Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine, who lived from 25 June 1908 to 25 December 2000, was an American logician and philosopher in the analytic tradition. Born in Akron, Ohio, he took his bachelor's degree in mathematics at Oberlin College in 1930 and his doctorate at Harvard in 1932 with a thesis supervised by Alfred North Whitehead, then held a Harvard junior fellowship. He held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. He taught logic and set theory, held that first-order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own set theory, known as New Foundations. With Hilary Putnam he formulated the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument for the reality of mathematical entities. His philosophical papers and books, including On What There Is, Two Dogmas of Empiricism and Word and Object, made him one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. John Myhill was his doctoral student at Harvard.