Willard Van Orman Quine interview with Bryan Magee (1977)

Willard Van Orman Quine of Harvard stands as one of the modern world’s most eminent philosophers. In this rare interview conducted by world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee, Quine discusses his earlier view of himself as a mathematical logician, and his later interest in philosophy in a more general sense—specifically, regarding metaphysics and the philosophy of language.

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This is from the series Modern Philosophy.
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[gianmarcoiapoce]

The interviewer does a great job in clarifying Quine's thoughts which are not expressed with the degree of clarity you would expect from a philosopher of his league

[MsBearhot]

best philospher of the XX century, no doubt

[martin]

Magee talks about Materialism, Idealism & Dualism, but leaves out other possibilities such as Empiricalisim, which isn't necessarily Materialism, Neutral Monism & Agnosticism (not just about God)

[charlesmartel]

Quine tap dances around Magee's point that you cannot, at one and the same time, reject mental objects and accept "abstract" ones.

[uncljoedoc]

IF I can't imagine an answer to the question off what it means to be. So does that mean I can sit in my chair and say that'sa pseudo question?

[UnslavedPodcast]

An expert at explaining consciousness away, rather than explaining it...what bullcrap...

[danwroy]

Pretty disappointing, was looking forward to it

[martin]

Quine appears to be a materialist who accepts the existence of abstracts such as mathematics, which isn't a definition of materialism as far as I'm aware & someone who doesn't accept the existence of minds or mental entities in any sense other than as attributes or activities on the part of physical objects, mainly persons, so he does?

[martin]

Philosophy is not an "it", rather a "they"

[mcrotty]

Mathematicians posit primes without end (telos)..
so, the 'optimus prime' is a misnomer and also functionally meaningless.

[esorse]

Excluding causation* from an account of the relationship between idea and matter, implies they may be coincidental and from this, properties of something described by an identifier : number 1 is respectively "someone with a smartphone's" concept and representative .

* Suppose a necessary and sufficient condition^ for something implies the identifier "matrix coordinate system" row, colum, or spatio, temporal, event sequence, ES = ST(1, 1) ST(1, 2), where (a, b) is an ordered - (a, b) ≠ (b, a) - pair of non-negative rational numbers^^ and from this, an event between any two events is assumed, so there are countably infinite event fractions, by God as the counterparty in a flawless 'hedge' against some portal for instance.

^ This is a necessary condition for that if that cannot without this ; this is a sufficient condition for that if the existence of this is enough to guarantee the existence of that.

^^ A complex number has general form, z = a + b.i, where a and b are real numbers - including rational numbers that can be written in x/y form, where x is a whole number - 0, 1, 2, ... -, y is a natural number - 1, 2, 3, ... - and "/" means divided by, like 1/1 = 1 = 1.0, as well as irrational numbers that can't be written as a ratio, like pi = 3.14 approximated to two decimal places -, "." is multiplied by and "i" is the imaginary number written, i = √-1, for √-1 pronounced "square root of negative one", geometrically meaning it is the length of the side of a square with area equal to negative one ; the complex conjugate of z = a + b.i is z' = a - b.i.

[brynbstn]

Quine certainly doesn’t come off as a great intellect in this interview…. Or at least not as a good speaker … I haven’t listened to others.

[ednasadler]

Wholly unprepared for Deconstructionist philosophy.