Magee is brilliant. I would love to spend a significant time in his lectures.

The quality of the video and sound is superb! It's also very interesting! Thanks for doing this.

I prefer your channel to watching other things. Thanks for making these videos available

Quine certainly is on the list of most important second-half-of-twentieth-century philosophers. I’d add Strawson to the list.

Quine is a simple man explaining complex truths, watch this more than once

"A man of measured merriment," as Sinclair Lewis once said (in Arrowsmith)

If it ws not declared right in the beginning that he was the greatest philosopher allive, I wouldn't have believed it.

A time when reason was measured and had truthful objectives. Interesting to compare with Slavoj Zisek: a man of our times surely comparable of mind but a very different means of expression; and like these two gentlemen and Socrates - performers of thinking.

Quine is very impressive, but some issues jump out at me, many of which I sure he’d have acknowledged himself. Quine depends upon propositions, but glosses over the distinction between causal and logical necessity. In other words he glosses over the fact that while logic is clearly the domain of rationality and mind, cause is a mysteriously imagined incarnation of corporeal logic acting via a body. But these bodies must themselves have governing laws as per physics, and physics, along with all of its mathematics, exists to date as an abstract system. Magee rightly puts to Quine that a materialist should have a hard time upholding a serious or genuine ontology of the abstract, but Quine rather glosses over this question , saying these abstracts simply seem practically necessary to keep science’s view coherent. In which case we have, as he himself dubs in other writings, Homeric gods; mysterious hands holding our world together that our sciences do not themselves explain, nor can. The question of the nature of these ‘gods’ should make or break the whole physicalist picture, and indeed he eluded to quantum physics’ primary objects, particles, dragging materialism into quite strange places, away from bodies and more towards what older thinkers might have called spirits: incorporeal forces without heft or visibility. It’s striking to see that even such a strong analytic and materialist view as Quine is (rightly) renowned for upholding, is still troubled to the core by issues that are rather metaphysical. He is also content to let mind in the sense of qualia go unexplained in an important sense: the difference between qualia and straight objects-in-themselves stands between him and the upholding of empiricism. This is a question as old as Parmenides. On what grounds do we trust our senses, if our theory is building a world ever more different to what they tell us? And if we cannot trust our senses what are we to make of the ‘meaning’ of our perceptions, of how observations ‘translate’ into facts in our models? We don’t see in sets. We see in things more like phenomena. How does one translate a phenomena into a set?

Mind and matter are energy in different disguises

I cant get over that background

Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel th eleast of us make the most of.

7:40 ㏘ Tuesday, November 7, 2023 (PST) Time in San Francisco, CA Feedback

The philosopher explores the connective “tisssssyyyyyyouuuuuu”.😂

The spitting image of Hunter S. Thompson!

Quine says philosophy is part of science but isn’t it the opposite? Without disrespect for science, philosophy is much broader.

These were the days that programs like this were aired on T.V. Now we have Kardashians and the bachelor. 😂😂😂

How the Beeb has fallen!

Was Quine proficient in portuguese ?

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The mind is just another (neural) activity of the body. Why not?

Watching thiis because Ive never heard of Quine. But we all need to understand the thinking of the US military and cultural hegemon.

This person should call himself a sophist. He wants to acknowledge himself as an entity, but yet denies himself as anything other than matter. Is the generation of language no different than a primitive chemical reaction!

Based Schopenhauerian Magee really grilled Quine for his sheltered materialism throughout the video.

Although brilliant, Quine is not a pristine talker.

I like philosophy but this interview was kind of dull

good job he wrote most of his ideas down innit

It all fell apart when he tried to put abstract things into his purely "Physicalist" system.

We pay tuition to listen to this man construct a maze!

Is the dualism between abstract objects and material objects not similar to classic dualism? The improvement seems very little Unless: he seems to say the reality of abstract objects is defendable because of the (discovered) similar abstract nature of fundamental physical reality. Doesn't this imply due to his argument he is unknowingly equating one with the other, basically siding with Max Tegmarks modern mathematicalism? That the sets and topologies he is talking about as abstract objects, actually also underly the physical world? And that basically, the world thus also is nothing more but an abstract object, or at least its foundations are? That the foundations of the physical world ARE abstract objects?

Schopenhauer would have mopped the floor with this q-tip

He denies the mind-body problem by denying it as a legitimate pursuit. He refuses to deal with it by saying there is not enough time to discuss the issue.

I hope that his papers are written in a more clear and well structured way!I have never heard a poorer speaker in my life,it makes me wonder if he truly grasped the nature of the concepts he makes reference to!I personally doubt it!The time for explanations will come!

This corporate master lackey

With respect, I think this interesting video is a clear example of why philosophy has now withdrawn into its own corner and attracts very few students. The world is burning, and these analytic guys have nothing to say about it. Social theory? Political thought? Ethics? Anything? At least Russell was engaged; these guys are just Wittgenstein sitting in his room.