Paul Gochet

Paul Gochet in April 2000

Paul Gochet (21 March 1932 – 21 June 2011[1]) was a Belgian logician, philosopher, and emeritus professor of the University of Liège.[2] His research was mainly in the fields of logic and analytic philosophy. He is perhaps best known for his works on Quine's philosophy.

Biography

Paul Gochet was born in Bressoux near Liège. He graduated from the University of Brussels (ULB) with degrees in Romance philology in 1954 and philosophy in 1959. In between his studies, he spent a year in England attending the courses of A. Ayer at University College London (1957) and J.L. Austin at Oxford in 1958. He received his PhD from the University of Liege in 1968, where he had been an assistant since 1962.

After studying in Liège with Philippe Devaux, a translator and friend of Russell, and later in 1971 at Harvard University, he was appointed an ordinary professor at the University of Liège in 1972. There, he taught logic and English-language philosophy. He was a Research Fellow at Stanford and Berkeley universities from 1974 to 1975, an invited professor at the Collège de France in 1981, Research Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences in Canberra in 1984, and holder of the Francqui Chair at the University of Ghent in 1988. He maintained a long-standing connection with the Belgian National Center for Research in Logic that was founded in 1955 by R. Feys, Ch. Perelman, A. Borgers, A. Bayart, PhDevaux, and others, which maintained close connections with E.W. Beth and other logicians in The Netherlands. He was an emeritus professor at the University of Liège from 1997 until 2011. He was Commandeur de l'Ordre de la Couronne and Grand Officier de l'Ordre de Léopold II. He was a member of both the Royal Academy of Belgium and the International Institute of Philosophy.

Gochet's interests concerned language, logic, and knowledge. He first graduated with a thesis on poetry, then worked on the logical theory of the proposition in the analytical tradition. With a few others, he was responsible for introducing analytic philosophy to the French-speaking community. From philosophy, he widened his investigations to the formal semantics of natural language that required an expertise in linguistics as well as in modal and intensional logics. Later on, Gochet shifted naturally with the trend toward applications in computer science and artificial intelligence. In particular, this led to his long-standing interest in epistemic logic. His decades-long involvement with the European community in logic, language, and computation, made him a widely known international presence. As such, he was a constant visitor at the Amsterdam Colloquia in formal semantics, and the European ESSLLI Summer Schools in Logic, Language and Information.

Principal professional activities

  1. Visitor, Philosophy Department, Harvard University, six weeks, F.N.R.S. scholarship May–June 1971.
  2. Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley 1974–1975.
  3. Invited Professor to the Collège de France, December 1981.
  4. Research Fellow, National University of Australia, Canberra (Research School of Social Sciences), three months 1984.
  5. Francqui Chair at the University of Gand, 1988.
  6. Research Fellow, National University of Australia, Canberra (Automated Reasoning Project) three months in 1995.
  7. Visiting professor, University of Puerto-Rico, March 2001.
  8. Guest Researcher: three weeks at the Universities of Tsukuba and Shizuoka (Japan), November–December 2003.
  9. Speaker at the "Conférences Pierre Duhem", Paris, Inaugural Session, April 2006.

Memberships

Gochet was a member of the following organizations:

Editorial boards

Gochet served on the editorial boards of Dialectica, Grazer Philosophische Studien, Logique et Analyse, Philosophiques, and Revue internationale de Philosophie.

Selected works

With Pascal Gribomont

Selected translations

Selected publications in logic

Main publications devoted to analytic philosophy

Publications devoted to Belgian philosophy

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ This is a revised version (and translation) of Esquisse d'une théorie nominaliste de la proposition
  2. ↑ For a complete bibliography up to 1999, see Logique en perspective. Mélanges offerts à Paul Gochet, François Beets and Eric Gillet (éds.), Brussels, Ousia, 2000,
  3. ↑ reprinted in Logic, Thought and Action, D. Vanderveken (ed.), Dordrecht, Springer, 2005, 479–96

References

  1. ↑ "Décès du professeur Paul Gochet (French)". 22 June 2011.
  2. ↑ Decock, Lieven; Horsten, Leon (2000). Quine: naturalized epistemology, perceptual knowledge and ontology. Rodopi. p. 225. ISBN 90-420-1241-2.
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