The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays: Revised and Enlarged Edition by Willard Van Orman Quine (PDF)

Description

This expanded edition of The Ways of Paradox includes papers that are among Professor W. V. Quine’s most important and influential, such as “Truth by Convention,” “Carnap and Logical Truth,” “On Carnap’s Views on Ontology,” “The Scope and Language of Science,” and “Posits and Reality.” Many of these essays deal with unresolved issues of central interest to philosophers today. About half of them are addressed to “a wider public than philosophers.” The remainder are somewhat more professional and technical. This new edition of The Ways of Paradox contains eight essays that appeared after publication of the first edition, and it retains the seminal essays that must be read by anyone who seeks to master Quine’s philosophy.Quine has been characterized, in The New York Review of Books, as “the most distinguished American recruit to logical empiricism, probably the contemporary American philosopher most admired in the profession, and an original philosophical thinker of the first rank.” His “philosophical innovations add up to a coherent theory of knowledge which he has for the most part constructed single-handed.” In The Ways of Paradox new generations of readers will gain access to this philosophy.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “[Quine] is at once the most elegant expounder of systematic logic in the older, pre-Gödelian style of Frege and Russell, the most distinguished American recruit to logical empiricism, probably the contemporary American philosopher most admired in the profession, and an original philosophical thinker of the first rank… The title essay of Quine’s The Ways of Paradox is a beautifully concise survey of the nature and significance of paradoxes… In general Quine’s style combines a certain rotundity of utterance with a verbal wit that exploits the submerged associations and resonances of technical terms.”―Anthony Quinton, New York Review of Books“The remarkable feature of this collection of essays is the achievement of profundity without the sacrifice of clarity. More than a clear, concise, nonmathematical presentation of logical perplexities and problems, this work is one written so that any intelligent layman can grasp the ideas wrestled with by Quine and other leading logicians. The manner in which the author interprets the pioneers of logical thought possesses the fascination of an exciting game rather than a dry intellectual exercise.”―William S. Sahakian, Boston Globe“Willard Van Orman Quine is the distinguished Harvard logician and philosopher who for more than a generation, and in prose as fresh and provocative as it is precise, has contributed fundamentally to the substance, the pedagogy, and the philosophy of mathematical logic.”―Science About the Author W. V. Quine was Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University. He wrote twenty-one books, thirteen of them published by Harvard University Press.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This collection of essays from the great American philosopher is not often cited among his most important works; I think this is a mistake. The reason of the mistake is probably that the book contains material of different kinds; there are “popular” essays, meant for the general educated public, like the title-essay. There are “occasion” pieces, reviews, replies, and the like. There are also some philosophical and logical essays that did not find space in other collections. Nonetheless, I warmly recommend the book. Among the philosophical essays, there are some of Quine’s most fundamental contributions, like his two most important pieces on the analytic/synthetic distinction: “Truth by convention” and “Carnap on logical truth” (the view that these two pieces are more important than the much more renowned “Two dogmas..” has been defended by Tyler Burge in his “Logic and Analitycity”, Grazer Philosophische Studien 2003). There is also “Quantifiers and propositional attitudes”, which was enormously influential in philosophy of language. But the less philosophically central pieces are also very interesting. For example, Quine’s review of Strawson’s introduction to logical theory is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of 20th century philosophy, as is Quine’s discussion of modal logic and his reply to Ruth Barcan Marcus. The (so-called) popular pieces were also thouroughly enjoyable and stimulating to me – but I am not “general educated public”, so I must confess I am not sure how readable they really are for the non-specialist. A special mention is deserved by Quine’s “Homage to Rudolf Carnap”, a brief obituary dedicated to his mentor, which I found truly touching and inspiring. Overall, the diversity of the works included in this collection ended up being a plus, at least for me. Quine is a great philosopher and a brilliant writer. Most pieces in the book require some minimal background in logic and/or analytic philosophy, but this is true of all of Quine’s work. I recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in philosophy.

⭐If the only weights I lift at the gym are light and easy, I stay flexible — but I don’t get any stronger. So I try to balance being smooth and quick on a certain machine with the challenge of more weight.I read a lot of lightweight books because they’re fun and easy and relaxing (and they’re a whole lot better than TV or movies), but just like having dessert for every meal is ultimately unsatisfying, every once in a while I try to push myself. Or, as I tell myself while struggling through a particularly boring or difficult book, it’s weight-lifting for the mind.”The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays”? Just trying to get the bar to twitch off the rack was a struggle in lot of these Willard Van Orman Quine pieces, which were mercifully short but sometimes brutally complex. Quine might have been the most important American philosopher of the 20th century, and the grand themes of his work (which interest me more than the gritty details) focused on how we are at the mercy of language and that our connection to whatever reality might be is more tenuous than we imagine. (Well, at least that’s what I think, but I can’t claim any real expertise here.)But Quine was interested in more than language. He was fascinated with logic, its relation to mathematics, set theory, and how mathematics worked as a language — and many of the essays in this book drill down to the fundamental connections between logic, logical and mathematical notation, and the nature of paradox.The early essays in the book are the most approachable, but by book’s end Quine was using terminology that any philosophy grad student would undoubtedly find familiar (“metalinguistic quantifiers,” “disquotation,” and “protosyntax” were some of my favorites) but a more casual reader would simply drown in.Did I enjoy this book? Sometimes, but just a hard session in the gym doesn’t really qualify as fun, “enjoyment” wasn’t necessarily the goal. Did I learn something? Yes, if only that things don’t get simpler the more you examine them. Would I recommend it? It depends on just how hard you want to work, and if you’re comfortable with a writing style that assumes you know what “reification” and “ontological” mean and builds from there.But I have to say I definitely worked some mental muscles that had been relaxing on my cranial couch for a very long time — and though I may not actually be mentally stronger, I feel like I should be. And doesn’t that count for something?

⭐Excellent collection of essays by one of the finest analytical philosophers

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