David Shepherd Nivison was born on January 17, 1923, outside of
Farmingdale, Maine. His great-uncle,
Edwin Arlington Robinson, was a notable 19th-century American poet and a three-time recipient of the
Pulitzer Prize. Nivison entered
Harvard University in 1940, but, like many American men of his generation, his studies were interrupted by
World War II. Nivison served in the
United States Army Signal Corps as a
Japanese translator, where he worked in a group organized by
Edwin O. Reischauer. He returned to Harvard after the war's conclusion in 1945, and graduated in 1946 with a
Bachelor of Arts degree
summa cum laude in
Chinese. Nivison stayed at Harvard for graduate studies in Chinese, receiving his
Ph.D. in 1953 with a dissertation on 18th-century Chinese philosopher
Zhang Xuecheng. He worked with
J.R. Hightower, Reischauer and
John K. Fairbank, and his first Chinese teachers were
Yang Lien-sheng and
William Hung, who passed on their deep knowledge of traditional Chinese scholarship and interest in recent Western historiography. Nivison began teaching at
Stanford University in 1948, and eventually held a joint appointment at Stanford in three departments: Philosophy, Religious Studies and Chinese and Japanese. Nivison devoted time and energy in the 1950s to train himself in the field of philosophy. He audited courses at Stanford and spent the academic year 1952-1953 at Harvard, where he audited
Willard Van Orman Quine's course on Philosophy of Language. He was chair of the Stanford Philosophy Department 1969-1972, a time of student protests at Stanford, as elsewhere in the world, and spent a night in the department office to protect it from attack. In 1979, the Pacific Division of the
American Philosophical Association elected him president. From 1954 to 1955 Nivison was a
Fulbright Fellow in
Kyoto, Japan, and was a
Guggenheim Fellow at
Oxford University in 1973. Nivison retired from Stanford in 1988 and was designated professor
emeritus. His doctoral dissertation on Zhang Xuecheng, the neglected
Qing dynasty philosopher and historian, was published in 1966 as ''The Life and Thought of Chang Hsüeh-Ch'eng, 1738-1801'', and won that year's
Julien Prize. In the field of philosophy, his major contribution is the application of the techniques of
analytic philosophy to the study of Chinese thought. In Sinology, one of his contributions has been the effort to precisely date the founding of the
Zhou dynasty, based on
archaeoastronomy. The traditional date was 1122 BC, but Nivison initially argued that the likely date was 1045 BC, and then eventually suggested that it was 1040 BC. As well as disagreeing with the 1045/6 BC date for the Zhou conquest of Shang, Nivison has also strongly disagreed with most of the dates published by the Chinese government's
Xia-Shang-Zhou chronology project. Nivison died at his home in
Los Altos, California, on October 16, 2014, at age 91. ==Major works==