Blackwell Reference Online

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Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) is among the twentieth century's most important and influential analytic philosophers, placing him squarely within the ranks of such towering figures as Bertrand russell, Ludwig wittgenstein, and Rudolf carnap.Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, on June 25, 1908. After graduating from Akron's West High School in 1926, he entered Oberlin College. It was during his freshman year at Oberlin that Quine learned of Russell's mathematical philosophy. Subsequently, Quine majored in mathematics with honors in mathematical philosophy, i.e. mathematical logic. Quine graduated sunma cum laude from Oberlin in 1930.In the fall of that same year Quine enrolled as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard. After completing a two-year PhD at Harvard – where he studied with Clarence I. Lewis and Henry M. Scheffer, and wrote a dissertation entitled The Logic of Sequences: a Generalization of Principia Mathematica under the direction of Alfred North whitehead – Quine was awarded Harvard's Sheldon Traveling Fellowship in 1933. He used the fellowship year to visit Vienna (where he attended meetings of the Vienna Circle), Prague (where he met with Carnap), and Warsaw (where he first met Stanislaw Leśniewski, Jan Łukasiewicz, and Alfred Tarski, among other prominent Polish logicians). Quine's Sheldon year was to have a profound and lasting impact on his philosophical development. ... log in or subscribe to read full text