No one since Russell has contributed so much to both philosophy and logic as Quine. No major philosopher has given anything like so much to logic, nor has any important figure in logic borne Quine’s stature as a philosopher. His work in the two fields, though distinguishable, has been very much related. He has been a pioneer philosopher of mathematical logic, while he has integrated his view of logic into the very core of his epistemology. I will discuss how logic fits with the rest of Quine’s philosophy and what motivated his choices as an expositor and teacher of logic. I will examine in particular aspects of his text Methods of Logic, now in its fourth edition.

Logic plays a central role in Quine’s philosophy. Quine is preeminently an epistemologist. His epistemology is wedded in interlocking ways to empiricism, naturalism, and physicalism; together they lead him to see science not only as the arbiter of what is to be believed about the world but also as providing the context in which we must make our philosophy. Rather than pursue some first philosophy, we look to science for our bearings: “[I[t is within science … that reality is to be identified and described” (TPT 21). And “the basic structure of the language of science … is the predicate calculus: the logic of quantification and truth-functions” (FM 160).