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Birth
He was born on June 25, 1908 and grew up in Akron, Ohio. His father, Cloyd Rober, was founder of the Akron Equipment Company, which produced tire molds. His mother, Harriet, was a schoolteacher. He also had an older brother named Robert Cloyd. -
Education
Studied mathematics and logic and recieved his B.A. Summa Cum Laude in Mathematics from Oberlin College. He then won a scholarship to Harvard University. -
Harvard
He recieved his Ph.D in philosophy from Harvard, where he held a strong position until his death. In 1933, he became a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s newly-formed Society of Fellows and worked mainly on logic and set theory. -
Sheldon Fellowship
Due to a Sheldon fellowship, he was able to travel Europe from 1932 to 1933 where he met important philosophers and logicians, such as Stanislaw Lesniewsk, Rudolph Carnap, and Alfred Tarski, and memebers of the Vienna Circle. -
World War II
During Word War II, from 1942 to 1945, he served as a US Naval intelligence officer. He helped dechipher messages from German Submarines and earned the rank of LtCdr. After, he became a major philosopher through his publications on ontology and epistemology. His work consisted of Mathematical Logic (1940), From a Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), Set Theory and its Logic (1963), Ways of Paradox (1966), The Roots of Reference (1974), Theories and Things (1981), and etc. -
Professor
At Harvard, he was first a Faculty Instructor and then in 1941 he became an Associate Professor. He promoted to a full professors where he stayed until 1978. There he helped supervise the graduate theses of David Lewis, Gilbert Harman, and etc. He also held the Edgar Pierce Chair of philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to1978. -
Epistemology
He created his “naturalize epistemology” theory which used methods and tools of natural science to answer questions of knowledge. He believed in the idea that all our knowledge is in some way based upon stimulations of our sensory nerves. His philosophical theories developed over time but remained remarkable consistent over the years. -
Death
25 December 2000: had alzheimer in his older age and past away on December 25th, 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts. -
Interview