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One man's struggle against impermanence
John Wilkins is an eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a position as a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Queensland, in Australia. After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, John finally completed his thesis on species concepts in 2004, which he has worked into two books.
This blog is designed evolved to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors...
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Category: General Science • Logic and philosophy
Posted on: June 22, 2008 10:33 AM, by John S. Wilkins
Willard Van Ormond Quine was, I believe, one of the best of the 20th century philosophers, and is someone who has greatly influenced me. Here is a TV interview by Brian Magee, from the 1970s, if I am right. They discuss the nature of philosophy. This year marks the centenary of Quine's birth.
Hat tip to Calculemus. The heading is a bad pun on one of Quine's most famous essays: "On What There Is".
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Comments
I took a semester focusing on philosophy at Harvard while Quine was there. But retired and unwilling to visit our seminars, so we never met. And all this was among phiso-symps in the anthro department.
But it was kind of cool imagining that Quine might pay us a visit...
Posted by: Greg Laden | June 22, 2008 10:56 AM
One of my philosophy professors had a Quine Story. He was in town for a symposium on the somethingth anniversary of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and she was assigned to ferry him around, take him to dinner and fend off the grad students fawning at his feet (one brought Quine's entire backlist for the man to sign). He had been given some little plaque or award thingy and in all the rushing about had been misplaced, and as my professor was driving him back to look for it, she ran a yellow on a left-hand turn and was almost hit by oncoming traffic...
She told us ruefully that she almost became known as The Woman Who Killed W. V. O. Quine.
Posted by: Tlönista | June 22, 2008 3:33 PM
Jeez, Brian Magee is the spitting image of Jim Broadbent (he plays Indy's Department Head in the "Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls").
Posted by: Toby | June 23, 2008 2:45 PM