[FOM] Imre Ruzsa died

[Andras Mate]

Imre Ruzsa
(1921-2008)

Imre Ruzsa, the father of modern philosophical logic in Hungary, the 
founder  of the Department of Logic at Eötvös Loránd 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 Rózsa Péter. He briefly 
taught students 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 Széchenyi 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 at ludens.elte.hu
http://philosophy.elte.hu/mate