Challenging Quinean naturalism

Our aim in this paper is to reconstruct Quine?s project of naturalistic epistemology and to investigate its relationship with the rest of his philosophy. For Quine naturalism offered a way out of most of the problems he was facing and was meant to reconcile conflicting standpoints he held over the years. However, by assigning some sort of primacy to naturalism one can shed doubt on the importance of some other aspects of his philosophy, most notably his empiricism. That this move is not an easy one to make is witnessed by the fact that Quine himself refrained from making it. We will show that he offered arguments which favor one, as well as arguments favoring the other.