Burton Dreben


Burton Spencer Dreben 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 a teacher and a critic of the work of his colleagues.

Education and career

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 University 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 from 1963.
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 and Chair of the Society of Fellows 1976-90.
At the Association for Symbolic Logic, he was twice a treasurer, and an editor of its journal.
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 and dedicated Pursuit of Truth to Dreben. Dreben also had a significant influence on many students and junior faculty at Harvard, including Warren Goldfarb, James F. Conant, Michael Friedman, and others.
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. After retiring from Harvard in 1991, he taught at Boston University.
During the student revolt of the late 1960s, Dreben helped mediate the conflicts and disputes between Harvard students and administration. Among his students was Harry R. Lewis.

Philosophical work

Dreben was both an 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. Dreben found a number of significant errors in the thesis, as well as evidence of haste and carelessness in its preparation. In particular, in 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 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.
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.

Personal life

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

Works

Book