Harvard students and administration. Among his students was Harry R. Lewis. Philosophical work Dreben was both an 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 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. Dreben interpreted Quine as attempting to show that philosophy does not provide the foundations of science. According to Dreben's interpretation of Quine, philosophy at its best merely answers a number of general questions from within science itself. However, Dreben saw even in Quine a tendency to generalize most successfully resisted by the later Wittgenstein, whose unflagging alertness to specifics Dreben took as a model. Personal life Dreben was first married to Massachusetts Judge Raya Spiegel Dreben, with whom he had two children. He later married the philosopher Juliet Floyd. Works Book 1979. The Decision Problem: Solvable Classes of Quantificational Formulas (with W. D. Goldfarb), Addison-Wesley, 1979. Thesis 1949. "Deductive completeness of n-valued quantification theory", A.B. Thesis, Harvard University. Articles 1952. "On the completeness of quantification theory", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 38, pp. 1047–52. 1957. "Relation of m-valued quantificational logic to 2-valued quantificational logic", Summaries of Talks Presented