Burton Dreben
| Burton Dreben | |
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| Born |
September 27, 1927 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Died | July 11, 1999 (aged 71) Boston |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
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Main interests
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Mathematical logic History of analytic philosophy |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Burton Spencer Dreben (September 27, 1927 – July 11, 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).
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, 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 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.
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.
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