Jaakko Hintikka

After a sojourn at Harvard as a Junior Fellow (1956-59), Jaakko Hintikka held professorial appointments at the University of Helsinki, the Academy of Finland, and Florida State University. From 1965 to 1982 Dr. Hintikka was also associated with Stanford University, and in 1990 joined Boston University.

Dr. Hintikka is known as the main architect of game-theoretical semantics and of the interrogative approach to inquiry, and also as one of the architects of distributive normal forms, possible-worlds semantics, tree methods, infinitely deep logics, and the present-day theory of inductive generalization. He has authored or co-authored over 30 books and monographs that have appeared in nine languages. Five volumes of his Selected Papers (Kluwer Academic) appeared in 1996-2003. Jaakko Hintikka has edited or co-edited 17 volumes and authored or co-authored over 300 scholarly papers. A comprehensive examination of his thought appeared in 2006 as the volume The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka in the series Library of Living Philosophers.

The honors Jaakko Hintikka has received include the John Locke Lectureship at Oxford (1964), the Hägerström Lectureship at Uppsala (1983), the Immanuel Kant Lectureship at Stanford (1985), the Wihuri International Prize (1976), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979-80), and honorary doctorates from the University of Liège (1984), the Jagiellonian University of Cracow (1995), and the Universities of Uppsala (2000), Oulu (2002), and Turku (2003). Most recently, he has been awarded the Rolf Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy (2005) for his pioneering contributions to the logical analysis for modal concepts, in particular the concepts of knowledge and belief.

Dr. Hintikka regularly teaches graduate level courses on a variety of topics including the philosophy of language, contemporary philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, Aristotle, Continental Rationalism, Wittgenstein, and epistemology.