Max Black

Max Black ( born February 24, 1909 in Baku, † August 27, 1988 in Ithaca, New York) was an American philosopher and influential representatives of analytic philosophy in the first half of the 20th century. He wrote important contributions to the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, and developed the center of the 20 yrs. relevant theory of metaphor, where he was based on the position of IA Richards.

Life

Max Black was born in Azerbaijan as a child of the businessman Lionel Black and his wife Sophia Davinska. To escape the anti-Semitic persecution, the family a short time initially went to Max Black's birth to Paris and in 1912 to London, where Max Black should grow up.

In the school years Max Black noticed by his talented violin playing and excellent mastery of chess. He then attended the Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and began to be interested in analytic philosophy in the context of the professors teaching there as Russell, Wittgenstein, George Edward Moore and Frank Plumpton Ramsey.

In 1930, he earned a B. A. (Bachelor of Arts). A scholarship enabled him to spend a year studying in Göttingen, where he worked on his first book ( The Nature of Mathematics ) and his future wife Michal Landsberg met, with whom he later had two children.

1933 Max Black went back to England and enrolled at the University of London, where he positivism in 1939 for the dissertation Theories of logical Ph.D. obtained. 1936 to 1940 he taught mathematics at the University of Education in London (Institution of Education), followed then a professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Illinois, Urbana (USA) and moved in 1947 to Cornell University in New York. In 1954 he was appointed there to the Susan Linsage Chair of Philosophy and Human Sciences. In September 1967, he organized an international conference on the psychology of art. He taught at Cornell University until his retirement in 1977 and then held numerous lectures at various universities. In 1948, he had already accepted a U.S. citizen. As far second was Max Black Americans from 1981 to 1984 President of the International Institute of Philosophy.

Work and assessment

Max Black is one of the most influential philosophers of the American analytic philosophy and has made particular services to the philosophy of language (metaphor theory, discussion of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics ), philosophy of mathematics (Problems of Analysis, 1954) and the philosophy of art.

In his first book ( The Nature of Mathematics, 1933) he interprets the intuitionism of Brouwer in anticipation of later matured to his art and epistemology views.

Four years later, he takes a description of the observability of uncertainty and the importance of uncertainty in the field of logic with the notion of vague sets. As fuzzy sets go these terms in the later fuzzy logic.

As a translator of Gottlob Frege ( with Peter Geach, he is in 1952 in the U.S., the major works of Frege out ) and commentator of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Commentary on the Tractatus, 1964), it forms an important bridge between the European, particularly British school of analytic philosophy and the USA.

Among American philosophers Black grapples mainly with the behaviorism and the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski. His early developed and taken up by other theory of metaphor evaluates them, similar to a speech act as an interactive shifting meaning.

As an analytic philosopher applies his interest the description of the models, " which is the case " ( Wittgenstein). These Black raised more than Wittgenstein from formal modeling and representation. Differences were roughly three types of models: the model as a rem prototype ( scale models ), model as a ( mental ) image ( analogical models ) and model as a guide to action ( theoretical model), which correspond to the Triassic index, icon and symbol in semiotics and aesthetics can. On the way to new to these models to " measure " as long as the models have general applicability, is also based the possibility of any judgment about the "world".

In his Philosophy of Art Max Black is the doctrine that it is impossible to set up a rule for the arbitrary, creative infraction ( creatively viola ting rules), which operates the art.

Black described himself as a " lapsed mathematician, addicted reasoner, and devotee of metaphor and chess " (a mathematics Decaying, reason Hinge inferior, and one of the metaphor and the chess devotee ). His building on Richards ( 1936) semantic theory of metaphor was the middle of the 20 yrs. instrumental and later put many philosophers semantic theory designs with varying emphasis on metaphors definition problem.

Publications (selection)

Writings

  • The Nature of Mathematics. 1933, Reprint 1959.
  • Vagueness: An exercise in logical analysis in the Philosophical Society. , 1937.
  • A New Method of Presentation of the Theory of the Syllogism. , 1944.
  • Language and Philosophy: Studies in Method. (1949). Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP ( herein also the article: Korzybsksi 's General Semantics, on the bottom of the cited article by Bruce I. Kodish refers )
  • Critical Thinking. , 1946. NYS, 2nd edition 1952
  • Problems of Analysis. In 1954.
  • Metaphors are no arguments, my pretty maiden. In: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume LV (1954-1955), 273-294.
  • Models and Metaphors. Studies in Language and Philosophy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1962.
  • A Companion to Wittgenstein 's Tractatus. In 1964.
  • The Labyrinth of Language. Mentor, New York 1969. ( Other sources give 1968 as the year of first publication )
  • Margins of Precision: Essays in Logic and Language. In 1970.
  • Making smart choices, how useful is decision theory? In 1985.
  • The Importance of Language.. Prentice- Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1962 reprint 1982: ISBN 0-8014-9077-4.
  • Art, Perception and Reality, along with E. H. Gombrich and Julian Hochberg. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1972.
  • Perplexities. Cornell University Press, Ithaca / London 1990.

Editorship and translations

  • Rudolf Carnap: The Unity of Science, translated and with an introduction by Max Black in Psyche Miniatures, General Series no 63 Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, 1934.
  • Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Edited by Peter Geach and Max Black ( 1953). 3rd ed Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1980.
  • The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons. A critical examination. Edited by Max Black. Prentice Hall, 1961.
  • Philosophical analysis: a collection of essays. Edited by Max Black. Prentice- Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1963
  • William P. Alston: Philosophy in America: Essays, edited by Max Black. George Allen & Unwin, London 1965.
  • John R. Searle: What Is a Speech Act. Philosophy in America. Ed. Max Black. Allen, London 1965.
  • Stephen Francis Barker: Induction and Hypothesis. A Study of the Logic of Confirmation. Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Max Black. o.J.
  • The Morality of Scholarship. Northrop Frye, Stuart Hampshire, Conor Cruise O'Brien. Edited by Max Black ( Studies in Humanities, vol. 1). Cornell University Press, 1967.

Max Black's article for the Encyclopedia Britannica

  • Abstract and abstraction. 1956 Vol 1, pp.67 -68 ( Edition 1957: Vol 1, pp 67-68. )
  • Antinomy. 1956, Vol 2, p. 70
  • Condition. 1957, Vol 6, pp. 220-221
  • Deduction. 1957, Vol 7, pp. 132-133
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