Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Jeremy Goodman's avatar
  2. David Wallace's avatar
  3. Mark's avatar
  4. Valerie Dawson's avatar

    Exactly! The question is not whether AI is conscious or forms human-like intentions. The question is whether AI–in carrying out…

  5. Valerie Dawson's avatar
  6. David Wallace's avatar

    This is a very strange comment. Searle’s Chinese Room, and his general position on intentionality, were controversial, and criticized (correctly,…

  7. Nat Hansen's avatar

More recollections of Putnam and Quine

Brian Leiter

A propos yesterday's post, Ned Block posted an amusing recollection at van Fraassen's blog:

I took a course with Putnam as a sophomore at MIT in 1962 and then one or two courses every semester until I graduated in 1964. He was brilliant then in a way that seemed almost other-worldly, a geyser spouting ideas. After 2 years in Oxford I went back to Harvard to work with Putnam but he seemed slightly dimmed, reading his lectures instead of just erupting with them as he had at MIT. He moved from one political nightmare to another, and then got religion. Hartry Field and I had dinner with him once where he seriously advanced the “Where there is smoke there is fire” argument for the existence of his god. Quine’s lectures were horrible. He just read from his Word and Object ms and would only take written questions submitted in advance. I went to see him once about something I was thinking about and he said in effect, “What does this have to do with Quine’s philosophy.” At departmental parties he would go around from grad student to grad student addressing each by name and making a comment that showed he knew something about them. We don’t have to speculate about the existence of Martians–-I have seen one.

Comments are open for more recollections of these "Harvard stars."

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

5 responses to “More recollections of Putnam and Quine”

  1. Ian Rumfitt

    My one encounter with Quine was pleasant. In early 1992, I had the good fortune to be an Academic Visitor at MIT, where Ned Block was then teaching. The exchange which took me there was funded by Bill Coolidge, a loyal alumnus of both MIT and Balliol (of which I was then a Junior Research Fellow). Coolidge's wealth meant that I was put up in a splendid flat on Beacon Hill, to which the nearest source of food was a small supermarket (on Charles St, I think) called De Luca's. On leaving the store one morning, I caught up with a venerable fellow customer who was gasping for breath as he struggled up the icy pavement (sorry: sidewalk) while carrying a heavy bag entirely filled with bottles of various alcoholic beverages. Having read (or, rather, seen the cover of) *The Time of My Life*, I knew at once that this was Quine. 'May I help you with that, Sir'?' I asked. He gratefully assented, and asked me (who was clearly not a native Bostonian) from where I was visiting. 'Jersey, in the Channel Islands', I replied — truthfully, or at least three-quarters truthfully, for I had been brought up there. We then had a conversation about the local language, a form of Norman French. Or rather, Quine — who evidently knew vastly more about the language than I did — told me various things about it. As we parted on reaching his house, which was prominently labelled with his surname, as was then the local custom, I said 'It was a great pleasure to meet you, Professor Quine'. He looked a bit perplexed, presumably wondering how I knew that he was a professor, but didn't press the point. It had indeed, in its perhaps strange way, been a pleasure.

    Reply
  2. Steve Sverdlik

    I was an undergraduate philosophy major at Harvard from 1968-72.
    I can confirm what Ned Block said about Quine’s lectures. In his logic class, starting on day one, he read from a yellow note pad in a sort of mumble. The word among majors was that it was wise to wait to take the course until Quine took a sabbatical, which fortunately he did in my senior year.

    I took Putnam’s Marxism class during 1970-1, I think. This was when he was a Marxist, as was generally known. I don’t remember his teaching particularly, but I do remember his final exam. It read in its entirety roughly as follows: “Part I: Ask three [or maybe four] questions. Part II: Answer them.”

    Reply
  3. Cheyney Ryan

    Every Harvard undergraduate philosophy major was required to take Quine’s logic class. Initially, I think 30 to 40 students had declared for that major; after Quine’s class, I think there were about five of us left. The class convinced people that philosophy was a long tedious exercise in chickenshit. For example, Quine began the whole course by explaining how he graded on a curve, but to make sure no one got off easy he used a five-year curve, so you were actually competing against students from five years ago. So watch out! But I suspect that most students did not find his lectures boring, because most students decided not to go at all. Why should they, because it was all in Quine’s book? At some point near the end of the term I decided to drop by the class to see if there were any students left, or whether Quine was up at the front talking to himself. There were, in fact, a few hardy souls, though one was reading the newspaper and two were in the back row talking to each other.

    During that time, Putnam was struggling, as every sensible person was, with how to respond to the political crises of the time. I only have nice things to say about him because he was single-handedly responsible for the fact that my academic career was able to continue after I was expelled from Harvard for antiwar protests.

    Reply
  4. Huw Price

    Delightful story – thank you, Ian.

    Reply
  5. Charles Pigden

    No personal recollections of Quine or Putnam to offer but in each case some kind remarks which I treasure. As an undergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1970s I was encouraged to read Quine and Putnam and acquired considerable admiration for each them. This admiration did not dissipate during my time as a graduate student at La Trobe in the early eighties. I still think that the first two volumes of Putnam’s Collected Papers constitute one of the high points of Twentieth Century Philosophy. I am a bit more ambivalent about Quine – no longer such an admirer of ‘On What There Is’ as I once was – but Quine’s first paper ‘Truth By Convention’ is a masterpiece. Anyway, during my doctorate I spent some time working on the Is/Ought issue and the counterexamples to No-Ought-From-Is devised by Arthur Prior. To deal with them I took Quine’s idea of a vacuous occurrence and relativised it to the conclusion of valid inference. (A term occurs vacuously in the conclusion of a valid inference if it can be uniformly replaced by any grammatical equivalent salva validitate. The point was to prove that a term such as ‘ought’ cannot occur *non-vacuously* in the conclusion a valid inference unless it appears on the premises. Hence if it *does* appear in the conclusion but *not* in the premises it will appear vacuously. Slogan: Non non-vacuous-ought-from-is.) I sent the published version of the resulting paper to Quine (I was then a virtually unknown junior lecturer working in New Zealand) and he responded very graciously and proved that he had read it carefully by helpfully pointing out a typo. (Now I come to think of it, the typo occurred in a passage that he would have especially liked since I was rubbishing the concept of deontic logic, deontic logic being a subvariant of modal logic, which, of course, Quine detested. ) My first published paper had almost nothing to do with my PhD but was a critique of Grice and Strawson’s ‘in Defense of a Dogma’ in which I criticised Putnam’s paper ‘the analytic and hte synthetic’ for its unduly concessive attitude to G&S (their central argument is fallacious as well has historically misinformed) and pointed out that Putnam’s attempt to delineate a reduced realm of the analytic failed, since it included the *consequences* of the Lockean trifling propositions, to which the title ‘analytic’ was to be confined. (Since logical truths are the true under any interpretation, they are the logical consequences of any set of propositions, including Lockean ‘trifling propositions’.) However, I suggested a fix: the analytic should consist of ‘trifling propositions and their consequences *except* those that are logically true. This would give Putnam what he wanted. Again, Putnam’s response was very gracious and he continued to refer positively to my paper for the rest of his career. Flawed in various ways they may have been, and ghastly as Quine was as a lecturer, but I am still grateful for their generous responses to a young and relatively unpedigreed philosopher on the other side of the world who they did not know from a bar of soap.

    —–
    KEYWORDS:
    Primary Blog

    Reply

Designed with WordPress