W.V.O. Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine was the most influential American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. His 1951 paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" dismantled the analytic–synthetic distinction that underpinned logical positivism and redirected anglophone philosophy toward a thoroughgoing naturalism: the view that philosophy is continuous with, not prior to, natural science.

Quine argued that our beliefs face the tribunal of experience not individually but as a corporate body—any statement can be held true by adjusting others, and no statement is immune to revision. His doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation challenged assumptions about meaning and reference. His slogan "to be is to be the value of a bound variable" made first-order logic the arbiter of ontology. Word and Object and From a Logical Point of View remain cornerstones of twentieth-century thought.