Colorless Green Idea's writeup above is very well written, but I feel it could benefit from a few random additions.

Brief Biography:

During his long life, Quine (or Van, as his friends called him) was called "the greatest living English-speaking philosopher," "the most influential American philosopher of the postwar period," and "the philosopher's philosopher." His interest in philosophy started at a very early age: he began worrying about heaven and hell at the tender age of nine. Quine earned his BA from Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio) in 1930 and his MA from Harvard University the next year. Quine's doctorate from Harvard, under Alfred North Whitehead (and influenced by Rudolf Carnap), on Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica was earned a record two years after graduating from Oberlin. Joining the Harvard faculty in 1936 and becoming a full professor in 1948, he retired 30 years later as Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus). In 1957 he was made President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. During his time as a professor, his only break from teaching took him into the Navy during World War II where he decrypted messages from German submarines and quizzed colleagues on city names based on their latitude and longitude. Among many other awards and honors, Quine won the Schock Prize (for Logic and Philosophy) from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1993 and the Kyoto Prize (for Creative Arts and Moral Sciences) from the Inamori Foundation in 1996. Later in life, his name was adopted as an adjective in the Oxford English Dictionary and was added to the lexicons of computer programmers and electrical engineers, and is used among philosophers as a verb meaning "to deny a distinction others feel to be obvious." He died on Christmas Day, 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts at the age of exactly ninety-two and a half years.

A Longer List of Quine's More Popular Publications:

1940: Mathematical Logic
1941: Elementary Logic
1950: Methods of Logic
1953: From a Logical Point of View, including the paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism (book named after the calypso song sung by Harry Belafonte)
1960: Word and Object
1966: The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (2nd edition includes the paper Homage to Rudolf Carnap)
1970: Philosophy of Logic
1981: Theories and Things
1985: The Time of My Life: An Autobiography
1987: Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary
1990: Pursuit of Truth
1991: Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondance and Related Work
1995: From Stimulus to Science

Quine published one work of fiction: It Tastes Like Chicken (1951, reprinted in 1989). His books have been translated into a variety of languages, including Polish, Chinese (tradition and simplified characters), Greek, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Dutch and Catalan.

Fun Facts:

Quine spoke several languages fluently (including most of the modern romance languages) and, I'm told, bits and pieces of many others (i.e. Chinese, Russian, and Czech). Traveling was a passion of his, and he had set foot in 118 countries before his death. Quine enjoyed a quirky taste in music: he liked eastern European mandolin and liked to dabble on his own mandolin; he taught himself to play piano in the key of F#; he especially loved Dixieland jazz and Gilbert and Sullivan. He was married twice and had two children with each wife: Elizabeth, Norma (first wife Naomi), Douglas and Margaret (second wife Marjorie). He liked puns and riddles, and spent a little time painting in his earlier years with an almost abstract style.

The story about the missing symbols on the 1927 Remington typewriter is true, but the missing symbols were the second period, the second comma (not the exclamation point and numeral one), and the question mark. Quine is also known for coining "gavagai," a theoretical word uttered by a native speaker of a yet-untranslated language upon seeing a rabbit, which illustrated his points about the indeterminacy of translation.

Naming that paper "From a Logical Point of View" annoyed his second wife, who was a very beautiful lady.

Theodore Kaczynski was an A student of his.

Quotable quotes: (here are a bunch more)

  • "Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of."
  • "The Humean predicament is the human predicament."
  • "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."
  • "To be is to be that value of a bound variable."

The "official" web site of WVO Quine is http://www.wvquine.org/, where one will find a full listing of his publications and their translations, his degrees, articles relating to his life and work, and even a detailed list of everywhere Quine had traveled. Some of the information above was obtained there; the rest was from my own knowledge.


Updates
30 June 2003: Paragrah order changed; some new facts I remembered added; some grammar fixed — all thanks to some very helpful people (whose names I've conveniently forgotten) and the discovery that I can edit this (this being my first node and all).
28 July 2003: Little things, no actual content changes.
28 September 2003: More little things, and the bit about Ted Kaczynski.
02 January 2004: XHTMLized, some little link changes; brought about by recent attention
08 March 2004: More little changes...mostly changing links