Akron

An Ohio rubber-manufacturing city where W.V.O. Quine was born in 1908, decades before he became one of the most influential logicians and philosophers of the American twentieth century.

Akron made rubber, and by the time Quine was born there in 1908 the tyre companies had turned it into a boom town. He collected stamps, drew maps, and said later that his interest in language began with wondering how words manage to mean anything at all. He went to Oberlin and then Harvard, visited the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, and spent much of his career dismantling the distinction between truths of meaning and truths of fact that the Circle had built on.