Quine Wins Kyoto Prize

Three days past his 88th birthday - just moments before setting off for his Emerson Hall office on June 28 - philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine got a once-in-a-lifetime phone call from Japan.

The message? He had just won the 1996 Kyoto Prize in Creative Arts and Moral Sciences. A fax on his office door soon confirmed the news.

Hours later, a "delighted" Quine was still largely at a loss for words. "I have to live with it a bit," he said.

Small wonder for a prize worth some $460,000 (¥50 million).

Like fellow winners in two other categories, he will formally accept the money, a diploma, and a gold medal on Nov. 10 as part of a four-day celebration in Kyoto, Japan, starting Nov. 9. Quine, who previously lectured in Japan in 1959, will also deliver a public talk and lead a specialists' workshop.

About a month before Quine got the official nod, two representatives from the prize foundation had brought him a "profusely illustrated" book and a brochure on the prizes and past winners.

"I just left those on a chair here in my office and never looked at them at all," he said, recalling his attempt to avoid false hopes. "Now I'm taking them home."

Before he could do so, five Philosophy Department colleagues - Stanley Cavell, Burton Dreben, Warren Goldfarb, Robert Nozick, and Charles Parsons - showed up and spirited him off for a surprise lunch in Harvard Square.

Distributed by the Inamori Foundation since 1985, the Kyoto Prizes were established in the previous year by Kazuo Inamori, founder of Japan's Kyocera Corp. (the world's leading producer of technical ceramics), to honor individuals who have, in Inamori's words, been "sincerely motivated to improve the human condition" and whose achievements have "contributed significantly to mankind's scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment."

Former Department Chair Thomas Scanlon, the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, greeted Quine's selection as "a marvelous and well-deserved honor. Quine is one of the most important philosophers of our time. His work has had decisive impact on thinking about the nature of language and our knowledge of the world."

In more than 20 books that have been translated into some 50 languages, Quine has addressed topics both weighty and whimsical. Noted for his wit, compendious scholarship, and generosity, he is best known for his contributions to the theory of knowledge and logic, and he has guest-lectured on five continents. The prize-selection committee credits Quine with creating "a new paradigm of philosophy for the second half of the 20th century."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences presented him with its 1993 Rolf Schock Prize "in recognition of [his] systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning - in particular in the works From a Logical Point of View [1953], Word and Object [1960], and Pursuit of Truth [1989]."

Reviewing Quine's lighter side in Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (1987), Hilary Putnam (now the Cogan University Professor) has praised his colleague as "not only a great philosopher, but also a master of the English language and a genuine polymath" (London Review of Books). Organized from A to Z, the book features entries from "Alphabet" to "Zero," with topics like "Gambling" and "Truth" in between.

"Anyone who wants to encounter a great philosophical mind in a less technical mood, and to get some feeling for Quine as a peerless companion, raconteur, and amused commentator on the passing show [. . .] cannot do better than to read this book," Putnam wrote.

Quine's most recent volume, From Stimulus to Science, appeared last October. He is currently preparing a book of selected papers.

Born in Akron, Ohio, Quine earned his A.B. at Oberlin (1930) and his Ph.D., under Alfred North Whitehead, at Harvard (1932). After joining the Harvard faculty in 1936, he rose to full professor in 1948, and retired in 1978 to become the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy Emeritus. In 1985, he published his autobiography, The Time of My Life.

Kyoto Prizes also went this year to University of Utah geneticist Mario Capecchi (Basic Sciences) and computer programmer Donald Knuth (Advanced Technology). This marks the first time that all 3 winners have come from the U.S.A. To date, Kyoto Prizes have gone to 17 Europeans, 17 Americans, and 3 Japanese.

Previous winners have included stage director Peter Brook, composers John Cage and Olivier Messiaen, linguist Noam Chomsky, developmental biologist Nicole Marthe LeDouarin, primatologist Jane Goodall, filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Andrzej Wajda, computer scientist John McCarthy, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, philosopher Karl Popper, and mathematician André Weil.