The Stanford Conference
Burton Dreben’s Contribution
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v16i2.5705Abstract
Burton Dreben, Quine’s colleague and closest collaborator down the decades, took it upon himself to make Quine’s thinking as strong as possible. Without broadcasting the fact, he was at pains to pinpoint Quine’s philosophical achievement and combat misunderstandings of what Quine was about. In this paper I discuss Dreben’s contributions to the 1986 closed Stanford conference, in particular the interventions in which he pushed back against Donald Davidson’s reservations about central themes in Quine’s philosophy. My primary purpose is to underscore Dreben’s support for Quine at the conference and indicate how he thought Quine’s writings are best understood.
Downloads
References
Carnap, Rudolf. 1966. Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. New York: Basic Books.
Davidson, Donald. 1973. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47: 5–20.
Feynman, Richard. 1965. The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marschall, Benjamin, ed. 2026. “The 1986 Stanford Conversation Between Quine, Davidson, Dreben, and Føllesdal.” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 16 (2): 13–396.
Quine, Willard Van. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1974. The Roots of Reference. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
———. 1976. “Carnap and Logical Truth.” In Ways of Paradox, Revised Edition, 107–32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1980. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View, Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1981a. “On the Very Idea of a Third Dogma.” In Theories and Things, 38–42. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1981b. Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1981c. “Things and Their Place in Theories.” In Theories and Things, 1–23. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1986. “Reply to Roger F. Gibson.” In The Philosophy of W.V. Quine, Expanded Edition, edited by Edward Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp, 155–57. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
———. 1992. Pursuit of Truth. Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 1979. Wittgenstein’s Lectures, 1932–1935. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1993. “A Lecture on Ethics.” In Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, 37–44. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Published
Issue
Section
License
The Public Knowledge Project recommends the use of the Creative Commons license. The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy requires authors to agree to a Creative Commons Attribution /Non-commercial license. Authors who publish with the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
