Georg Henrik von Wright

From Philosopedia

Georg Henrik von Wright (14 June 1916 - 16 June 2003)

A philosopher, editor, and university official, von Wright (pronounced, roughly, vrikt) was a member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. Although his mother tongue was Swedish, he published in English, Finnish, and German.

Von Wright was born in Helsinki, the son of Tor von Wright and Ragni Elisabeth Alfthan. His family belonged to the Swedish-Finnish aristocracy and were of Scots ancestry. He was educated at Helsinki University from 1934 to 1937, majoring in philosophy, history, and political science, with mathematics as a minor subject. His philosophy teacher was Eino Kaila, an affiliate of the Vienna circle, whose influence was crucial in steering him towards logic and logical analysis and introducing him to the writings of the logical empiricists.

Von Wright resolved to do postgraduate work on the problem of the justification of inductive reasoning and went to Vienna to study with members of the circle. His wishes were frustrated by the Anschluss, and, early in 1939, he went to Cambridge to work with C. D. Broad and Rand R. B. Braithwaite. It was there that he first met Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose lectures he attended and whose impact upon him was profound. He also met G. E. Moore, another important influence.

During the continuation war of 1941 to 1944, he worked at the government information centre. He was appointed lecturer at Helsinki University in 1943, and elevated to a chair in 1946. In 1947, he returned to Cambridge on a visit, attended Wittgenstein's last lectures on the philosophy of psychology, and renewed his friendship with his teacher. On Wittgenstein's retirement in 1948, von Wright was elected to his chair at the age of 32.

When he returned to Finland, he was met with the outbreak of the winter war between his country and the Soviet Union. Being unfit for military service, he worked in a voluntary organisation for propaganda on the home front. In 1941, he married Maria Elisabeth von Troil, and they had a son and a daughter. That year, too, he published The Logical Problem Of Induction, which was his doctoral dissertation.

Over a period of 40 years, von Wright edited many of Wittgenstein's works, also writing much about him. In three volumes, called Philosophical Papers, he wrote of his varied interests, and in other of his works his philosophical interests ranged from inductive reasoning to deontic logic, from the study of values and norms to the logic of explanations of human action.

In the Anglo-American vein, he wrote about analytic philosophy and philosophical logic. His writing about modal logic and deontic logic have been described as being landmarks in the postwar rise of formal modal logic and its deontic interpretation.

From the 1970s, von Wright's philosophical interests shifted. Beginning with Explanation And Understanding (1971), he wrote extensively on action and intention, on reasons for action, and the ways in which actions are explained by reference to reasons. Opposed to the reduction of reasons to causes, he championed methodological pluralism in explanation, arguing for the autonomy of the sciences of man and against attempts to reduce the characteristic forms of explanation of human behaviour to causal explanation. These investigations led him to explore the nature of human freedom, about which he wrote luminously in Freedom And Determination (1980) and Of Human Freedom, his Tanner lectures in 1985.

His interests in philosophical psychology expanded, and, in the 1990s, he became increasingly preoccupied with the mind-body relation. In The Shadow Of Descartes (1998) is a collection of essays on these themes. He published his autobiography Mitt Liv in Swedish in 2001.

In addition to being a leader in modern Finnish philosophy, he became known as a specialist in the philosophy of language, logic, the philosophy of mind, and Charles Peirce.

During his last 20 years, under the influence of Oswald Spengler, he wrote such books as "'The Myth of Progress," in which he questioned technological progress, finding to his surprise that Wittgenstein also had liked Spengler.

Author

(1941) The Logical Problem of Induction, Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica; 2nd revised edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 1957

(1951) A Treatise on Induction and Probability, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

(1951) An Essay in Modal Logic, Amsterdam: North Holland.

(1955) Tanke och förkunnelse (Thought and Prophecy), Helsinki: Söderströms; also publ. in Finnish as Ajatus ja julistus, Helsinki: Söderström, 1961.

(1957) Logical Studies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

(1963) Norm and Action, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; also publ. in German as Norm und Handlung, Königstein: Scriptor, 1979.

(1963) The Varieties of Goodness, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

(1971) Explanation and Understanding, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; also publ. in German as Erklären und Verstehen, Frankfurt: Atheneum, 1974.

(1983) Practical Reason: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Oxford: Blackwell.

(1983) Philosophical Logic: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Oxford: Blackwell.

(1984) Truth, Knowledge, and Modality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Oxford: Blackwell.

(1993) The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays, Leiden: Brill; also publ. in German: Erkenntnis als Lebensform, Vienna: Böhlau, 1993.

(1998) In the Shadow of Descartes, Dordrecht, Kluwer.

(2001) Mit Liv, an autobiography in Swedish.

References

Apel, K.O. (1984) Understanding and Explanation, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Hintikka, J. (ed.) (1976) Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G.H. von Wright, Amsterdam: North Holland.

Manninen, J. and Tuomela, R. (eds.) (1976) Essays on Explanation and Understanding, Dordrecht: Reidel

Niiniluoto, I., Sintonen, M., and von Wright, G.H. (eds) (1992) Eino Kaila and Logical Empiricism, Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica

Schilpp, P.A. and Hahn, L.E. (eds.) (1989) The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, La Salle, IL: Open Court