In 1951 W. V. O. Quine publishes Two Dogmas of Empiricism, philosophy's most influential paper of the century, rejecting the analytic and synthetic distinction and proposing that knowledge is a single web answering to experience at its edges. Quine's holism is the founding document of naturalized philosophy: no first philosophy stands above science.
Tagged: Naturalism
The Event
- Date
- 1951 (exact)
- Era
- Naturalized Philosophy; Standard periodization of naturalist history
- Location
- Cambridge; today Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Traditions
- Naturalism
- Streams
- Naturalism
- Key figures
- W. V. O. Quine
- Key texts
- Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Primary Sources
- Quine, W. V. O. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 1951.
Secondary Sources
- De Caro, Mario, and David Macarthur, eds. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
- Gregory, Frederick. Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977.
- Papineau, David. Philosophical Naturalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Provenance: HIST-1414; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
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World View
Naturalism
Naturalism holds that nature is all there is: the universe of matter, energy, and natural law needs no god, soul, or purpose beyond itself.