Thanks to LinkedIn, I was able to locate my fellow Brandeisian, Jan
Wald, who took his Ph.D. at the same time as I (1977). Wald had written
his dissertation on mass terms, which was doubly supervised by Jean van
Heijenoort at Brandeis and Helen Cartwright at Tufts. After getting his
doctorate, Wald taught for a while at Middlebury College in Vermont,
but then dropped out of sight of academia, I believe in the early 1980s
(he's now an analyst specializing in medical devices for a major
investment firm).
As an aside, but Peirce-relevant, van Heijenoort's "Peirce" file
contained nothing more by Charles than the entries from the Baldwin
Dictionary "Modality", "'Necessary' and 'Necessity'", and "Vague",
photocopies from Hartshorne & Weiss, and which, one might suppose,
relate directly or indirectly to Wald's dissertation. None of Peirce's
major publcations on algebraic logic occur in van Heijenoort's notes.
For those of you who have read my book on van Heijennort, you might
recall that Wald was van Heijenoort's housemate at the former Peirce
house at 4 Kirkland Place. I'm hoping that Wald might be able to
definitely answer the question as to whether or not van Heijenoort was
ever aware of the Peirce association of that house.
I'm still fairly certain that I learned about the Peirce association of
that house directly from Willard Quine, and that van Heijenoort never
mentioned it to me; and that Quine must have told me about it shortly
after van Heijenoort died (in 1986), but before the Peirce
Sesquicentennial conference at Harvard in September 1989, when Max
Fisch's "Walk a Mile in Peirce's Shoes" was distributed to conference
attendees.
It should be interesting to get Wald's reply. So stay tuned.
Irving H. Anellis
Visiting Research Associate
Peirce Edition, Institute for American Thought
902 W. New York St.
Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis
Indianapolis, IN 46202-5159
USA
URL: http://www.irvinganellis.info
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