The Ideas of Quine - Bryan Magee & Quine (1977)

In this program, Willard Van Orman Quine discusses the nature of philosophy and some of his own work in philosophy with host Bryan Magee. This is from a 1977 series on Modern Philosophy called Men of Ideas.

#Philosophy #BryanMagee #Quine

[dapaulson]

Magee is brilliant. I would love to spend a significant time in his lectures.

[eternaldoorman]

The quality of the video and sound is superb! It's also very interesting! Thanks for doing this.

[samuellyngdoh]

I prefer your channel to watching other things. Thanks for making these videos available

[jacobgeorge]

If it ws not declared right in the beginning that he was the greatest philosopher allive, I wouldn't have believed it.

[Zagg]

Quine certainly is on the list of most important philosophers. I’d add Strawson to the list.

[thomaskilroy]

Quine is very impressive, but some issues jump out at me, many of which I sure he’d have acknowledged himself.

Quine depends upon propositions, but glosses over the distinction between causal and logical necessity. In other words he glosses over the fact that while logic is clearly the domain of rationality and mind, cause is a mysteriously imagined incarnation of corporeal logic acting via a body.

But these bodies must themselves have governing laws as per physics, and physics, along with all of its mathematics, exists to date as an abstract system.

Magee rightly puts to Quine that a materialist should have a hard time upholding a serious or genuine ontology of the abstract, but Quine rather glosses over this question, saying these abstracts simply seem practically necessary to keep science’s view coherent.

In which case we have, as he himself dubs in other writings, Homeric gods; mysterious hands holding our world together that our sciences do not themselves explain, nor can.

The question of the nature of these ‘gods’ should make or break the whole physicalist picture, and indeed he eluded to quantum physics’ primary objects, particles, dragging materialism into quite strange places, away from bodies and more towards what older thinkers might have called spirits: incorporeal forces without heft or visibility.

It’s striking to see that even such a strong analytic and materialist view as Quine is (rightly) renowned for upholding, is still troubled to the core by issues that are rather metaphysical.

He is also content to let mind in the sense of qualia go unexplained in an important sense: the difference between qualia and straight objects-in-themselves stands between him and the upholding of empiricism.

This is a question as old as Parmenides.
On what grounds do we trust our senses, if our theory is building a world ever more different to what they tell us?
And if we cannot trust our senses what are we to make of the ‘meaning’ of our perceptions, of how observations ‘translate’ into facts in our models?
We don’t see in sets. We see in things more like phenomena. How does one translate a phenomena into a set?

[mikecorbett]

Quine is a simple man explaining complex truths, watch this more than once

[deanedge]

A time when reason was measured and had truthful objectives. Interesting to compare with Slavoj Zisek: a man of our times surely comparable of mind but a very different means of expression; and like these two gentlemen and Socrates - performers of thinking.

[MrKlemps]

"A man of measured merriment, " as Sinclair Lewis once said (in Arrowsmith)

[Expatsunleashed]

These were the days that programs like this were aired on T.V.
Now we have Kardashians and the bachelor. 😂😂😂

[Open-]

The philosopher explores the connective

[oamiry]

7:40 ㏘
Tuesday, November 7, 2023 (PST)
Time in San Francisco, CA
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[ivanbeshkov]

I'm not sure if this is above or below my cognitive capabilities.

[Khuno]

Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel th eleast of us make the most of.

[squandermania]

The spitting image of Hunter S. Thompson!

[saulorocha]

Quine says philosophy is part of science but isn’t it the opposite? Without disrespect for science, philosophy is much broader.

[BobQuigley]

Mind and matter are energy in different disguises

[roygbiv]

Based Schopenhauerian Magee really grilled Quine for his sheltered materialism throughout the video.

[elysium]

I'd gladly much rather wrestle with Kant than slog knee deep through Quine's over wrought tedious swamp.

[dapaulson]

This person should call himself a sophist. He wants to acknowledge himself as an entity, but yet denies himself as anything other than matter. Is the generation of language no different than a primitive chemical reaction!