When you think of quiddity, consider quintessence, the essence of things, and quibble, a trifling point, and consider quirk which refers to a person's eccentricities: all of these Q-words give you a foretaste of this book.
I could easily have read this book on QF1 flying from Sydney to London, and never have bothered to get off and stretch my legs in Singapore, that's how deeply involved I was with this superb introduction to central issues in contemporary thinking about logic, mathematics, language and science. Two-hundred-and-fifty pages of deeply distilled knowledge presented by, as the blurb says, "the most distinguished and influential of living philosophers", except that Willard Van Orman Quine died on 25 December 2000, aged 92 years, and the world is much poorer for it.
I am no longer flying high but sitting on the jetty at "Riverbend" and reading W.V. Quine still gives me a sort of mental altitude sickness. How I wished I had taken the time to read such books many years earlier.
Even if you never get past the cover of the book, you will now know the three meanings of quiddity: the essence of things, a trifling point, and my eccentricity which compels me to blog about little-known books.
