Richard Montague
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Richard Merett Montague (September 20, 1930 Stockton, California – March 7, 1971, Los Angeles) was an American mathematician and philosopher.
[edit] Career
At the University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned an A.B. in Philosophy in 1950, an M.A. in Mathematics in 1953, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski. Montague, one of Tarski's most accomplished American students, spent his entire career teaching in UCLA's Philosophy Department, where he supervised the dissertation of Nino Cocchiarella.
Montague wrote on the foundations of logic and set theory, as would befit a student of Tarski. His Ph.D. dissertation, titled Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory, contained the first proof that all possible axiomatizations of the standard axiomatic set theory ZFC must contain at least one axiom schema. In other words, ZFC cannot be finitely axiomatized.
He pioneered a logical approach to natural language semantics which became known as Montague grammar. This approach to language has been especially influential among certain computational linguists—perhaps more so than among more traditional philosophers of language.
Montague was an accomplished organist and a successful real estate investor. He died violently in his own home; the crime is unsolved to this day. He was a homosexual, and sometimes engaged in high-risk behavior such as bringing home strangers that he had just met while cruising bars (Feferman and Feferman 2004: 332). On the day that he was murdered, he brought home several people "for some kind of soirée", and a friend later found him dead, strangled in his bathroom (Feferman and Feferman 2004: 332-33).
[edit] References
- Feferman, Anita, and Solomon Feferman, 2004. Alfred Tarski: A Life. Cambridge Univ. Press.
- Kalish, Donald, and Montague, Richard, 1964. Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning. Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich.
- Montague, Richard, 1974. Formal philosophy : selected papers of Richard Montague / ed. and with an introd. by Richmond H. Thomason. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. (1979 printing: ISBN 0-300-01527-5)
- Partee, Barbara H., 2006, "Richard Montague (1930 - 1971)" in Brown, Keith, ed., Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 8, 2nd ed. Oxford: Elsevier: 255-57. Includes a bibliography of the secondary literature on Montague and his eponymous grammar.
