| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Era: | 20th-century philosophy |
| School Tradition: | Analytic philosophy |
| Jaakko Hintikka | |
| Birth Name: | Jaakko Kaarlo Juhani Hintikka |
| Birth Date: | 12 January 1929 |
| Birth Place: | Helsingin maalaiskunta, Finland |
| Death Place: | Porvoo, Finland |
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| Education: | University of Helsinki (Ph.D., 1953) |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Georg Henrik von Wright |
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| Thesis Title: | Distributive Normal Forms in the Calculus of Predicates |
| Thesis Url: | https://books.google.com/books/about/Distributive_Normal_Forms_in_the_Calculu.html?id=7_kHAQAAIAAJ |
| Thesis Year: | 1953 |
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Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (; pronounced as /fi/; 12 January 1929 – 12 August 2015) was a Finnish and American philosopher and logician. Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic. He was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize for philosophy in 2005, and he was chief editor of the philosophical journal Synthese 1965–2002.
Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta (now Vantaa) outside of Helsinki, Finland on 12 January 1929.[1]
In 1953, he received his doctorate from the University of Helsinki for a thesis on predicate logic entitled Distributive Normal Forms in the Calculus of Predicates. He was a student of Georg Henrik von Wright.[2] After his doctoral study, he became a Junior Fellow at Harvard University (1956–1959).
Hintikka held professorial appointments at the University of Helsinki (1959–1970), Stanford University (1965–1982, partially visiting), Florida State University (1978–1990), and finally Boston University from 1990 until his death in 2015.[3] He was the prolific author or co-author of over 30 books and over 300 scholarly articles. Hintikka 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. 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".[4]
Hintikka served as chief editor of the philosophical journal Synthese from 1965 to 2002, and he was a consultant editor for more than ten journals. He was a vice president of the Association for Symbolic Logic (1968–1971),[5] a member of the American Philosophical Association and president of its Pacific division (1975–1976),[6] a member of the governing board of the Philosophy of Science Association (1970–1974), president of the Florida Philosophical Association (1984–1985),[7] the first vice-president of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (1993–1998), a vice-president and president of the Institut International de Philosophie (1993–1996; 1999–2002), as well as a president of the Charles S. Peirce Society (1997)[8] and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science.
He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.[9] On May 26, 2000, Hintikka received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of History and Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden.[10]
Hintikka died on 12 August 2015 in Porvoo, Finland.[11]
Early in his career, he devised a semantics of modal logic essentially analogous to Saul Kripke's frame semantics, and discovered the now widely taught semantic tableau independently of Evert Willem Beth.[12] Later, he worked mainly on game semantics, and on independence-friendly logic, known for its "branching quantifiers", which he believed do better justice to our intuitions about quantifiers than does conventional first-order logic. He did important exegetical work on Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Hintikka's work can be seen as a continuation of the analytic tendency in philosophy founded by Franz Brentano and Peirce, advanced by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and continued by Rudolf Carnap, Willard Van Orman Quine, and by Hintikka's teacher Georg Henrik von Wright. In 1998, for instance, he wrote The Principles of Mathematics Revisited, which takes an exploratory stance comparable to that Russell adopted in his The Principles of Mathematics in 1903.
For a bibliography, see Auxier and Hahn (2006).