Jaakko Hintikka Biography

Finnish philosopher and logician

Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (12 January 1929 – 12 August 2015) was a Finnish philosopher and logician. Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic.

Life and career

Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta (now Vantaa).

In 1953, he received his doctorate from the University of Helsinki for a thesis en*led Distributive Normal Forms in the Calculus of Predicates. He was a student of Georg Henrik von Wright.

Hintikka was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University (1956-1969), and held several professorial appointments at the University of Helsinki, the Academy of Finland, Stanford University, Florida State University and finally Boston University from 1990 until his death. He was the prolific author or co-author of over 30 books and over 300 scholarly articles, Hintikka contributed to mathematical logic, philosophical logic, the philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, language theory, and the philosophy of science. His works have appeared in over nine languages.

Hintikka edited the academic journal Synthese from 1962 to 2002, and was a consultant editor for more than ten journals. He was the first vice-president of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie, the vice-president of the Ins*ut International de Philosophie (1993–1996), as well as a member of the American Philosophical *ociation, the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, *ociation for Symbolic Logic, and a member of the governing board of the Philosophy of Science *ociation. In 2005, he won the Rolf Schock Prize in logic and philosophy "for his pioneering contributions to the logical *ysis of modal concepts, in particular the concepts of knowledge and belief". In 1985, he was president of the Florida Philosophical *ociation.

He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. On May 26, 2000, Hintikka received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of History and Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden

Philosophical work

Early in his career, he devised a semantics of modal logic essentially *ogous to Saul Kripke's frame semantics, and discovered the now widely taught semantic tableau, independently of Evert Willem Beth. Later, he worked mainly on game semantics, and on independence-friendly logic, known for its "branching quantifiers", which he believed do better justice to our intuitions about quantifiers than does conventional first-order logic. He did important exegetical work on Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Hintikka's work can be seen as a continuation of the *ytic tendency in philosophy founded by Franz Brentano and Peirce, advanced by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and continued by Rudolf Carnap, Willard Van Orman Quine, and by Hintikka's teacher Georg Henrik von Wright. For instance, in 1998 he wrote The Principles of Mathematics Revisited, which takes an exploratory stance comparable to that Russell made with his The Principles of Mathematics in 1903.

Selected books

Hintikka in 2006.

For a bibliography, see Auxier and Hahn (2006).

1962. Knowledge and Belief – An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions ISBN:1-904987-08-7
1969. Models for Modalities: Selected Essays ISBN:978-90-277-0598-3
1975. The intentions of intentionality and other new models for modalities ISBN:978-90-277-0634-8
1976. The semantics of questions and the questions of semantics: case studies in the interrelations of logic, semantics, and syntax ISBN:978-95-1950-535-0
1989. The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic ISBN:0-7923-0040-8
1996. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths ISBN:0-7923-4091-4
1996. Lingua Universalis vs Calculus Ratiocinator ISBN:0-7923-4246-1
1996. The Principles of Mathematics Revisited ISBN:0-521-62498-3
1998. Paradigms for Language Theory and Other Essays ISBN:0-7923-4780-3
1998. Language, Truth and Logic in Mathematics ISBN:0-7923-4766-8
1999. Inquiry as Inquiry: A Logic of Scientific Discovery ISBN:0-7923-5477-X
2004. *yses of Aristotle ISBN:1-4020-2040-6
2007. Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning ISBN:978-0-521-61651-5

Notes

External links

Media related to Jaakko Hintikka at Wikimedia Commons
Jaakko Hintikka's personal website
Philosopher Jaakko Hintikka reveals love affair between his wife and JFK. Helsinki Times.
Jaakko Hintikka in 375 humanists – 20 May 2015. Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki.

Theories

Anti-realism
Causal theory of reference
Descriptivism
Emotivism
Feminism
Functionalism
Logical atomism
Logical positivism
Marxism
Neurophilosophy
Ordinary language
Pragmatism
Quietism
Scientific structuralism
Sense data
*ytic theology
*ytical Thomism

Concepts

*ysis (paradox of *ysis)
*ytic–synthetic distinction
Counterfactual
Natural kind
Reflective equilibrium
Supervenience

Philosophers

Noam Chomsky
Keith Donnellan
Gottlob Frege
Edmund Gettier
Jaakko Hintikka
Giuseppe Peano
Russ Shafer-Landau
Ernest Sosa
Barry Stroud

Harvard

Roderick Chisholm
Donald Davidson
Daniel Dennett
Nelson Goodman
Christine Korsgaard
Thomas Nagel
Robert Nozick
Hilary Putnam
W. V. O. Quine
John Rawls

Notre Dame

Robert Audi
Peter van Inwagen

Pittsburgh School

Robert Brandom
Patricia Churchland
Paul Churchland
Adolf Grünbaum
John McDowell
Ruth Millikan
Alexander Pruss
Nicholas Rescher
Wilfrid Sellars
Bas van Fra*en

Pragmatism

Susan Haack
Nicholas Rescher
Morton White

Princeton

Alonzo Church
Jerry Fodor
Kurt Gödel
David Lewis
Jaegwon Kim
Saul Kripke
Richard Rorty
Nathan Salmon
Michael Walzer

Quietism

James F. Conant
Alice Crary
Cora Diamond

Reformed

Alvin Plantinga
William Lane Craig
Nicholas Wolterstorff

Science

Paul Feyerabend
Thomas Kuhn
Karl Popper

Stanford School

Nancy Cartwright
John Dupré
Peter Galison
Ian Hacking
Patrick Suppes

Lwow-Warsaw

Jan Łukasiewicz
Alfred Tarski

Category
Index

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