Burton Dreben

Burton Spencer Dreben (1927, Boston - 1999) was an American philosopher specializing in mathematical logic. A Harvard graduate who taught at his alma mater for most of his career, he published little but was highly influential as a teacher and as a critic of the work of his colleagues (Floyd & Shieh 2001).

The logician

Dreben was a rare combination of expert logician, and careful historian of ideas and interpreter of historical texts. In the 1950s, he found a copy of Jacques Herbrand's Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the University of Paris in 1929 and thought lost. (Herbrand died in 1931 before either marrying or starting his career.) Dreben found a number of significant errors in the thesis, as well as evidence of haste and carelessness in its preparation. in particular, Herbrand's proof a crucial lemma was fatally flawed, but Dreben found another way of proving the essential conclusions of the thesis. Dreben's introduction to the translation of Herbrand's thesis in Van Heijenoort (1967) includes a concise description of his work on Herbrand's writings.

In the 1970s, Dreben and Warren Goldfarb wrote a book on the decision problem.

Philosophical thought

From 1978 onwards, Dreben gave a series of lectures at Harvard which had as their primary topics the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine. Dreben took from Wittgenstein the lesson that philosophers always went wrong when they tried to provide general accounts of reality, epistemology, or metaphysics. He was in agreement with Wittgenstein's later view that philosophical problems mostly arise when language goes on holiday. Dreben took the history of philosophy as itself a proof of Wittgenstein's thesis that much philosophizing is nonsense; Dreben attempted to show how the history of philosophy is a history of people talking past one another.

Dreben interpreted Quine as attempting to show that philosophy does not provide the foundations of science. According to Dreben's interpretation of Quine, philosophy at its best merely answers a number of general questions from within science itself. However, Dreben saw even in Quine a tendency to generalize most successfully resisted by the later Wittgenstein, whose unflagging alertness to specifics Dreben took as a model.

Given the negative nature of Dreben's interpretation of philosophical history, there is surprisingly little in the literature that attempts to respond to his views. One reasonable response is to show that philosophy cannot be nonsense because its ideas can be lead to practical and/or profitable institutions or artifacts. For example, the American system of government derives from a number of political philosophies. Other work has attempted to show that useful computer program design ideas can be derived from philosophical theories (Helman & Bahuguna, 1986).

Career

Harvard University awarded Dreben an A.B. and an A.M. in 1949 and 1955, respectively. He taught at the University of Chicago, 1955-56, at Harvard 1956-90, and at Boston University for the remainder of his life. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford 1950-51, a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows 1952-55, a Guggenheim Fellow from 1957-58, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1963-99.

At Harvard, he was Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1973-75, a special assistant to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences with oversight over the academic tenure process, Chair of the Society of Fellows 1976-90, and Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy Emeritus.

Dreben was a highly influential teacher of philosophy. The "Harvard Crimson" described him as

"A mathematical logician by training, his writings set new standards of clarity for the historical study of 20th-century philosophy. His lectures at Harvard and later at Boston University, where he taught from 1991 until his death, were famous for their wit, bravado, and intellectual excitement, attracting students and faculty alike and shaping several generations of philosophers. His mastery of the texts of 20th-century analytic philosophy was unmatched."

Dreben became known for his close reading and detailed comments on the draft writings of his Harvard colleagues W.V. Quine, John Rawls, Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Charles Parsons, and Warren Goldfarb. Quine often thanked Dreben in print for his advice and corrections. In his later years, Dreben was a guest lecturer in Scandinavia, Israel, and Europe, giving seminars on the nature and significance of 20th-century philosophy.

During the student revolt of the late 1960s, Dreben helped mediate the conflicts and disputes between Harvard students and administration.

Life

Dreben was first married to Massachusetts Judge Raya Dreben, by whom he had two children. He later married the philosopher Juliet Floyd.

References

*cite book|author=Floyd, Juliet, and Shieh, Sanford (eds.)|title=Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy|publisher=Oxford Univ. Press|year=2001|id=ISBN 019513916X
*Helman, David and Bahuguna, Akash, [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=318242.318476 "Explanation systems for computer simulations"] .
*Isaacson, Daniel, [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990820/ai_n14242712 "Obituary: Professor Burton Dreben"] , "The Independent" (London).
*Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. "From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931". Harvard Univ. Press.

External links

*" [http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/07.15/dreben.html Obituary,] " "Harvard Gazette".