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“... Professor at Oxford: only the second philosopher to hold the august position (the first being W.V. Quine, a teacher of Davidson’s at Harvard and his greatest philosophical influence). This honour reflects his present stature in the academic world. Last year he was the subject of a massive conference held in New Jersey, organised by the indefatigable Ernie ...”

“... In earlier essays, not reproduced in this volume, Quine wrote, ‘Philosophy, or what appeals to me under that head, is continuous with science’; and, more bluntly: ‘Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.’ There are pages in the present collection of 26 papers which seem to invite a still narrower construction of these apparently restrictive remarks: to invite one, in a word, to gloss ‘science’ as ‘physics ...”

“... has been as widely and deeply respected as any English-speaking philosopher now alive. Professor Quine is enjoying a vigorous and productive retirement after many years’ teaching at Harvard. His tone here is jaunty, and he expresses steady enjoyment of almost everything that has happened to him along the way. In the age of P.G. Wodehouse there used to be ...”

“... contributors to Philosophical Subjects are probably Professor Sir Freddie Ayer and W.V. Quine. Ayer and Strawson enlighteningly discuss the latter’s views on free will in his essay ‘Freedom and Resentment’. Quine and Strawson rekindle their old controversy on the eliminability of proper names. It seems to me ...”

“... languages. His chief target, however, is not Davidson himself, but his erstwhile teacher, W.V. Quine, whose ‘philosophy, if correct, brings analytic philosophy as depicted in this book to an end, for the conception that informs analytic philosophy (and has informed it since the Twenties) is inconsistent with that of ...”

“... most distinguished and influential of living philosophers’ (Strawson’s description of Quine, on the dust-jacket) to produce a collection of loosely-connected essays on topics of his choice in a format inspired by Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary – and the result is a remarkable addition to English literature. ...”

“... carrying on, there must surely be something wrong with the view. So much for stage one. Stage two: Quine. In 1953, W.V. Quine published an article called ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. Easily the most influential paper of the generation, its reverberations continue to be felt whenever philosophers discuss the nature of ...”

“... on telling us how things are. And in our day, when that most influential of philosophers, W.V. Quine, teaches us that we must naturalise epistemology, and take what the scientists tell us as the core of all our knowing, Locke would be a wonderful prophylactic, if only he (or Ayers) were a little more lively. At any rate, Locke is ‘relevant’, and ...”

“... in which our ancestors were mothered by Mitochondrial Eve. But, to borrow a phrase from W.V. Quine, ‘creatures inveterately wrong’ in the conclusions they draw from their environment will be unlikely to survive long enough to pass on their genes at all. Even if the scoffers, cynics and sceptics are no more than a minority incapable of successfully ...”

“... to thinking about humans as biological organisms,’ he tells us, ‘there will be a tidal wave of new discoveries.’ Sam Harris means to circumvent survivalism by rooting his claims in something called ‘well-being’. Harris, who dabbles in neuroscience when he’s not saving the West from the threat of a new caliphate in the pages of the New York ...”

“... or so, when it comes to the question of conscious experience (‘experience’ for short). W.V. Quine, who in his reductive passion and ontological austerity was seen as a standard bearer for naturalism in philosophy, never for a moment doubted or denied the existence of experience, as some of the false naturalists appear to do (even as they deny that they ...”

“... and that he should have insisted on it entitles him to the high place he has been accorded by W.V. Quine as one of the two great sources, with Frege, of modern logic. Four years after getting a first, unsatisfactory degree from Harvard, Peirce got a second, ‘summa cum laude’ this time, in chemistry. By then he already had a job, found for him by his ...”

“... of the widgeon and the arrival of the Sauternes, hangs over much of the book. We learn what W.V. Quine wrote about the word ‘solstice’ in a personal letter to Sen, what John Sparrow said about the Good Samaritan parable over dinner at All Souls, and why Piero Sraffa used to rub his chin when chatting to Wittgenstein at Trinity. No doubt each of these ...”