Time for some bunny-fun with our favoritemost ontological leporiphile -- Mr. Willard Van Orman Quine !!!
The
sensible materiality of the rabbit was inessential to the example,
since the prime numbers between 10 and 20 sustained the same point.
-- W.V.O.Q., “Existence and Quantification”
 |
| HMMmmmm..... ! !! |
…undetached rabbit-part…
-- W.V.O.Q., passim.
Well we would hope so ! ! !
Gavagai !
-- W.V.O.Q., Word and Object
You da man !
[For more wholesome Quinefun, click here.]
[If you'd like to see a really big bunny, click here! It depicts Quine furioso putting ontological sybarites to flight.]
[Note:
I took logic from Quine in college. He is a brilliant and witty writer, but in person -- at least with the undergraduates -- a singularly humorless and ponderous man. (Randy Allen Harris refers to him, with irrefutable finality, as The Venerable Quine.) I even suspect he didn't really like bunnies very much himself. Whether the rabbit parts in question were detached or undetached was, one suspects, a matter of ontological indifference to the great professor: for, as Quine has demonstrated, in either case the animal could be considered, like the world's sum of water, as "a single scattered whole". Or, phrasing the matter with precision: An intact rabbit, and a shmushed rabbit, can be safely interchanged salva veritate. Not, however, salva cutibus.]
[For more wholesome Quinefun, click here.]
[If you'd like to see a really big bunny, click here! It depicts Quine furioso putting ontological sybarites to flight.]
[Note:
I took logic from Quine in college. He is a brilliant and witty writer, but in person -- at least with the undergraduates -- a singularly humorless and ponderous man. (Randy Allen Harris refers to him, with irrefutable finality, as The Venerable Quine.) I even suspect he didn't really like bunnies very much himself. Whether the rabbit parts in question were detached or undetached was, one suspects, a matter of ontological indifference to the great professor: for, as Quine has demonstrated, in either case the animal could be considered, like the world's sum of water, as "a single scattered whole". Or, phrasing the matter with precision: An intact rabbit, and a shmushed rabbit, can be safely interchanged salva veritate. Not, however, salva cutibus.]
The illustration above pretty much captures Quine's aspect as he made his way across the Yard.]
~
A relatively little-known aspect of
the professor’s career, is his attempt to answer Dedekind’s classic question, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, by
means of an experiment.
Working over the holidays, in the same monastery garden where Mendel
carried out his celebrated work, Quine indulged in bit of bunny husbandry:
You put seven
rabbits in a pen, add five more, and
for a while the total is
twelve.
-- W.V.O. Quine, Philosophy of
Logic (1970), p. 100
Subsequently, Quine was able to
derive the Fibonacci series using
purely biological means.
 |
| … thus proving the theorem. |
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