeed, contemporary analytic philosophy), then trust me: you WANT this book. One warning, though. Quine may have been a genius, but he had very weird (and, I think, wrong-headed) views on certain subjects. Don't be seduced into thinking he must be right because he's a genius. There is much to be learned from great philosophers, but uncritical acceptance of their theories is a disastrous policy. Having issued this caveat, I say again: this is a superb book. Enjoy!
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Title: Ontological Relativity by W. V. Quine ISBN: 0231083572 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 1977 List Price(USD): $24.50 |
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Title: Elementary Logic by Willard V. Quine ISBN: 0674244516 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1980 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Methods of Logic by Willard V. Quine ISBN: 0674571762 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1989 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Theories and Things by W. V. Quine, Willard V. Quine ISBN: 0674879260 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: October, 1986 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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Title: The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays by Willard Van Orman Quine ISBN: 0674948378 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 1976 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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