I admit to being at fault for even suggesting there is a top intellectual, as I don't believe in such things. I only believe in a developed mind.
But Chomsky is one of the top intellectuals and our entire Civilization was built upon the minds of our great intellectuals.
The right wing has been dumbing down our country for 30 years now. Even to the point of calling intellectuals elitists. We must stop doing that. It is easy to see why people do that.
From the ancient Greeks thinking about justice and Republics, to the Magna Carta to our great constitution.
What people usually don't think about, is that our founding fathers were the top intellectuals of their day. They wrote the constituion not by deducing it out of their heads, but by knowing the history of thought about Republics and justice and building on that.
My only point is that we need to celebrate our intellectuals; and educate our children as our most important job. We should provide free education from the age of 2.5 years through a PHD.
I do not believe a society can put more into education than they will get out of it by having and educted populace.
Noam Chomsky:
Avram Noam Chomsky (pronounced /'no?m/ or /?no?.?m 't??mski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,[2][3] cognitive scientist, and political activist. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[4] Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics,[5][6][7] and a major figure of analytic philosophy.[2] Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident and an anarchist,[8] referring to himself as a libertarian socialist. Chomsky is the author of more than 150 books and has received worldwide attention for his views, despite being typically absent from the mainstream media.
In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of generative grammar, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as universal grammar, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms."[9] He elaborated on these ideas in 1957's Syntactic Structures, which then laid the groundwork for the concept of transformational grammar. He also established the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. In 1959, Chomsky published a widely influential review of B. F. Skinner's theoretical book Verbal Behavior. In this review and other writings, Chomsky broadly and aggressively challenged the behaviorist approaches to studies of behavior and language dominant at the time, and contributed to the cognitive revolution in psychology. His naturalistic[10] approach to the study of language has influenced the philosophy of language and mind.[9]
Beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War, first articulated in his 1967 essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" and later extended in his American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Chomsky established himself as a prominent critic of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. He has since become an outspoken political commentator and a dedicated activist; he is a self-declared anarcho-syndicalist[11] and a libertarian socialist, principles he regards as grounded in the Age of Enlightenment[12] and as "the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society."[13]
Chomsky's social criticism has also included an analysis of the mass media; Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, articulated the propaganda model theory for examining the media.
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992. He is also the eighth most cited source of all time, and is considered the "most cited living author".[14][15][16][17] He is also considered a prominent cultural figure,[18] while his status as a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy has made him controversial.[19]
Contents [hide]
1 Life and career
2 Contributions to linguistics
2.1 Generative grammar
2.2 Chomsky hierarchy
3 Contributions to psychology
4 Approach to science
5 Debates
6 Political views
7 Influence in other fields
8 Academic achievements, awards and honors
9 Bibliography
10 Filmography
11 See also
12 References
13 External links
[edit] Life and career
The Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT, in which Chomsky holds his office in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.Chomsky was born on the morning of December 7, 1928 to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky), a native of what is present-day Belarus, grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English." Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish,[20] but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it.[20] Although his mother was part of the radical activism in the 1930s, Chomsky was largely influenced by his uncle who, having never passed 4th grade, owned a newsstand that acted as an "intellectual center [where] professors of this and that argu[ed] all night." [21] Chomsky was also influenced by being a part of a Hebrew-based, Zionist organization as well as hanging around anarchist bookstores.[21]
He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto," split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side," with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature," though he means more a "cultural ghetto than a physical one."[22] Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s. He recalls "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis.[22] In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."[23]
Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at Oak Lane Country Day School about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.[24]
A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 Master's Thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky.[25] Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.
In 1949, he married linguist Carol Schatz. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008.[26] The couple had two daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967). With his wife Carol, Chomsky spent time in 1953 living in HaZore'a, a kibbutz in Israel. Asked in an interview whether the stay was "a disappointment" Chomsky replied, "No, I loved it," however he "couldn't stand the ideological atmosphere" and "fervent nationalism" in the early 1950s at the kibbutz, with Stalin being defended by many of the left-leaning kibbutz members who chose to paint a rosy image of future possibilities and contemporary realities in the USSR.[27] Chomsky notes seeing many positive elements in the commune-like living of the kibbutz, in which parents and children lived in rooms of separate houses together, and when asked whether there were "lessons that we have learned from the history of the kibbutz," responded,[28][29] that in "some respects, the Kibbutzim came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction, or that was on anything like a similar scale. In these respects, I think they were extremely attractive and successful; apart from personal accident, I probably would have lived there myself – for how long, it's hard to guess."
Chomsky received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, one of his best-known works in linguistics.
Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.
In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals",[30] in The New York Review of Books. This was followed by his 1969 book, American Power and the New Mandarins, a collection of essays that established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have made him a controversial figure: largely shunned by the mainstream media in the United States,[31][32][33][34] he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets internationally. In 1977 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, The Netherlands, under the title: Intellectuals and the State.
Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy.[35] He was also on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives.[35] He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.[35]
Chomsky resides in Lexington, Massachusetts and travels often, giving lectures on politics. |
