The Significance of the New Logic

Abstract

W. V. Quine was one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century American analytic philosophy. Although he wrote predominantly in English, in Brazil in 1942 he gave a series of lectures on logic and its philosophy in Portuguese, subsequently published as the book O Sentido da Nova Lógica. The book has never before been fully translated into English, and this volume is the first to make its content accessible to Anglophone philosophers. Quine would go on to develop revolutionary ideas about semantic holism and ontology, and this book provides a snapshot of his views on logic and language at a pivotal stage of his intellectual development. The volume also includes an essay on logic which Quine also published in Portuguese, together with an extensive historical-philosophical essay by Frederique Janssen-Lauret. The valuable and previously neglected works first translated in this volume will be essential for scholars of twentieth-century philosophy.

Susan Stebbing

“…The radical extensionalist logicians of the 1930s and 1940s, especially Tarski and Quine, thought logic should only account for differences in extension, not intension: as Tarski put it, 'two concepts with different intensions but identical extensions are logically indistinguishable' (Tarski, 1956(Tarski, [1935: 387). Quine, too, enthusiastically defended extensionalism (Quine, 2018(Quine, [1944: 158; see also Janssen-Lauret, 2018, 2022b, and it was assumed that modal logics like C. I. Lewis's couldn't be extended to the quantified case until Ruth Barcan managed it in 1946-7 (Barcan, 1946(Barcan, , 1947.…”

The logic behind Quine's criterion of ontological commitment

“…(The sharp boundary between classical logic and mathematics, in particular set theory, is something Quine draws only in some of his later works, such as Philosophy of Logic . Oftentimes Quine (, p. 1944) does consider ways of drawing a line but leaves “this terminological question undecided” (p. 112) or he says that “one might well limit the word ‘logic’ to the former (though I shall not)” (Quine, , p. 111).)…”