Working from Within

During the past few decades a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a naturalistic approach arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy--the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact the latter an <em>a priori</em> discipline concerned with meaning--philosophers today largely follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. <p/>Sander Verhaegh here offers a comprehensive study of Quine's groundbreaking naturalism. Building on Quine's published corpus as well as a wealth of unpublished letters notes lectures papers proposals and annotations from the Quine archives Verhaegh aims to reconstruct both the nature and the development of his naturalism. As such <em>Working from Within</em> aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy and to provide a better historically informed understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. Transcriptions of five unpublished papers letters and notes are included in the appendix.<br>