February 2, 2001

An Imaginative Philosopher: the Legacy of W.V. Quine

By RICHARD RORTY

Willard van Orman Quine, the dean of American philosophers, died at the age of 92 on Christmas Day. Just 50 years before, in December of 1950, he read a paper to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association that rocked the audience back on its heels. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," when published the following year, went on to become the most discussed and most influential article in the history of 20th-century Anglophone philosophy. Few pieces of similar brevity have had such

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