Volume 7, Number 12 · January 12, 1967
The Importance of Quine
By Anthony Quinton
The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays
by W.V. Quine
Random House, 258 pp., $6.95
Selected Logic Papers
by W.V. Quine
Random House, 250 pp., $6.95
Modern analytic philosophy is descended from a fertile if temporary union between the revived formal logic of our age and empiricist philosophy. In the last decades of the nineteenth century logic underwent, at the hands of Frege, its most important developments since Aristotle started it off as a systematic discipline. Frege's work seemed to realize the prophetic dreams of Leibniz. With it formal logic came to cover a vastly wider field than the syllogistic logic of Aristotle had ever done. Where the logic of Aristotle was largely confined to the study of inferences owing their validity to the way the words 'all,' 'some,' and 'not' occurred in them (as in the old favorite: all men are mortal, all Greeks are men, so all Greeks are mortal), the logic of Frege also covered inferences hinging on 'and,' 'or,' and 'if.' Aristotle's theory of the syllogism turned out to be a rather small, elementary segment of the second main part of Frege's system. Frege's logic was expressed with unprecedented rigor, and as a crowning achievement, seemed to afford a basis of indubitable certainties from which the whole of mathematics could be derived, effecting a unification of the two disciplines.
Review, 4711 words
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