Jaakko Hintikka

Jaakko Hintikka lived from January 12, 1929 to August 12, 2015 and was a Finnish and American philosopher and logician regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic. He served as chief editor of the journal Synthese from 1965 to 2002 and received the Rolf Schock Prize in philosophy in 2005. His work developed a semantics for modal logic comparable to Kripke's frame semantics, discovered the method of semantic tableaux independently of Evert Willem Beth, and created game theoretic semantics and independence friendly logic built on branching quantifiers. He also produced extensive interpretive scholarship on Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein and Peirce, extending the analytic tradition established by Frege, Russell, Carnap and Quine.