Language
Logic
Conceptanalysis
Description of a language
Three creators of the Modern Conceptanalysis
Scheme of languages
Scheme of abstractions
Scheme of a ´Possible world´
2-level theory of science´s language
Review to the history of Conceptanalysis
Views of History
... and many other interesting topics!
Georg Henrik von Wright
(1916-06-14 - 2003-06-16)
Georg Henrik von Wright was a Finnish philosopher and logician who was a
student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and successor of
Wittgenstein as a Professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge (1948-1951). He
wrote also an historical introduction to the "Prototractatus" (first published in the
year 1971 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, ISBN 0 7100 6788 7), which includes a
facsimile of the earlier version of Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, Editor's preface, the text in German, English translation and
also correspondences (and non-correspondences) between "Tractatus" -
"Prototractatus".
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Georg Henrik von Wright in Cambridge 1949.
Photo by:
Knut Erik Tranöy.
(Private-collection).
G.H. von Wright's purpose of life has been mostly deliberate upon the problems
of a person's situation in the cultural crisis and speculate about mediums of the logic.
His views to those problems varies between the empirical logic, the ethics, the (an
anti-positivist analytical) hermeneutics and the phenomenology.
The cover of Georg Henrik von Wright's book.
From Wittgenstein he inherited also an enormous quantity of manuscripts and
notes. After "Tractatus" Wittgenstein did not publish himself any of his own works.
Together with Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Rush Rhees, von
Wright received publication-rights to the collection of Wittgenstein's works.
Georg Henrik von Wright, who has died aged 87, was one of the most eminent philosophers of the second half of the 20th century,
and a distinguished essayist and cultural critic. His philosophical interests ranged from inductive reasoning to deontic logic,
from the study of values and norms to the logic of explanations of human action. To all these great themes he made important and original contributions...
Hermeneutics and its role in current literary theory. By C. John Holcombe.
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The cover of Georg Henrik von Wright's book "Logic, philosophy and language".
During his Gambridge years von Wright became interested in logical properties of
various modalities: ethic, deontic and epistemic. An essay in Modal Logic (1951)
studies, syntactically, various deductive systems of the modal logic. In that year he
published his famous article "Deontic Logic" in Mind. It made him as
the inventor of the Modern Deontic Logic. These logical works
profoundly influenced to the analytic philosophy, especially to the action theory. Von
Wright distinguishes technical oughts (means-ends relationships) from norms issued by a
norm-authority. His Norm and action (1963) discusses philosophical problems
concerning the existence of norms and the truth of normative statements. His main work on
meta-ethics is The Varieties of Goodness (1963).
In Explanation and Understanding (1971) he turned to philosophical problems
concerning the human science. He defends a manipulation view of causality, where the
concept of action is basic for that of cause: an human action cannot be explained
causally by laws, but must be understood intentionally. The basic model of intention is
the practical syllogism which explains an action by a logical connection with wants and
beliefs. This work sometimes, characterized as a anti-positivistic analytical
hermeneutics, bridges an analytic and a continental philosophy. His studies in the truth,
the knowledge, the modality, the law-likeness, the causality, the determinism, norms and
the practical inference were published in 1983-1984 in his Philosophical
Papers.
Von Wright has become increasingly critical of the modern scientific-technological
civilization, its narrowly instrumental concept of rationality and its myth of progress.
His public pleas for the peace, human rights and the more harmonious coexistence of human
beings and a nature have made him the most esteemed intellectual in the Scandinavian
countries.
Sources:
THE CAMBRIDGE DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY
ISBN 0 521 63722 8.
Ilkka Niiniluoto
Johdatus tieteenfilosofiaan, Käsitteen- ja teorianmuodostus,
(An introduction to the philosophy of science, Forming a theory and a concept)
ISBN 951-1-05435-X.
John Passmore
A Hundred Years of Philosophy
ISBN 0-14-02.0927-1.
"The knowledge is in the same degree the medium of a fortune, a misfortune, a good
action and a devilish. The knowledge can be the individual's highest form of life but
also most disastrous." (Georg Henrik von Wright)
In chapter "LOGIC, SEMANTICS AND METHODOLOGY" of John Passmore's book "A
Hundred Years of Philosophy" the author is mentioning, while dealing with Rudolf
Carnap's views to the probability and induction, also e.g. four other works which are
handling the same theme of the probability and induction:
D.C. Williams's "The Ground of Induction" (1947)
W. Kneale's "Probability and Induction" (1949)
G.H. von Wright's "The Logical Problem of Induction" (1951)
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