Yehoshua Bar-Hillel

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Yehoshua Bar-Hillel ( Hebrew יהושע בר-הלל, born as Oscar Westreich , born June 3, 1915 in Vienna ; † September 25, 1975 in Jerusalem ) was a philosopher , mathematician and linguist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , best known for his fundamental work on machine translation and formal linguistics . He made central contributions to indexicality and speech act theory . He also dealt with axiomatic set theory .

Bar-Hillel grew up in Berlin . He emigrated to Palestine in 1933 , lived briefly in a kibbutz and joined the British Army's Jewish Brigade during World War II . During the Israeli War of Independence he fought in the Haganah , losing an eye. He studied at the Hebrew University with Abraham Fraenkel and received his doctorate in philosophy. In 1950 he went to the University of Chicago as a postdoc with Rudolf Carnap . Bar-Hillel and Carnap had corresponded since the 1940s. At Carnap he worked on his An Outline of the Semantic Theory of Information (1952). He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he dealt with the then already current (and in times of economic growth and the Cold War in the USA with high research funding) machine language translation. In 1952 he organized the first international conference on this. Even then, Bar-Hillel expressed his doubts about the possibility of pure machine translations. In 1953 he returned to Israel and taught at the Hebrew University until his death. Since 1973 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

Bar-Hillel revised, together with Abraham Fraenkel, his textbook on axiomatic set theory, this edition was a standard work for a long time. It was re-edited in 1973 by Azriel Levy .

Fonts

Books
  • with Abraham Fraenkel : Foundations of Set Theory , 1958. 2nd edition with Azriel Levy , North Holland 1973.
  • Language and Information , Reading, Mass., 1964. Articles.
  • Aspects of Language: Essays and Lectures on Philosophy of Language, Linguistic Philosophy and Methodology of Linguistics , Jerusalem, 1970. Articles.
Editing
  • with EIJ Poznanski u. a .: Essays on the Foundation of Mathematics . The Magnus Press et al. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1961. A. Fraenkel Festschrift on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.
  • Mathematical Logic and Foundations of Set Theory . North Holland, Amsterdam, 1970.
  • Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science , 1972
  • Pragmatics of Natural Languages , 1975
Essays
  • Analysis of 'Correct' Language . In: Mind , Volume 55, 1946, pp. 328-340.
  • Bolzano's Definition of Analytic Propositions . In: Theoria , Volume 16, 1950, pp. 91-117.
  • Logical Syntax and Semantics . In: Language , Volume 30, 1954, pp. 30-37. In: Bar-Hillel, Language and Information (1964), pp. 38-46.
  • Indexical Expressions . In: Mind , Volume 63, 1954, pp. 359-379. In: Bar-Hillel, Aspects (1970).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Indexical Expressions . In: Min . Volume 63, pp. 359-379.
  2. ^ Member entry by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (with a link to an obituary by Wolfgang Stegmüller ) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 8, 2017.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli philosopher, mathematician and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 1975
Place of death Jerusalem