Willard Van Orman Quine

232 daniel isaacson
with no brighter view than this of the groves of Academe. So might I have
done, but for the graciousness of Carnap. 20 (HRC 42).
After Prague, where he had “reaped philosophy” (A 13), Quine
went on to imbibe logic in Warsaw, attending the seminars and lectures
of Tarski, Le´sniewski, and L̷ ukasiewicz and meeting the many
other logicians active at that time in Warsaw. At the end of his year
in Europe, Quine returned to Harvard as a junior fellow of Harvard’s
newly founded Society of Fellows, which gave him three years of
unfettered research.
The senior fellows of the society included members of the Harvard
Corporation, which had governing responsibility for the university.
Over lunches and dinners of the society, Quine instilled in the corporation’s
members such a sense of the importance of Carnap’s philosophy
that it was determined to award Carnap an honorary degree at the
ceremonies marking the tercentenary of Harvard College, in 1936.In
anticipation of Carnap’s visit to Harvard for these ceremonies, Quine
was asked to expound Carnap’s philosophy, which he did in a series
of three lectures given in November 1934 (and published by Creath
in 1990). 21 Quine had lectured in Vienna and Warsaw on the logical
results from his dissertation; these Harvard lectures were his first
in philosophy. They loyally expounded Carnap’s views, as set out
in Logische Syntax der Sprache, which had been published earlier
that summer (and would appear in English translation three years
later).
When Quine’s term as junior fellow ended, in 1936, he was appointed
a faculty instructor at Harvard. Half the courses he taught
were on mathematical logic (these gave rise to his “New Foundations
for Mathematical Logic” and Mathematical Logic) (A17). His other
courses included “one on logical positivism, primarily on Carnap”
(TL 130), 22 about which Quine comments, “It was generous of my
senior colleagues to let me go so nearly my own way.”
For Quine, Carnap was certainly the leading figure of logical positivism,
though he also later stressed the importance of distinguishing
Carnap from the movement. In “Carnap’s Positivistic Travail,” he
writes,
The significance of the Vienna Circle, as a concerted movement, can be
overestimated. We are told of the evolving doctrine of the Circle when what
is really concerned is the doctrine of an individual, usually Carnap....When
one speaks of the Vienna Circle or logical positivism, one thinks primarily
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