“On the Vision of Depth”. Introduction and translation. Philosophy and Psychology in Quine’s early thought

Abstract

This is a translation of a W. V. O. Quine’s paper for an Advanced Psychology course, taught by Professor John Beebe-Center at Harvard. This unpublished text was submitted in the spring of 1931. It demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the state of the then young discipline of psychology, its most important names and its most outstanding schools at the time. The first and last sections contain elements of historiographical and philosophical interest for experts and those interested in Quine's thought. The second and third sections show the mastery of the subject from different points of view, namely optics, ocular physiology, the psychology of perception and, of course, the history of the philosophy underlying the approaches of the different psychological schools. It is accompanied by an introduction linking the ideas in this work to issues currently relevant to the philosophy of psychology and computational neuroscience in its debate with naturalism.