Nuel Belnap, professor emeritus of philosophy on the College of Pittsburgh, well-known for his work on the philosophy of logic, has died.
Professor Belnap joined the College of Pittsburgh philosophy school in 1963 and retired in 2011. Previous to this he was an assistant professor at Yale College. He acquired his PhD from Yale in 1960 and his undergraduate diploma in philosophy from the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Professor Belnap labored extensively on logic, fact, and time and company. Anil Gupta, who was a doctoral pupil of Belnap’s and later his colleague at Pittsburgh, writes:
Belnap’s contributions to logic and philosophy are broad, deep, and stylish. He was a co-founder (or co-discoverer, relying on one’s philosophy) of the methods E and R of entailment logics, whose examine has occupied a number of generations of logicians and philosophers. He remoted (with Michael Dunn) the truth-functional fragment of entailment logics—a fraction now often called the Belnap-Dunn logic—and supplied a robust motivation for it (in “How a Pc Ought to Assume” and “A Helpful 4-Valued Logic”). He was a pioneer within the examine of the logic of questions and of the logic of company in branching time. He generalized the notion of branching occasions to branching space-times to assist us higher perceive bodily in addition to psychological phenomena. He made an necessary contribution to proof concept along with his Show Logic. He was a co-originator of the prosentential concept of fact, and he helped give delivery to the revision concept of fact. (There’s nothing odd right here, for these two theories of fact will not be rivals; they tackle totally different points.) Belnap introduced his analysis in quite a few articles and within the following books: The Logic of Questions and Solutions (co-authored with Thomas Metal, 1976), Entailment (vol. I, with Anderson, 1975; vol. II, with Anderson and J. M. Dunn, 1992), The Revision Concept of Fact (with A. Gupta, 1993), Going through the Future (with M. Perloff and M. Xu, 2001), and Branching Area-Instances (with T. Müller and T. Placek, 2021).
Three volumes of essays have been revealed on Belnap’s work: Fact and Penalties (eds., J. M. Dunn and A. Gupta), New Essays on Belnap-Dunn Logic (eds., H. Omori and H. Wansing), and Nuel Belnap on Indeterminism and Free Motion (ed., T. Müller). The final quantity appeared in Springer’s Excellent Contributions in Logic collection.
You’ll be able to learn extra about his work here and here.
Belnap acquired many honors, together with fellowships from the Guggenheim Basis, the Nationwide Science Basis, and the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities. He was a Fellow of the Middle for Superior Examine within the Behavioral Sciences in 1982–1983 and acquired an Honorary Doctorate from Leipzig College in 2000. In 2008 he was elected as a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Gupta provides:
Belnap was an impressive trainer and skilled a number of generations of logicians and philosophers. He had a particular expertise for making vivid, and thus understandable, even essentially the most summary and complicated ideas. What Belnap stated as soon as about Alan Anderson applies to him additionally: his displays “happy the sensibilities in addition to the mind.” Belnap was a beneficiant trainer, fast to acknowledge even the smallest contributions of scholars. He made college students really feel that they too might contribute to this imposing enterprise that’s logic and philosophy.
Professor Belnap died on June twelfth, 2024 in Whitefield, New Hampshire.
(by way of Anil Gupta)
