Leiter attributes the "dip" to an intellectual stubbornness that prevailed in the department during the 1960s, `70s, and `80s.

Harvard was home to Willard Van Orman Quine, one of the most influential post-World War II philosophers, who died last year. During the three decades after the war, Leiter said, Quine's prominence was essential to Harvard's dominance of the field.

But, he said, starting in the 1960s, new strains of thought emerged from Princeton (which Leiter now ranks No. 1) that ran counter to Quine's views, and after Harvard failed to entice Princeton's leading theorists to come to Cambridge, it did not hire other faculty who supported these theories.

Instead, Leiter says, the University retreated further and further into a dogmatic Quinian stance, solidified by the presence of Burton S. Dreben, a former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who advocated Quine's views.

"Harvard's [inability] to hire [anti-Quinians] is a crucial explanation for Harvard's slippage," Leiter said. "There was this term 'to get Drebenized'-Dreben would beat into the students and faculty this deflationary view of philosophy."

But Professor of Ancient Philosophy Gisela Striker dismisses these attacks.

"The idea that it was still Quine's department is ridiculous," she says.