Georg Henrik von Wright

Georg Henrik von Wright lived from June 14, 1916 to June 16, 2003, born and dying in Helsinki, and was a Finnish philosopher particularly known for his work in philosophical logic, above all deontic logic, the formal logic of obligation and permission, which he founded with his 1951 essay Deontic Logic. He also worked on temporal and modal logic and on the philosophy of action, philosophy of language and epistemology, and wrote influentially on moral pessimism and what he called the myth of progress. He studied under Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge from 1947 and succeeded him as professor there in 1948; Wittgenstein is reported to have called him the only one of his students he had not spoiled with his own teaching. Von Wright was one of three literary executors of Wittgenstein's estate, alongside G.E.M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, and edited several of Wittgenstein's works published after his death.