Harvard Stars

In analytic philosophy, in my generation, it seemed that every philosophy child learned two names at her mother’s knee: Willard Van Orman Quine and Hilary Putnam.  In the way myths grow in the absence of history, Quine was the Creator of naturalism and Putnam the Destroyer of the fact-value distinction, and they lived on Harvard Square.  

My first philosophy teacher, Karel Lambert, introduced me to Quine’s essay ‘On What There Is”, and I have introduced all my graduate students, in every cohort since, to it as well. Then Lambert taught a course with Quine’s Word and Object as text, and after that I had an independent study course on Quine’s Mathematical Logic, including its prototype-syntax … I was brought up, you might say, as a Quine fan.

Quine was the older of the two, his life spanned all but eight years of the twentieth century.  As a young man he went to study with Carnap in Prague, just before the Nazi’s forced logical positivism’s diaspora.  As Ayer did to England, Quine carried the positivist evangel to America.  I first saw and heard him shortly after my graduation, in the sixties, at Yale.  During the discussion period  I asked a question, no doubt still sounding like an uppity student.  The question I do not remember, but I can still see it all quite vividly.  Quine paused, looked at me suspiciously, paused a bit more, then made a single kindly comment.  

I never knew Quine personally, but in some ways he was never far.  Stephanie Lewis’ husband had been one of Quine’s students,  She thought and talked very warmly about him, though she called him Willard Van Orman Grape, referring to what was — to all appearances, if not in reality —  his drinker’s nose.  Quine had a special game he liked to play, she told me:  give him any longitude and latitude coordinates and he would list cities nearby, if any.  He liked to play this for a long, long time.   

To me Quine, whom I idolized when I was an undergraduate, was always an enigmatic figure.  In the eighties his autobiography appeared, The Time of My Life.  It did not illuminate the enigma. Written like Homer’s Odyssey: wanderings throughout the known world, no inner life.

In this respect Putnam was very different, and I developed a great liking for him.  We met at many conferences.  Again the first occasion was just shortly after I graduated.  In 1968 the Philosophy of Science Association had its first meeting and we were together in a symposium on quantum logic.  In one respect this was like my first meeting with Quine.  I raised an objection and was dismissed with a single, unexpected, awfully clever riposte.  But we continued to meet and debate, in such places as Urbana, Montreal, Florence, Taxco, Thessalonica, Los Angeles.  Each year I admired him more.  He was not easy to debate, for Putnam was well known for how he would criticize his own positions and change his views.  “I am a moving target!” he would say.  Still one could see the underlying continuity. Even when he was going in and out of his Marxist period:  Marxist philosophy of mathematics, as he presented it in a lecture in Toronto, turned out to be so very like Putnam’s earlier philosophy of mathematics.

In 1990 we had a great celebration for Quine in San Marino, “for the world’s greatest philosopher in the world’s oldest and smallertrepublic” Umberto Eco said.  It was indeed a feast, a whole lamb (or was it a suckling pig?) was roasted at the reception in a medieval hall.  Besides worshippers from afar such as me, there were also the real disciples. George Boolos stood out.  One of Quine’s notable insights had to do with quotation, and the famous use/mention distinction, by which he would expose even ambiguities in mathematical language.  Boolos’ very technical lecture, “Operational Ambiguity” had as focus the difficulties with 

            ‘blue’ appended to the quotation of ‘red’ = ‘ ‘red’ blue’

and ended with some very long expressions that turned out to denote themselves.  A young man with a German accent accused Boolos of having presented a parody of Quine’s philosophy.  Perhaps this was disingenuous.  A few people laughed. Boolos was angry.

As for me, I was not at ease on this occasion.  Quine’s little last book, The Pursuit of Truth, had just appeared, and I had just submitted a negative, I am not sure it was uncharitable, review to the TLS.  We didn’t talk.