Jaakko Hintikka

For the Finnish floorball player see Jaakko Hintikka (sportsman).

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

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 Charles Peirce. Hintikka can be seen as a continuation of the Anglo-American analytic tendency in philosophy, one founded by Frege and Bertrand Russell, and continued by Carnap, Willard Van Orman Quine, and his fellow Finn Georg Henrik von Wright.

Hintikka edited the academic journal Synthese (ISSN 0039-7857) 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".

[edit] Selected books

Primary
- 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
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.
- Daniel Kolak, On Hintikka, Wadsworth 2001 ISBN 0-534-58389-X
- Daniel Kolak and John Symons, eds., Quantifiers, Questions and Quantum Physics: Essays on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka Springer 2004 ISBN 1-4020-3210-2