- Lived:
- 1908–2000 · Akron, Ohio → Harvard, with detours through Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, and 118 countries
- Tradition:
- American analytic philosophy; logic, language, and a thoroughly scientific empiricism
- The Big Idea:
- Our beliefs don't face reality one at a time — they face it together, as a single interconnected web, and no belief, not even the "obvious" ones, is immune to revision.
- In their words:
- "Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body."
- If you remember one thing:
- He demolished the neat wall between truths of meaning and truths of fact — and with it, the idea that philosophy sits above science, checking its papers from some higher court.