PHILOSOPHER

Willard Van Orman Quine

1908 - 2000

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Willard Van Orman Quine ( KWYNE; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He was the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978. Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. He was famous for his position that first-order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations. Read more on Wikipedia

His biography is available in different languages on Wikipedia. Willard Van Orman Quine is the 124th most popular philosopher (up from 479th in 2019), the 231st most popular biography from United States (up from 1,472nd in 2019) and the most popular American Philosopher.

Willard van Orman Quine is most famous for his work in philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics. He proposed a version of the indeterminacy of translation thesis, which holds that there is no fact of the matter as to which language is the correct translation of another language.

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Among PHILOSOPHERS

Among philosophers, Willard Van Orman Quine ranks 124 out of 1,267. Before him are William of Ockham, Ibn Taymiyyah, Bonaventure, Henri de Saint-Simon, Emmanuel Levinas, and Ramon Llull. After him are Hans-Georg Gadamer, Marsilio Ficino, Chanakya, Pyrrho, Anaximenes of Miletus, and Simone Weil.

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1908, Willard Van Orman Quine ranks 14. Before him are Lyndon B. Johnson, Herbert von Karajan, Lev Landau, Otto Skorzeny, Amon Göth, and Edward Teller. After him are Olivier Messiaen, Hannes Alfvén, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Don Bradman, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simon Wiesenthal. Among people deceased in 2000, Willard Van Orman Quine ranks 4. Before him are Hafez al-Assad, Hedy Lamarr, and Ingrid of Sweden. After him are Władysław Szpilman, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, Habib Bourguiba, Emil Zátopek, Arkan, Victor Borge, Alec Guinness, and Louis Néel.

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In United States

Among people born in United States, Willard Van Orman Quine ranks 231 out of 20,380. Before him are Milton Friedman (1912), Ray Bradbury (1920), Humphrey Bogart (1899), George Lucas (1944), F. Sherwood Rowland (1927), and J. D. Salinger (1919). After him are Emily Greene Balch (1867), Candice Bergen (1946), Josephine Baker (1906), Clark Gable (1901), Johnny Cash (1932), and Truman Capote (1924).

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Among PHILOSOPHERS In United States

Among philosophers born in United States, Willard Van Orman Quine ranks 1. After him are John Rawls (1921), George Herbert Mead (1863), Donald Davidson (1917), Pat Robertson (1930), Judith Butler (1956), John Searle (1932), Anne Sullivan (1866), Robert Nozick (1938), Richard Rorty (1931), Hilary Putnam (1926), and Michael J. Sandel (1953).

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