BOOKS
.....
QUINE/IS JUST FINE"
SELECTED LOGIC PAPERS.
By
W. V. Quine. Random House. $6.95.
THE WAYS OF PARADOX AND OTHER ESSAYS.
By
W. V. Quine.
Random House. $6.95.
John Langshaw Austin, whose death in 1960 placed him
alongside Wittgenstein in the pantheon of ordinary-language philosophy,
used to write cierihews about other philosophers. About Quine he wrote:
Everything done by Quine
Is just fine.
All we want is to be left alone
To fossick around on our own.
As an admission of Quine's importance in contemporary philosophy this
can only be called grudging; what it amounts to is that he is important
enough to be a nuisance to ordinary-language philosophers. Quine spent
a year at Oxford in 1953-54 as George Eastman Visiting Professor, and
the year was, as he puts it, "kicked off" by the publication in
Mind
of
his review of Peter Strawson's
Introduction to Logical Theory,
a review
in which he takes ordinary-language philosophy to task for supposing
that it can explain what logicians are trying (and failing) to do. The
review, along with twenty other papers, is reprinted in
Ways of Paradox,
the metalogical member of this pair of books, and by all odds the more
interesting and accessible of the two for the average reader. It is a
significant pointer for anyone who wants to understand the leading
motives of his work.
As this episode shows, Quine is not above being polemical; but it
would be a mistake to think of him as mainly concerned with polemics
or even with doctrine.
An
empiricist by his own admission (see his
essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in
From a Logical Point of View),
he is nevertheless difficult to place for people who depend on move–
ments, affinities and other such pigeonholing devices for their un–
derstanding of the philosophical scene. Quinton calls
him
"the most
distinguished American recruit to logical empiricism," an odd clas-
