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I would like to begin by saying a word about Reichenbach's impact on my own philosophical formation. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, I studied philosophy of science mainly with C. West Churchman, who taught a version of pragmatism informed by a substantial knowledge of and interest in the logic of statistical testing, and with Sidney Morgenbesser, who was himself still a graduate student, and logic and American philosophy with Morton White. My orientation on graduation was positivistic (although my knowledge of positivism came mainly from A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic). I did a year of graduate work at Harvard in 1948–49 (studying mainly mathematics and mathematical logic), where I came under the influence of Quine's views on ontology and his scepticism concerning the analytic/synthetic distinction. At that point, I was in a mood that is well known to philosophy teachers today: it seemed to me that the great problems of philosophy had turned out to be pseudoproblems, and it was not clear to me that the technical problems that remained to be cleared up possessed anything like the intrinsic interest of the problems in pure logic and mathematics that also interested me. It was a serious question in my mind at that point whether I should really go on in philosophy or shift to mathematics.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-3490-3_5

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