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25 JUNE 1908 * 25 DECEMBER 2000
WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE played a crucial role in shaping philosophy during the twentieth century. Early encyclopedias classified him as a logician, but he soon came to be regarded as a general philosopher, to begin with a philosopher of logic and language, but eventually as a metaphysician, whose radical thoughts about ontology, epistemology, and communication have repercussions within all major areas of philosophy.
Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, on 25 June 1908, the son of Cloyd Robert Quine, an engineer and manufacturing entrepreneur, and Harriet Ellis Van Orman, a teacher. Quine's happy and active boyhood in Akron is engagingly described in his autobiography, The Time of My Life (1985). Quine received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1930, majoring in mathematics. His diverse talents and interests, in mathematics, science, and psychology but also in language, literature, and poetry, attracted him to philosophy. At the end of his junior year at Oberlin his mother bought him Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's three- volume Principia Mathematica (1910-13), and he applied for a scholarship to Harvard to work with Whitehead for a Ph.D. This started his seventy-year association with that institution.
Quine was only twenty-three when he received his Ph.D. in the spring of 1932, after just two years at Harvard. His dissertation simplified and clarified various aspects of Russell and Whitehead's work. It exemplifies many of Quine's characteristic features as a philosopher: his acute awareness of obscurity and confusions, his constructive ability to find new viewpoints that make things fall into place, and his concern with ontological issues. Quine was awarded Harvard's Sheldon Traveling Fellowship for 1932-33, which brought him to Vienna, Prague, and Warsaw and put him in contact with Moritz Schlick, Kurt Godei, and other members of the Vienna Circle: Rudolf Carnap in Prague, and Alfred Tarski, Jan Lukasiewicz, and Stanislaw Lesniewski in Warsaw.
Quine's year in Europe was followed by three years in Harvard's first group of six junior fellows. He thereafter taught philosophy at Harvard. In 1956 he succeeded C. I. Lewis as Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, a position he held until his retirement in 1978.
In 1936, his last year as a junior fellow, Quine participated in the founding of the...