Willard Van Orman Quine, an Edgar Pierce professor of philosophy at Harvard, was born in Akron, Ohio. In 1930 he was graduated from Oberlin, where he majored in mathematics, and he wrote a doctoral dissertation in logic under Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. He visited Vienna, studied mathematical logic at Warsaw, and at Prague met Rudolf Carnap, whose work was to inspire and influence him.

Some of Quine's publications are in philosophy, some in symbolic logic, and others are concerned with the logical regimentation of ordinary language. It is his philosophy and related aspects of his advocated regimentation of language that concern us here, his contributions to logic being dealt with elsewhere.

Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

Some philosophers have attempted to distinguish between such statements as "A river flows through Brisbane," which, they contend, are true as a matter of fact, and statements...