Editing Analytic philosophy (section)

===== Quine =====
[[File:Willard Van Orman Quine on Bluenose II in Halifax NS harbor 1980.jpg|thumb|120px|W. V. O. Quine helped to undermine logical positivism.]]

Also among the developments that resulted in the decline of logical positivism and the revival of metaphysical theorizing was [[Harvard University|Harvard]] philosopher [[Willard Van Orman Quine|W. V. O. Quine]]'s attack on the [[analytic proposition|analytic–synthetic distinction]] in "[[Two Dogmas of Empiricism]]", published in 1951 in ''[[The Philosophical Review]]'' and republished in Quine's book ''From A Logical Point of View'' (1953), a paper "sometimes regarded as the most important in all of [[20th century philosophy|twentieth-century philosophy]]".<ref name=qui>{{cite journal |last=Quine |first=W. V. O. |year=1951 |title=Two Dogmas of Empiricism |url=https://courses.cs.sfu.ca/2015fa-phil-880-g1/pages/quine1/view |journal=[[The Philosophical Review]] |volume=60 |issue=1 |pages=20–43 |doi=10.2307/2181906 |jstor=2181906}} Reprinted in his 1953 ''From a Logical Point of View''. Harvard University Press.</ref><ref>S. Yablo and A. Gallois, ''Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?'', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 72, (1998), pp.&nbsp;229–261, 263–283 [https://www.mit.edu/%7Eyablo/om.pdf first part] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110912125408/http://www.mit.edu/%7Eyablo/om.pdf|date=12 September 2011}}</ref><ref>[[Peter Godfrey-Smith]], ''Theory and Reality'', 2003, [[University of Chicago]], {{ISBN|0-226-30062-5}}, pages 30–33 (section 2.4 "Problems and Changes")</ref>

''From a Logical Point of View'' also contains Quine's essay "[[wikisource:On What There Is|On What There Is]]" (1948), which elucidates Russell's theory of descriptions and contains Quine's famous dictum of [[ontological commitment]], "To be is to be the value of a [[Free variables and bound variables|variable]]". He also dubbed the problem of nonexistence [[Plato's beard]].

Quine sought to naturalize philosophy and saw philosophy as continuous with science, but instead of logical positivism advocated a kind of [[semantic holism]] and [[ontological relativity]], which explained that every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's conception of the entire world. In his magnum opus ''[[Word and Object]]'' (1960), Quine introduces the idea of [[radical translation]], an introduction to his theory of the [[indeterminacy of translation]], and specifically to prove the [[inscrutability of reference]].