A doctor who wrote much during the Islamic Golden Age. Known in Western sources as "Avicenna".

20 years old when he disappeared into the woods. 47 years old in 2013 when he was caught.

• He slept in an unheated tent, in an area which falls to -20 degrees in the winter.
• He had contact with a single person, once, a hiker in the 1990s.
• He never made a phone call
• He never drove a car
• He never spent money (1000+ burglaries provided food)
• He never sent an email or saw the Internet

When he was asked about Thoreau, Knight dismissed him with a single word "dilettante" (dabbler, amateur, nonprofessional).

At the very end of each of our visits, I'd always asked him the same question. An essential question: Why did he disappear? He never had a satisfying answer. "I don't have a reason." "I can't explain why." "Give me more time to think about it." "It's a mystery to me, too." Then he became annoyed "Why? That question bores me." But during our final visit, he was more reflective. Isn't everybody, he said, seeking the same thing in life? Aren't we all looking for contentment? He was never happy in his youth–not in high school, not with a job, not being around other people. Then he discovered his camp in the woods. "I found a place where I was content," he said. His own perfect spot. The only place in the world he felt at peace.

Read more: www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit

• Paper: On What There Is
• Paper: Two Dogmas of Empiricsm 1951
• Book: The Web of Belief
• Book: Word and Object 1960

his paper basically killed logical positivism.

However, he was the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis, but continuous with science; the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. This led to his famous quip that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough." [12] He led a "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself" and developed an influential naturalized epistemology that tried to provide "an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meager sensory input."[13] He also advocated ontological relativity in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis (also called confirmation holism, that no individual statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed by a test, only a set of statements can).

Quine has remarked that one may or may not choose to be a behaviorist in psychology, but one has no choice but to be a behaviorist in linguistics.

In chapter 2 a linguist has to translate a native's unknown language into English. What is so specifically behavioristic there is that the linguist has nothing to go on but verbal behavior from the native and the visible environment the native interacts with. The same view is displayed in chapter 3 where Quine describes how a baby learns its first words. In this chapter Quine also mentions B.F. Skinner, a well known behaviorist, as one of his influences. The opposite view to Quine's and Skinner's in philosophy of language is represented by Noam Chomsky's linguistic nativism.

"Radical translation" is a thought experiment about translating a completely unknown language from scratch. Proves/disproves what?

Indeterminacy of translation Three aspects of indeterminacy arise, of which two relate to indeterminacy of translation.[5] The three indeterminacies are (i) inscrutability of reference, and (ii) holophrastic indeterminacy, and (iii) the underdetermination of scientific theory. The last of these, not discussed here, refers to Quine's assessment that evidence alone does not dictate the choice of a scientific theory, as different theories - observationally equivalent - may be able to explain the same facts. The first refers to indeterminacy in interpreting individual words or sub-sentences. The second refers to indeterminacy in entire sentences or more extensive portions of discourse.

– en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation

Dissolve the analytic-synthetic distinction

Aristarchos of Samos calculated the Earth's circumference very well, and realized that the Earth must revolve around the Sun. Nobody liked this, so we had to wait 1700 years for Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) to once more put forth the idea in the public sphere.

It has been said that Cleanthes (a Stoic) considered Aristarchos a dangerous enemy, (perhaps due to the 'providence or atoms' issue?)