 | Dr Wilfrid Hodges
Formerly Professor of Mathematics, Queen Mary, University of London (H12) Links between logic and semantics, including model-theoretic definitions of mathematical constructions, formal semantics for sentences with scope peculiarities, the logic of Ibn Sina and its semantic foundations
The election to a Fellowship of the British Academy, though highly delightful, still puzzles me. My work in logic and semantics has impinged on too many different areas, and in any one of them I never achieved more than honourable mention. But maybe the broad integration was what found favour. In my time it was still possible to move from a training in the classics to a career in mathematics; this kind of breadth is harder for today's scholars. For the future I'm confident that the Fellowship will help to give backbone to my project of the last few years, namely to make available commented translations of key logical and semantic writings of Ibn Sina (Avicenna). There are two motives for this work. The first is that Ibn Sina and Leibniz were the two most powerful and insightful logicians between Aristotle and Frege. The second is that in view of the last hundred years of history, Britain in particular has an obligation to cherish and publicise the hidden jewels of Arabic culture. Happily it was the British Academy's publication of Zimmermann's translation of logical work of Al-Farabi that first made me aware of the richness of Arabic logic. |
