1189Willard Van Orman Quine was the youngest of the sons born to Robert Quine
and Harriet Van Orman Quine of Akron, Ohio. His mother was a schoolteacher
and his father a worker in heavy industry. As a child, Quine developed a lifelong
fascination with travel and maps. On summer vacations, he would draw careful
maps of nearby lakes and sell copies to local cabin owners. The young Quine also
excelled in mathematics and languages. In 1926, he enrolled at Oberlin College,
where he majored in mathematics and studied philosophy. His research led him to
mathematical philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. In
Russell, he found a kindred spirit—they shared a logical approach to philosophi-
cal problems and a religious skepticism.
Quine went to Harvard University for graduate studies in 1930. He married
his college sweetheart, buried himself in studies with such noted philosophers
as C.I. Lewis and Alfred North Whitehead, finished his course work, passed
preliminary examinations, and received his master’s degree—all in a year. The
following year, he completed a 290-page dissertation on logic and received his
Ph.D. degree at age 23. A System of Logistic(1934), a revision of this disserta-
tion, became the first of his fifteen published books.
The year Quine received his doctorate, he was also awarded Harvard’s Sheldon
Traveling Fellowship. He took the title of the fellowship seriously, and in one
year he and his wife visited twenty-seven countries. Quine met several members
of the Vienna Circle and studied logic in Warsaw with the great Polish logicians
Alfred Tarski, Stanisl⁄aw Les ́niewski, and Jan L⁄ ukasiewicz. At the end of the year,
he was elected into Harvard’s Society of Fellows, which gave him, among other
emoluments, three years’ pay and no duties. Among his five colleagues as junior
fellows was the promising young psychologist B.F. Skinner.WILLARD VAN ORMAN
QUINE
1908–2000