This little book is based on the Ferrater Mora lectures given by Quine in 1990. In his preface he writes:
The Ferrater Mora lectures are a semiannual event at the Universitat de Girona, in Catalonia, honoring the memory of the late philosopher and novelist Josep María Ferrater Mora. The lecturer meets a selected group of some forty auditors ten times, over a period of two weeks, for a total of twenty-odd hours of lectures and discussion. Four eminent colleagues are invited along with the lecturer to participate in the discussion.
In 1990 the four additional Eminences were Donald Davidson, Burton Dreben, Dagfinn Føllesdal, and Roger Gibson.
Chapter One, “Days of Yore,” starts with a seven-page history of philosophy. That’s followed by a description of Russell and Whitehead’s attempt to construct mathematics from minimal beginnings. There is no sign, here, that Quine sees anything problematic about either their project or their actual construction. The chapter ends with an account of Rudolf Carnap’s somewhat similar attempt, in Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928), to construct knowledge (science) from minimal beginnings.
Chapter Two, “Naturalism,” describes Quine’s own try at constructing science on a small foundation. Carnap had taken sensory phenomena as the basis for “the logical construction of the world.” Quine rejects this version of the epistemological project, not because it won’t work but because it allows the possibility that not everything in the world is material. His own option
