List members will be interested to know that Harvard philosopher W. V. Quine died on Monday. For our purposes, his most interesting work was his 1951 article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", which argued against Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction and the notion of theory-free statements. At the same time, he never abandoned his fundamental realism.
There is an excellent obituary by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in today's NYTimes.
Paul Smith
