Bei Quine gibt es die große Klarheiten und die große Unklarheiten.

Arnim von Stechow

I have been increasingly of the view that Quine the philosopher is overrated and Quine the logician is underrated. Quine the philosopher is pretty damn' good, but he plays to a large and appreciative audience; Quine the Logician is arguably better, but he plays to a much smaller audience. Quine's philosophy of science is obscure, but his philosophical logic is a model of clarity, and he was enduringly, reverberatingly and frequently annoyingly right about (tedious) basics that were often (and still are often) treated with culpable sloppiness by people who ought to know better . Use/mention... that kind of thing. He is important to us beco's he cared about things that mattered, and — in the teeth of contemporary poor practice — he got them right. It may be true, as Dana Scott says, that Quine didn't know any Model Theory to speak of, but he did invent prime implicants, breadth-first and depth-first search (among other things) and he thought very hard about Synonymy. His work on Quasi-quotation is important, fundamental and all his own work. Read the chapter in Mathematical Logic.

It's almost certainly something to do with him being a language buff. He was one of only two people I have ever met who (while not being linguists or polynesians) pronounced the glottal stop in ``Hawai'i''. (The other is Nigel Rockliffe).

Actually, while we are on the subject of the Tractatus, i once held in my hands the copy that W gave to Francis Skinner, with the inscription ``To Francis, with all my love''

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