Jaakko Hintikka

Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (; ; 12 January 1929 – 12 August 2015) was a Finnish and American philosopher and logician. Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic. He was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize for philosophy in 2005, and he was chief editor of the philosophical journal Synthese 1965–2002.

Early life and education Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta (now Vantaa) outside of Helsinki, Finland on 12 January 1929.

In 1953, he received his doctorate from the University of Helsinki for a thesis on predicate logic entitled Distributive Normal Forms in the Calculus of Predicates. He was a student of Georg Henrik von Wright. After his doctoral study, he became a Junior Fellow at Harvard University (1956–1959).

Hintikka served as chief editor of the philosophical journal Synthese from 1965 to 2002, a member of the American Philosophical Association and president of its Pacific division (1975–1976), a member of the governing board of the Philosophy of Science Association (1970–1974), the first vice-president of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (1993–1998), and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science. On May 26, 2000, Hintikka received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of History and Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Death Hintikka died on 12 August 2015 in Porvoo, Finland.

Philosophical work

Early in his career, he devised a semantics of modal logic essentially analogous 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 analytic 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. In 1998, for instance, he wrote The Principles of Mathematics Revisited, which takes an exploratory stance comparable to that Russell adopted in his The Principles of Mathematics in 1903.

Selected books

For a bibliography, see Auxier and Hahn (2006). 1962. Knowledge and Belief – An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions 1969. Models for Modalities: Selected Essays 1973 Logic, Language-Games and Information: Kantian Themes in the Philosophy of Logic 1975. The intentions of intentionality and other new models for modalities 1976. The semantics of questions and the questions of semantics: case studies in the interrelations of logic, semantics, and syntax 1989. The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic 1996. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths 1996. Lingua Universalis vs Calculus Ratiocinator 1996. The Principles of Mathematics Revisited 1998. Paradigms for Language Theory and Other Essays 1998. Language, Truth and Logic in Mathematics 1999. Inquiry as Inquiry: A Logic of Scientific Discovery 2004. Analyses of Aristotle 2007. Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning