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Willard Van Orman Quine was born on June 25, 1908. He was graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in mathematics, summa cum laude , in 1930; his senior honors thesis was a proof within the system of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica (1910–13) , which he studied largely without aid from his teachers. Whitehead was in the Philosophy Department at Harvard, so it was there that Quine went to do graduate work, although Whitehead was no longer teaching logic and Quine had done little undergraduate work in philosophy. Nonetheless, he completed a Ph.D. in two years, graduating in 1932. His dissertation generalized Principia's treatment of classes so that it included dyadic relations, instead of treating the latter separately. Along the way, Quine clarified and reformulated the basis of the system – a point to which we shall return. Quine spent the academic year 1932–3 in Europe on a Sheldon Fellowship. He spent five months in Vienna, attending some meetings of the Vienna Circle. More important, perhaps, was a shorter stay in Prague, where he had extensive conversations with Rudolf Carnap, then completing The Logical Syntax of Language ( Carnap 1934 ). While in Europe he was elected as one of the first group of Junior Fellows in Harvard's newly formed Society of Fellows: a three-year fellowship, without teaching obligations. He spent most of these years working on ... log in or subscribe to read full text