In his Ph.D. thesis written under Frederic Fitch, Martin discovered virtual sets a bit before Quine, and was possibly the first non-Pole other than Joseph Henry Woodger to employ a mereological system.
[5][3] In 1976, Martin largely retired from teaching (only giving one course per year at Northwestern from then on) becoming a research associate with Boston University Center for the Philosophy and History of Science.
He made excellent use of the resulting leisure, so that his final decade of life was by far his most productive, publishing over 100 book chapters and journal articles.
[7] He also helped edit, and contributed chapters to, the Festschriften books The Logical Enterprise (1975)[8] dedicated to Fitch, and Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay (1985).
Martin was part of the first wave of American analytic philosophers; arguably, only Quine (1908–2000), Fitch (1909–1987), and Henry Leonard (1905–1967) preceded him.
His chronological elders Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) were arguably his contemporaries, as they all began their careers in earnest at about the same time, namely right after World War II.
Starting with the papers reprinted in his 1969 Belief, Martin argued that the Frege's Art des Gegebensein was crucial to his thinking.
Martin was especially fond of applying his first-order theory to the analysis of ordinary language, a method he termed logico-linguistics.
A complete bibliography of Martin's articles published in journals, conference proceedings, and books edited by others can be found in Meguire, Philip, 2005.