Quine and the Limits of Analytical Philosophy

A Philosophical Video Essay Series on Meaning, Metaphysics, and the Collapse of Analytic Boundaries
What you'll learn
Understand Quine's core arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction
Relate Quine's arguments to deeper themes of intentionality, normativity, and conceptual rupture - as developed in the instructor's published work
Understand Quine's critique of analyticity through the lens of cutting-edge philosophical research
Explore how formal semantics breaks down under epistemological and phenomenological pressure
Trace the tension between analytic/continental traditions with insights drawn from peer-reviewed studies in Husserl Studies, Cognitio, and Estudios Kantiano
Requirements
No formal background in philosophy is required - just a deep interest in ideas, language, and conceptual critique.
Basic familiarity with modern philosophy or logic is helpful but absolutely not necessary.
An openness to essay-style video lectures that reference thinkers like Quine, Heidegger, and Husserl is encouraged.
Description
Quine and the Limits of Analytical Philosophy is a rigorous and conceptually ambitious exploration of one of the most transformative figures in 20th-century thought. Combining philosophical narrative, camera-presented lectures, and cinematic video essays, this course traces W. V. O. Quine's intellectual legacy and the shockwaves his work continues to send across philosophy, linguistics, the theory of computation, cognitive science, and the social sciences.Taught and authored by Dr. Lucas Ribeiro Vollet (Ph.D., UFSC with a period abroad in Brown University; with publications in Husserl Studies, Cognitio, Peri, Kalagatos and others), this course is both a critical history of the analytic tradition and a conceptual re-evaluation of its epistemological and ontological commitments. From Frege and Russell to Carnap, Tarski, and Wittgenstein, the course builds a genealogical structure that reveals how meaning became a battlefield, and how Quine, far from simply rejecting past paradigms, exposes their fragility from within.The course combines three types of materials:Camera-based introductions, where the instructor addresses the learner directly to frame and situate key arguments in contemporary discourse.Philosophical video essays, which blend high-level conceptual analysis with audio-visual composition, rhythm, and metaphor to enhance understanding.Supplementary academic PDFs, authored by Lucas Ribeiro Vollet and published in respected peer-reviewed journals, accompany the course to provide scholarly depth, formal citations, and the textual architecture that underpins each video. These texts are not auxiliary; they are integral to the course's method. They help articulate an internally coherent theoretical vision, allowing students to trace how each argument evolves across media - from voice and image to formal prose - and to engage with the philosophical stakes of Quine's legacy in a cross-disciplinary context.Each module addresses both historical and contemporary problems:The early analytic debates over intension and extension.Carnap's logicist project and its collapse under Quine's scrutiny.The analytic/synthetic distinction and its philosophical consequences.Quine's indeterminacy of translation and the challenge it poses to semantic stability.The implications of semantic flattening for theories of mind, computation, and linguistic sociology.The ontological deficit resulting from the evacuation of metaphysical structure in post-positivist thought.A culminating dialogue between Quine's empiricism and phenomenological conceptions of meaning.Throughout, Quine is not treated as a terminus but as a point of philosophical rupture - one that allows new questions about normativity, knowledge, and symbolic depth to emerge.This course is not introductory in tone but remains accessible to those with a foundational background in philosophy, cognitive science, or linguistics. It invites learners to critically engage with the assumptions that underlie formal semantics, scientific objectivity, and philosophical method itself.Included Materials:16 fully produced video classes (~1h50m total)7 peer-reviewed articles from the author, each introduced and contextualizedDownloadable PDFs of essays published in Cognitio, Kalagatos, Revista Controvérsia, Peri, and Academia LettersThematic summaries and guided frameworks for further explorationWhether you are interested in the structure of language, the dynamics of theory change, or the intersection between epistemology and ideology, this course offers a unique and philosophically committed space to revisit - and rethink - the foundations of analytic thought in the shadow of Quine.
Who this course is for
Philosophy students and enthusiasts interested in Quine, language, logic, and conceptual critique
Readers of analytic philosophy seeking to explore its limits and connections with phenomenology
Researchers, undergraduates, or graduate students looking for an essay-style, authorial take on Quine
Anyone curious about the crisis of meaning, the collapse of formal language, and the clash between analytic and continental traditions
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