Jaakko Hintikka

Hintikka in 2003

Jaakko Hintikka in 2006.

Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (born January 12, 1929) is a Finnish philosopher and logician.

Hintikka was born in Vantaa. After teaching for a number of years at Florida State University, Stanford, University of Helsinki, and the Academy of Finland, he is currently Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. The prolific author or co-author of over 30 books and over 300 scholarly articles has 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 is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic. Early in his career, he devised a semantics of modal logic essentially analogous to Kripke's frame semantics, and discovered the now widely taught semantic tableau, independently of Evert Willem Beth. In recent decades, he has worked mainly on game semantics, and on independence-friendly logic, known for its "branching quantifiers" which he believes do better justice to our intuitions about quantifiers than does conventional first-order logic. He has done important exegetical work on Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, and C.S. Peirce. Hintikka's work can be seen as a continuation of analytic tendency in philosophy founded by Brentano and Peirce, advanced by Frege and Bertrand Russell, and continued by Carnap, 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.

Hintikka edited the academic journal Synthese from 1962 to 2002, and has been 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 Institut International de Philosophie (1993–1996), as well as a member of the American Philosophical Association, the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Association for Symbolic Logic, and a member of the governing board of the Philosophy of Science Association. In 2005, he won the Rolf Schock prize in logic and philosophy "for his pioneering contributions to the logical analysis of modal concepts, in particular the concepts of knowledge and belief".

He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Selected books

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

• Primary
  • Socratic Epistemology; Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning ISBN 9780521616515
  • The Philosophy of Mathematics ISBN 0-1987-5011-0
  • The Principles of Mathematics Revisited ISBN 0-521-62498-3
  • Paradigms for Language Theory and Other Essays ISBN 0-7923-4780-3
  • Lingua Universalis vs Calculus Ratiocinator ISBN 0-7923-4246-1
  • Inquiry as Inquiry: A Logic of Scientific Discovery ISBN 0-7923-5477-X
  • Language, Truth and Logic in Mathematics ISBN 0-7923-4766-8
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths ISBN 0-7923-4091-4
  • Analyses of Aristotle ISBN 1-4020-2040-6
  • The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic ISBN 0-7923-0040-8
  • Knowledge and Belief - An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions ISBN 1904987087
  • Hintikka, Jaakko; Hintikka, Merrill B. (1984), "Sherlock Holmes Confronts Modern Logic: Toward a Theory of Information-Seeking through Questioning", in Umberto Eco; Thomas Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington, IN: History Workshop, Indiana University Press, pp. 154-169, ISBN 978-0253352354 , 236 pages. Ten essays on methods of abductive inference in Poe's Dupin, Doyle's Holmes, Peirce and many others.
  • Hintikka, Jaakko (1984), "Sherlock Holmes Formalized", in Umberto Eco; Thomas Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington, IN: History Workshop, Indiana University Press, pp. 170-178, ISBN 978-0253352354 
• Secondary
  • Auxier, R.E., and Hahn, L., eds., 2006. The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka (The Library of Living Philosophers). Open Court. Includes a complete bibliography of Hintikka's publications. ISBN 0812694627
  • Bogdan, Radu, ed., 1987 Jaakko Hintikka, Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN 9027724024
  • Daniel Kolak, 2001 On Hintikka, Wadsworth ISBN 0-534-58389-X
  • Daniel Kolak and John Symons, eds., 2004 Quantifiers, Questions and Quantum Physics: Essays on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka Springer ISBN 1-4020-3210-2

See also

• Rudolf Carnap
• Charles Sanders Peirce
• Saul Kripke
• Willard Van Orman Quine
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Alfred Tarski
• Doxastic logic

References

• Jaakko Hintikka's personal website