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As an undergraduate at Oberlin Quine concentrated on mathematics and mathematical philosophy, especially the works of Peano, Russell, and Whitehead. He went on to study philosophy at Harvard, where in only two years he received a doctorate. In his second year, a visit from Russell during which Whitehead (who chaired the department) and Russell shared the podium to give a joint talk - his "most dazzling exposure to greatness" - moved him to write his dissertation on The Logic Sequence: A Generalization of 'Principia Mathematica,' later published as his first book, A system of Logic.
After earning his doctorate, Quine accepted a series of postdoctoral fellowships in Vienna, Prague, and Warsay, where he met and studied with Moritz Schlick, who founded the logical positivist group known as the Vienna Circle, the philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach, as well as the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap and the great mathematician and logician Adolph Tarski. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1936, Quine went back to Harvard as an instructor in philosophy. Over the next several years he published Mathematical Logic (1940) and Elementary Logic (1941), a time during which "Germans massacred Jews, Germans swarmed over France, Japanese bombed Hawaii. Logic seemed off the point." So he joined the navy and worked for radio intelligence in Washington. After the war he returned to Harvard and became full professor in 1948.
