Jaakko Hintikka 1929 – 2015
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician and one of the most prolific and inventive logicians of the late twentieth century. Trained at Helsinki and at Harvard under Quine, he held chairs in Finland, Stanford, Florida State, and Boston University, and produced foundational work in epistemic logic, possible-worlds semantics, the interrogative model of inquiry, and independence-friendly logic. Knowledge and Belief, Models for Modalities, and The Game of Language shaped much of subsequent analytic philosophy of language and mind. He was also a deeply engaged historian of Aristotelian and Cartesian philosophy.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Finnish
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Jaakko Hintikka:
“Knowledge is closure under known implication.”
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Attributed to Jaakko Hintikka:
“Inquiry is a structured game of question and answer.”
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Attributed to Jaakko Hintikka:
“To know who someone is is to be able to identify them across possible situations.”
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Attributed to Jaakko Hintikka:
“Logic is the art of making explicit what reasoning already requires.”
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Attributed to Jaakko Hintikka:
“Possible worlds are the resources by which logic does its work.”