In 1960 Quine publishes Word and Object, his masterwork: language studied as a natural phenomenon, meaning analyzed by behavior, and the doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation. The book fixes naturalism as the working program of analytic philosophy's American school, epistemology and ontology alike made continuous with science.
Tagged: Naturalism
The Event
- Date
- 1960 (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
- Word and Object
Connections
Primary Sources
- Quine, W. V. O. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.
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-1415; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
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Newton's Principia Mathematica
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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.