Joseph S. Ullian, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, died on December 16th, 2024.  He was 94.

Born in 1930 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Joe earned his BA (1952), MA (1953), and PhD (1957) at Harvard University, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.  He did stints teaching at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before joining WashU in 1965, where he taught until his retirement some forty years later.

Among philosophers, he is probably best known for co-authoring The Web of Belief (first edition 1970, second edition 1978) with W.V. Quine, but he also published papers on set theory, truth, “about,” and projectibility, some co-authored with Nelson Goodman and one with Hilary Putnam.   He served on the executive committee of the Association for Symbolic Logic (1974 – 1977), co-organized national logic meetings in St. Louis in the 1970s and a huge Quine conference here in the early 1990s, and continued to attend American Philosophical Association meetings well into his retirement. 

However, his CV leaves out much. Joe rarely wore long pants, regularly wore Hawaiian shirts, and drove a rundown convertible whose top needed to be held in place if the rain or snow were heavy enough to warrant being put up. He used to serve ludicrously large bowls of ice cream and teach his mathematical logic classes in his apartment on Pershing, where the living room was dominated by a chalkboard and yellow volumes of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. He loved Broadway shows of a certain era—he definitely had his opinions about which ones were best—women's basketball—he arranged to be able to call Santa Barbara from St. Louis and listen to the radio broadcast of the Lady Gauchos game—and baseball—especially the Chatham A's of the Cape Cod League.

There are some further remembrances of Professor Ullian here.