Georg Henrik von Wright

Georg Henrik von Wright (Helsinki, 1916–2003) was a Finnish philosopher who wrote in Swedish, his mother tongue, and also in English, German and Finnish. He is considered the founder of contemporary deontic logic, the formal study of obligation, permission and prohibition. Trained in logical empiricism, he worked across philosophical logic, the philosophy of action, of language and of mind, and became the leading figure in Finnish philosophy of his generation.

At the University of Helsinki he studied under Eino Kaila, a member of the Vienna Circle who introduced him to logical empiricism. After a stay at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he defended a doctoral thesis on the logical problem of induction in 1941. He returned to Cambridge in 1947 and succeeded Wittgenstein as professor in 1948, a post he held until 1951. That year he published his Treatise on Induction and Probability and the essay "Deontic Logic", which helped launch modern deontic logic and, with his modal logic essay, the postwar revival of formal modal logic.

Much of his later work concerned action and norms, in books such as Norm and Action and The Varieties of Goodness, the latter drawn from Gifford Lectures he regarded as his best work. As an editor of Wittgenstein, he helped prepare several posthumous texts, including the notebooks of 1914–1916 and On Certainty.

In his last decades, influenced by Oswald Spengler, Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School, he took a pessimistic view of modern civilisation. In The Myth of Progress he questioned whether material and technological advance deserves to be called progress in any human sense.

His influence reaches formal logic, Finnish analytic philosophy and the study of action and norms, and can be seen in students such as Jaakko Hintikka.