Philosopher Quine Dies at 92 on Christmas Day

Willard van Orman Quine, a Harvard professor who was one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century, died on Dec. 25 at age 92. He lived in Boston.

Quine led the second golden age of the Harvard philosophy department along with John Rawls, the political theorist, and philosophers Stanley Cavell and Hillary Putnam, according to Warren Goldfarb, Pearson professor of modern mathematics and mathematical logic. (During the first golden age, at the turn of the century, the department was led by Henry James, Josiah Royce and George Santayana.)

"He had just a commanding position in American philosophy," said Goldfarb, who knew Quine as a member of the Society of Fellows, as a professor and as a student. "This is what set new directions in philosophy."

Quine argued that philosophy was continuous with science, not a separate, privileged field that could provide an independent foundation for other areas of study.

He tried to integrate rigorous study of logic and language with philosophy to discover what humans can know and how they can know it.

A summa cum laude graduate of Oberlin College, Quine came to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy and stayed for the rest of his career, aside from a stint as a Navy cryptographer during World War II and his travels around the globe (he spoke half a dozen languages and visited over 100 countries.)

Spurred by the economic uncertainty of the depression, Quine earned his Ph.D. in just two years under the supervision of leading philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

In 1932, he went to Europe for four years on a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship, then returned to Harvard as a member of the newly-formed Society of Fellows. At that time, other members of the prestigious group--which funds three years of research and study--included Whitehead, A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, the former Harvard president who founded the organization, B.F. Skinner, the behavioral scientist, and Nathan Pusey, who later became president of Harvard.

He went from the society to a professorship in Harvard's philosophy department, where he ultimately became Edgar Pierce professor.

Quine professed to be bored by even the best lectures he attended during his days as a student. But he spent nearly four decades teaching, until his retirement in 1978.

His students included Tom A. Lehrer '47, the satirical songwriter, as well as Theodore J. Kaczynski '62, later known as the Unabomber.

During the turmoil of 1969, Quine was a conservative voice on the Faculty.

He regarded the undergraduate protests of the time--against the war in Vietnam, the presence of ROTC on campus and Harvard's lack of an Afro-American Studies

Program--with disdain.

"President Pusey was compelled to call in the police after many hours of waiting and warning," he wrote in his autobiography of the police raid on

University Hall. "He was unduly apologetic afterward about having acted thus responsibly, and the culprits were set loose on further mischief in the service of their headlong ideals."

Of the aftermath, he wrote: "Standards sank in various departments...The loss in rapport and fellow feeling, as well as in academic standards, was not soon to be made up."

Quine continued to write long after his retirement, with the last of his more than 25 works, "From Stimulus to Science" published in 1995.

He was known for the graceful style of the prose he wrote in ballpoint pen or banged out on a typewriter that he customized with logical symbols.

Goldfarb remembered asking Quine for help revising an early translation of his. He said Quine came back with four single-word changes--all perfect.

Each of them was absolutely beautiful," he said. "It was striking how he found the exactly the right word."

Quine is survived by three daughters, a son, five grandchildren and a great-grandchild.