In memoriam: Jaakko Hintikka, by Gila Sher

The Editors in Chief of Synthese note with sadness the death of Jaakko Hintikka on August 12, 2015. Hintikka was Synthese’s Editor in Chief for almost 40 years (1965 – 2002). He was a charismatic and influential editor who left his stamp on the journal. Hintikka was a distinguished philosopher and a prolific writer who made important contributions to analytic philosophy. He published close to 40 books and several hundred articles. He was a pioneer in the fields of possible-world semantics, epistemic logic, game-theoretic semantics, branching quantification, IF logic, and more. His contributions spanned a large number of topics from the philosophies of logic, mathematics, science, knowledge, and language to the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, and others).

 Hintikka was a recipient of the prestigious Rolf Schock prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in logic and philosophy. Among his seminal books areKnowledge & Belief (1962), Models for Modalities (1969), Logic, Language-Games & Information (1973), Investigating Wittgenstein (with Merrill B. Hintikka, 1986), and The Principles of Mathematics Revisited (1998). He will be sorely missed.