Logic List Mailing Archive

Imre Ruzsa (1921-2008)

Imre Ruzsa
(1921-2008)

Imre Ruzsa, the father of modern philosophical logic in Hungary, the 
founder of the Department of Logic at Etvs Lornd University (ELTE)
, 
Budapest, has died at the age of 87.

He was born on 12th May, 1921 in Eastern Hungary. Having been a political
 
prisoner under Nazism and Stalinism, he was 35 by the time he finished his
 
studies at ELTE, as a student of Rzsa Pter. He briefly taught student
s 
in mathematics before moving on to teach philosophy students. In 1965, he
 
was appointed a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophical 
Research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1971, he moved to the 
ELTE Humanities Department of Logic, then chaired by a Marxist-Leninist 
dialectical logician. In 1982, he succeeded in separating modern logicians
 
from the "dialectical logic" tradition, and founded a new department under
 
the name "Department of Symbolic Logic and Methodology of Science"-it is 
this department that is now called the Department of Logic. He was 
appointed full professor in 1978 and professor emeritus in 1998. He 
received the Szchenyi Prize in 1991.

His professional interests centered around modal logic, intensional logic,
 
modeling natural language in systems of intensional logic, and the 
foundations of logic and mathematics. He always thought of his 
generalization of A. N. Prior's concept of semantic value gaps to 
quantified, intensional and type-theoretic systems as his most important 
contribution to logic. He was the author of three books in English (Modal
 
Logic with Descriptions, The Hague, 1982, Intensional Logic Revisited, 
Budapest, 1991, Introduction to Metalogic, Budapest, 1993), several 
monographs and textbooks in Hungarian, and many articles in leading logic
 
journals. Many of his former students are now renowned experts in logic, 
philosophy, and linguistics at departments across Hungary, Europe, and the
 
United States.

  He died quietly, after a prolonged illness, on July 2 in Budapest, and 
was buried by family members in a private ceremony on August 4. His memory
 
will live on in the hearts and minds of his former students.

Andras Mate CSc, assoc. prof.
Inst. Philosophy, Dept. Logic
ELTE Budapest
mailto: mate@ludens.elte.hu
http://philosophy.elte.hu/mate