20th century · 1908–2000
Who influenced W. V. O. Quine?
Influences and legacy
Attacked the analytic/synthetic wall and made ontology a question of variables.
W. V. O. Quine was influenced by Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, and went on to influence Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and David Lewis. That is 6 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Maryclaire Quine, CC BY 4.0 See the whole map
Who was W. V. O. Quine?
Willard Van Orman Quine taught philosophy at Harvard and is counted among the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century. In "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) he attacked the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, undermining logical positivism, and in "On What There Is" he summed up ontological commitment as "to be is to be the value of a variable".
He saw philosophy as continuous with science, developed a naturalised epistemology and, with Hilary Putnam, the indispensability argument for the reality of mathematical objects. Word and Object (1960) introduced his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced W. V. O. Quine?
2 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Rudolf Carnap 1891–1970
Who did W. V. O. Quine influence?
4 thinkers on this map draw directly on W. V. O. Quine.
- Donald Davidson 1917–2003
- Hilary Putnam 1926–2016
- Saul Kripke 1940–2022
- David Lewis 1941–2001
The line of teachers behind W. V. O. Quine
The longest documented line of influence ending at W. V. O. Quine runs 27 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- T. H. Green
- F. H. Bradley
- Bertrand Russell
- Rudolf Carnap
- W. V. O. Quine
Two steps away from W. V. O. Quine
Indirect influences
Contemporaries of W. V. O. Quine
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of W. V. O. Quine, with no direct line between them.
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908–2009
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908–1961
- Simone Weil 1909–1943
- Hannah Arendt 1906–1975
- A. J. Ayer 1910–1989
- Emmanuel Levinas 1906–1995
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
W. V. O. Quine by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 2
- Direct followers
- 4 — #32 of 279 on this map
- Thinkers upstream
- 106
- Thinkers downstream
- 4
- Wikipedia languages
- 51 — #48 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Schools and lineages
Questions about W. V. O. Quine
- Who influenced W. V. O. Quine?
- Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap.
- Who did W. V. O. Quine influence?
- Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and David Lewis.
- When did W. V. O. Quine live?
- 1908–2000. The map files W. V. O. Quine under the 20th century.
- How rare is the W. V. O. Quine card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on W. V. O. Quine in 51 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016