Georg Henrik von Wright

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Georg Henrik von Wright
House of Georg Henrik von Wright
Finnish 2 Euro commemorative coin for the 100th birthday

Georg Henrik von Wright [ ˈjeːɔrj ˈhɛnːrɪk fɔnˈvrɪkːt ] (born June 14, 1916 in Helsinki ; † June 16, 2003 ibid) was a Finnish philosopher and logician who made influential contributions to the development of modern fields of logic in the 20th century.

Life

Von Wright studied philosophy at the Universities of Helsinki and Cambridge . His academic teacher in Finland was Eino Kaila (1890-1958), who is considered the leading exponent of logical empiricism in Finland. Kaila had personally attended the meetings of the Vienna Circle and introduced the new metaphysics-skeptical direction into Finnish philosophy. Von Wright's scientific socialization falls into the heyday of logical empiricism, whose dogmatic rigidity in the course of internal developments in analytical philosophy was successfully overcome in the early 1950s - not least through Wright's own contributions. First Wright began his academic teaching activity in Helsinki, where he taught as a professor of philosophy. He then took over the chair of his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge. He then taught at Cornell University .

Groundbreaking were his contributions "Deontic Logic" (German Deontic Logic ) and An Essay in Modal Logic ( Modallogik ) from 1951. With the first contribution, Wright became the (co-) founder of modern norm logic, which he derived from the principles of Tried to develop modal logic, and with the second made an influential contribution to the further development of modal logic itself. In later years Wright had dealt in particular with questions of action theory and the so-called "explain-understand controversy". In addition, Wright was the co-editor of Ludwig Wittgenstein's posthumous writings and was considered one of the most important Wittgenstein philologists .

In the last 20 years of his life, von Wright was heavily involved in questions of moral philosophy and published a.o. a. 1993 the pessimistic contribution Myten om framsteget (English: The Myth of Progress , German: The Myth of Progress , in: Knowledge as Life Form , 1995, pp. 262-295).

Honors

Works by Wrights (selection)

  • Memorial plaque on the house of George von Wright
    1951 Deontic Logic. Mind NS (60), pp. 1-15; dt. in 1977 , pp. 1-17
  • 1963 The Varieties of Goodness. Routledge & Kegan, London & Humanities Press, New York
  • 1963 The Logic of Preference. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh
  • 1963 Norm and Action. A Logical Inquiry. Routledge & Kegan, London
    • 1979 norm and action. A logical investigation. Librarian, Königstein ( Monographs Theory of Science and Basic Research , edited by Georg Meggle , Volume 10)
  • 1971 Explanation and Understanding. Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca, New York
    • 1974 Explain and Understand. Athenaeum, Frankfurt (FAT 1002 - basic research ) 3807210024 ern. 2008 EVA / Europ. Verlagsanst., Hamburg, ISBN 9783434461685
  • 1977 action, norm and intention. Investigations on deontic logic. de Gruyter, Berlin (see )
  • 1982 Wittgenstein. Blackwell, Oxford
  • 1984 Practical Reason. Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca, New York, ISBN 9780801416736
  • 1985 Truth, Knowledge and Modality. Blackwell, Oxford, ISBN 9780631133674
  • 1990 A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man. From the Diary of David Hume Pinsent 1912-1914. Blackwell, Oxford, ISBN 9780631175117
  • 1993 The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays. Brill Acad. Publ., ISBN 9789004097643
  • 1994 norms, values ​​and actions. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt, ISBN 9783518581780 (special edition 1997)
  • 1995 Knowledge as a way of life: contemporary wanderings of a philosophical logician. Böhlau, Vienna a. a., ISBN 3205981448 (collection of articles)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Wright, Georg Henrik von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Finnish philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Helsinki
DATE OF DEATH June 16, 2003
Place of death Helsinki