Quine traces the path from rudimentary particles impinging on human sensory organs to man's most highly evolved behavior, the construction of strip malls. For those not familiar with postmodernist synchrocyclotron engineering, the going will be virtually impossible, but a basic knowledge of addition and subtraction will go a long way toward helping the reading become totally confused. The ideas are both painful and tasty, but it's important to floss your teeth carefully after reading in order to grasp the full ramifications of Quine's point. For those who were driven psychotic by Quine's other work, this book will prove immensely helpful in whiling away the hours while waiting for the nurse to bring your Haldol.

Faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap corporate bodies of theories in a single bound, Quine stands up for the American way by showing the reader just how silly and utterly unconnected from reality modern analytic philosophy has become. True to form, Quine has cut and pasted a number of Martha Stewart's hors d'oeurve recipes into his text, disguising them in clever formal logic symbolism. But it is easy to see through this and one can hardly put the book down without musing on how Quine would have made a great chef instead of an incomprehensible Harvard philosopher. Indeterminacy of translation? Right. But when one thinks through Quine's latest reflections on this matter it becomes clear that Quine is really describing a very palatable salad dressing with just the right amount of balsamic vineager. Finally, one puts the text down with the clear understanding that Hilary Putnam's Representation and Reality is really the confession of a closet pastry chef who took a wrong turn in life and ended up on the Harvard philosophy faculty. Nice going, Quine.

Quine traces the path from simple stimulus to man's most advanced response to his environment, the pursuit of science. For those not familiar with mathematical logic, the going will be almost impossible, but a knowledge of the predicate calculus and standard symbolism will carry you through. The ideas are brilliant and entrancing, but you have to work through them carefully to catch the full implication. While this is mostly for those familiar with Quine's other work, the general reader can still get quite a lot from it.

In this incomparable and engaging book Quine takes up many of the questions he raised in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and in his other early papers. In Word and Object, he levels an attack against the traditional notion of meaning that is accepted by so many, because it is understood by so few. Though the position defended here is alomost completely wrong, it is wrong for interesting reasons and, along with Quine's other works, establishes a position regarding matters semantic that, from his ultra-empiricist positivist perspective is nearly inevitable. If you don't find his position at least a little compelling, then your heart is made of stone.

This book is a true classic, both in content and presentation; Quine's pithy style, sometimes ironic, is singular in analytic philosophy. This book describes the generation of reference and logical categories out of the confluence of "sense-data" and "stimulus synonymy," answering with consistency many perennial questions in ontology and epistemology in the process. Chapter two (the infamous "indeterminacy of translation" thesis) is a fascinating linguistic reformulation of the "other minds" problem, demonstrating that one must conclude a type of "ontological relativity" amongst speakers. Along with Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations," Ryle's The Concept of Mind," and Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Quine's magnum opus completes the quadrivium of mid-20th century analytic philosophy which together rang the death-knell of Cartesianism.

This is one of the great books of 20th-century philosophy, with page after page of brilliant arguments. Although Quine had an understated wit and a gracefully economic style, this is not an easy book. I would not tackle it without some training in philosophy, logic, or linguistics. Particularly useful would be some understanding of logical positivism, which Quine is reacting against.

The book's motivating question is how a word (or words) can refer to an object or be used to pick out an object. This might seem to be a narrow topic, but it leads Quine to discuss a large number of epistemological, logical, and metaphysical issues. Quine's conclusions in these areas were so novel and profound that decades later philosophers are still digesting them.

Was Quine right about everything? Surely not, but like all great philosophers, he made us look at the old issues in new ways and made us aware of problems which we hadn't known had existed. For this we can be profoundly grateful.

Willard Van Ormen Quine died 25 December 2000.

This book, edited by Richard Creath, is valuable both as a biographical work on the lives of Carnap and Quine, and as an resource for scholars interested in the Carnap-Quine debates (and the history of 20th century analytic philosophy more generally). The correspondence, which constitutes most of the book, provides a nice glimpse into the personal and academic friendship between Carnap and Quine: a friendship that developed from their first meeting in the 1930's till Carnap's untimely death in 1970. The book also includes a useful 43 page introduction by Creath focusing on the Carnap-Quine debates on analyticity. Previously unpublished manuscripts, i.e., Quine's "Three Lectures on Carnap" and Carnap's "Quine on Analyticity," are valuable resources for philosophers interested in the Carnap-Quine debates. The book concludes appropriately with Quine's "Homeage to Carnap," a personal tribute to his mentor. Overall, Creath does a superb editorial job and the resulting book is a pleasure to read.

book is due to be reprinted by Open Court in September 199

Like any great book, this one could be a bit, though not too much, better. By far and away the most useful element of Quine's book is his treatment of translating ordinary English into logical schemata. I have never seen such a lucid and effective presentation of the task, and I recommend the book very highly to anybody on that account. His presentation of truth-functional and quantificational schemata are solid are simply excellent. The book, however, is not without its defects of which I should caution prospective buyers about. First, there are many treatments in the book of historical interest, but to a student of first-order logic they may seem to be a bit excessive. His incorporation of Polish notation, while fascinating in its own right, is not in accorance with Quine's drive for efficiency and conciseness. A similar account goes for his treatment of Boolean algebra. It is in that treatment that Quine introduces many ideas indispensible to quantificational logic, yet it is tempting to skip over those chapters when one can sufficiently delve into quantification theory. Secondly, his notation is, as another reviewer points out, unorthodox. It is very effective and in my opinion superior to the conventional formality, but this could be difficult to deal with, and one wonders if Quine should have been more cautious about varying his symbols from the norm. Finally, Quine's treatment of the Completeness Proof and the Lowenheim Theorem, while quite solid in their own right, could be more effective. Quine seems to be keen on applying a constructivist approach to the proof, and spends many pages on definitions and lemmas that can be avoided. One can provide a proof by contradiction in order to sufficiently demonstrate most of his treatment of the matter, as so much of it is spent proving the "law of infinite conjunction," which is really only an 8 step proof. I won't go into the details here, but keep that in mind when studying the chapter. Nevertheless, Quine's work is as entertaining as it is rigorous.

I don't think you get this in a lot of other books. Just look at the Historical Notes; In themselves a guided direction to the most important work on logics. This is truly time saving instead of go wondering what books to read, up to the date of Quine's book of course.

In the end it also contains bibliography, but also a note to a whole other index covering literature up to 1935, this is truly at great value.

I find this book helpful in analysis concerning ideas; Whatever they are, since language usage is the tool for thought, even if not written down.

It's simply a MIND-SPEAKER.

Also more newer books, in for instance computer science, in my personal opinion, skip important questions already asked by scientists which then have been elaborated on.

People who read logic for the first time, like me, ask fundamental questions in order to understand, following Quine's reasoning is surely educational.

Quine is well-known in this century for being one of the premier analytic philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. He probably used this book for his upper-division course in logic for philosophy majors. After reading this book, I can see his reputation is well-justified.

This book is more than just a textbook in logic. In his own way, Quine shows in his examples just how difficult it is to break down ordinary language into symbolic logic, and in the process (hopefully), one should learn both rigorous thinking and charity. These are rare commodities today.

Quine has the rather idiosyncratic position that modal logic only confuses matters. However, I would rather read a complete introduction to modal logic, than to receive only a chapter's worth of treatment. Hence, I can deal with his excluding modal logic from this book.

I do wish there was a short chapter or glossary on informal logic, since many other treatments do continue to use those terms (e.g. Copi). Knowing the terminology does help one to communicate in prose one's analysis of an argument. It does help to know all those latin distinctions (e.g. ad hominem, ad nominem, ad populii, petitio principii, etc.).

That being said, I'm a much clearer thinker for having worked through this book, and I would heartily recommend this for anybody.

The book is quite basic and introductory. I think it would be useful to many people who want to start thinking philosophically. However, it is boring. Yet, I do like the term "web of belief" a lot. Unfortunately, though, they do not expound upon it much in that book.

A very enjoyable, introductory philosophy text. It is a very readable and easy introduction to Quine's thought.

I highly recommend it to the thoughtful reader who is interested in contemporary philosophy.

This book points to the underpinnings of rational thought and scientific method. There is no such thing as THE scientific method. But all versions of the scientific method have certain basic elements such as hypothesis, evidence, testing of theory and so forth. This book explains all this and from the position of philosophy that invented the scientific method. The authors show the logic behind rational thought which all adds up to eminent common sense. After reading this book many years ago, it became clear to me how Einstein came up with the theory of relativity. The theory is an explanation of why the Miachelson-Morley experiment failed to find the ether. This book makes a lot of sense. Its a bit pricey, but if you like the philosophy behind rational thinking and scientific method, you might consider the purchase of this book.

The only complaint I have about this collection (and of *Theories and Things*) is a certain lack of systematicity. In the collection, of course, not at all in Quine's thought. Both contain a very broad range of essays from a decade or two of Quine's career. They range from a public radio piece on the limits to extremely technical work in logic. Quine's range is immense, and it would be much more accessible if his essays were collected more thematically (in something like the manner of Davidson's) than, as I take it they were, just chronologically. It's difficult either to remember where you read a passing comment of his, or to try to read systematically through all of his essays on a given theme.

A passing complaint, I suppose. Other than that it's just first rate.

This book looks at Quine's philosophy and the consequences of Quine's conclusions on analytic philosophy. Though it is fairly lucid, his unquestioning acceptance of everything Quine says makes a lot of what is said seem superficial.

Unless you're a die-hard Quine scholar, I don't suggest this book. Dilham's critique is rambling and incoherent. The book is full of references which the reader may or (more likely) may not be familiar with. Much of the book seems unmotivated and directionless. He may very well have some valid points, but it's hard to tell, and it's not at all clear that it's worth working through this book to find out.