Quine and the Limits of Analytical Philosophy: A Philosophical Video Essay Series on Meaning, Metaphysics, and the Collapse of Analytic Boundaries

Quine and the Limits of Analytical Philosophy is a rigorous exploration of one of the most disruptive figures in 20th-century thought. Blending philosophical narrative, on-camera lectures, and cinematic video essays, this course traces W. V. O. Quine’s legacy across philosophy, linguistics, computation, cognitive science, and the social sciences.

Taught by Dr. Lucas Ribeiro Vollet (Ph.D., UFSC; visiting scholar at Brown University; published in Husserl Studies, Cognitio, Kalagatos, among others), the course offers both a critical history of the analytic tradition and a conceptual re-evaluation of its epistemological and ontological foundations. From Frege to Russell, Carnap, Tarski, and Wittgenstein, it reconstructs the semantic crises that culminate in Quine’s radical empiricism.

The course includes:

Direct camera-based modules, framing key arguments in context

Philosophical video essays, blending conceptual rigor with metaphor and audiovisual composition

Academic PDFs, authored by Dr. Vollet and published in peer-reviewed journals, offering scholarly depth and textual scaffolding for each lesson

These materials together form an integrated method: theory is not only explained but enacted across multiple media. Students engage with arguments as they develop through discourse, image, and text.

Modules cover:

Early analytic debates on intension and extension

Carnap’s logicist project and Quine’s critique

The collapse of the analytic/synthetic distinction

Indeterminacy of translation and its semantic consequences

The flattening of meaning in contemporary philosophy of mind and language

The ontological deficit in post-positivist metaphysics

A culminating dialogue between Quine and phenomenology

This course is designed for learners with a foundational background in philosophy, cognitive science, or linguistics, and invites them to rethink the foundations of meaning, objectivity, and normativity in the wake of Quine.

Includes 16 video lessons (~1h50m)