- Pavel Tichý
Pavel Tichý (
18 February 1936 Brno ,Czechoslovakia –26 October 1994 Dunedin ,New Zealand ) was a Czechlogician ,philosopher andmathematician . He worked in the field ofintensional logic and foundedTransparent Intensional Logic , an original theory of the logical analysis of natural languages – the theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we learn, know and can communicate when we come to understand what a sentence means. He spent roughly 25 years working on it. His main work is a book "The Foundations of Frege's Logic", published byWalter de Gruyter in 1988.Early life and education
Tichý was born in Brno in 1936. His father was an insurance clerk. His family lived in
Zlín until 1948 when they moved toVsetín . At school he was already a brilliant student. He also liked playing music ofJaroslav Ježek on the piano. After finishing studies in Vsetin he moved toPrague followed by his parents. Tichý graduated in 1959 atCharles University in Prague. He stayed there tutoring as an assistant from 1961 to 1968 at the department of Logic at Faculty of Philosophy. One of his other hobbies was carpentry. He was said to be perfectionist in everything he did, whether he was learning a foreign language or making a table.In 1968 he received an invitation from
Exeter University in theUnited Kingdom . He was permitted to leave the country even though it was shortly after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in thePrague Spring . He decided not to return back. In 1970 he emigrated with his family to New Zealand, by ship. He started teaching at theUniversity of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand where he became Professor of Philosophy at Otago in 1981. Tichý stayed teaching there until his death. He is remembered as ferocious debater who liked to express his views directly regardless of any bad implications it could have. This made him a lot of friends but also a lot of enemies.Four years after the
Velvet revolution , in 1993, Tichý was offered the position of Head of the Department of Logic at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts ofCharles University in Prague . He planned to move to Prague in 1995 but committed suicide by drowning before taking this position.Degrees and academic appointment
*PhDr. (Charles University, 1959), thesis: "Výklad Gödelovy věty o neúplnosti v prosté teorii typů" ["An Exposition of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in the Simple Theory of Types"]
*Candidate of Sciences (Charles University, 1964), thesis: "Vyčíslitelnost ve vztahu k teoriím" ["On Computability w.r.t. Theories"]
*Docent (Charles University, 1969), thesis: "Intensions in Terms ofTuring Machine s and On the Vicious Circle in Definitions: Two Studies in LogicalSemantic s"
*PhD (Exeter University , 1971), thesis: "Contributions to the Theory ofPostulate Systems"
* Associate Professor, University of Otago, 1978
* Professor, University of Otago, 1981Books
* P. Tichý (1988): "The Foundations of Frege's Logic". De Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1988, 333 pp., ISBN 3110116685
* V. Svoboda, B. Jespersen, C. Cheyne (Eds.) (2004): "Pavel Tichý's Collected Papers in Logic and Philosophy". Filosofia, Prague and Otago University Press, Dunedin, 901 pp., ISBN 1877276987External links
* [http://til.phil.muni.cz/text/biography_tichy.php Tichy's biography and bibliography] – Transparent Intensional Logic website, Masaryk University, Brno
* [http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Tichy.html Tichy's biography] – Mac Tutor Biographies, University of St Andrews, Scotland
* [http://www.otago.ac.nz/philosophy/history.html#11 Tichy's biography] – University of Otago
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