ABSTRACT
Willard Van Orman Quine was the youngest of the sons born to Robert Quine and Harriet Van Orman Quine of Akron, Ohio. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father a worker in heavy industry. As a child, Quine developed a lifelong fascination with travel and maps. On summer vacations, he would draw careful maps of nearby lakes and sell copies to local cabin owners. The young Quine also excelled in mathematics and languages. Quine went to Harvard University for graduate studies in 1930. He married his college sweetheart, buried himself in studies with such noted philosophers as C.I. Lewis and Alfred North Whitehead, finished his course work, passed preliminary examinations, and received his master’s degree—all in a year. Kant’s cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths was foreshadowed in Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and in Leibniz’s distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact.
