The Biography of Avram Noam Chomsky
By
: Yonatan Meikhel.K
Avram Noam Chomsky is an eminent linguist and a
radical political philosopher of international reputation. Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December
7, 1928. He grew up in a family of Ukrainian and Belarusian Jewish immigrants
who had gone through New York before settling in Philadelphia .Noam Chomsky was
a brilliant child, and his curiosities and intellect make him stand out. Born
in Philadelphia, Chomsky felt the weight of America's Great Depression. He was
raised with a younger brother, David, and although his own family was
middle-class, he witnessed injustices all around him.
His
mother name is Elsie Chomsky and his father name is William a Russian Jewish immigrant
like his mother, was a respected professor of Hebrew at Gratz College, an
institution for teacher’s training. Before he was two years of age they sent
him to an experimental progressive school, where he remained until the age of
twelve.
There
he would learn that everybody has a place and that everyone can do something
important. Chomsky himself remembers a childhood absorbed in reading. He can
see himself curled up on a sofa reading the books he used to borrow from the
library often up to a dozen at a time.By the age 13, Noam Chomsky was traveling
from Philadelphia to New York, spending much of his time listening to disparate
perspectives.
Chomsky’s
current political views spring from this type of lived-experience, position all
people that can understand politics and economics and make their own decisions.
Chomsky was moved by what he felt language could reveal about society. Chomsky
began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He met Zellig S. Harris,
an American scholar touted for discovering structural linguistics.
Avram
Noam Chomsky often called as Chomsky known as intellectual figure who has brave
to Assign his life as anti iconoclasts. His text and article always Electrify
America government. Today Chomsky is Professor emeritus of linguistics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he has taught all of his
career. In 1955, Chomsky obtained a job as an assistant professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He
spending half his time on a mechanical translation project and the other
half teaching linguistics and philosophy.
Chomsky
came across anarchism very young and even published an anti-fascist article
when he was just twelve. Thanks to an assistance program for persons with
disabilities in New York City in the 30s, Chomsky’s uncle who was a hunchback
had been given a newspaper stand to tend behind the exit of the subway station
of the 72nd Street and Broadway. The kiosk, as a result of being behind the
exit hardly made any money, but it became a forum where radical ideas came
together, and where the young Chomsky would work in the evenings and take part
in the rich intellectual debates. Chomsky would even declare years later that
it is where he got his political education.
Chomsky
has been a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Chomsky has been a member of both the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the National Academy of Sciences.
Over the years Noam Chomsky has been invited to numerous major universities all
around the globe. He has received at least ten honorary university degrees from
around the world. In 1988, Japan awarded him with the Kyoto Prize for the Basic
Sciences category. He has been the eighth most cited intellectual in the
scientific literature for a long time and was identified in 2005 by the British
magazine Prospect as the most influential living scholar in the world.
Indeed his influence extends beyond
that of science and The Arts and Humanities Citation Index recognized Chomsky
as being cited more than any other living scholar in the eighties and early
nineties. Indeed, with William Shakespeare, Karl Marx and the Bible, Chomsky is
apparently one of the top ten most cited in the humanities.
In 1945 he began studying philosophy,
mathematics and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania where his
teachers included the famous philosopher and systems scientist C. West
Churchman, the distinguished philosopher Nelson Goodman and the renowned
linguist Zellig Harris.
In 1949 Noam Chomsky marries the
linguist and education specialist Carol Schatz’s whom he knew since early
childhood and with whom he would have three children, two girls and one boy
(Aviva, Diane and Harry). Carol Chomsky died of cancer in 2008. Under the
guidance of teachers such as the Russian linguist and literary theorist Roman
Jakobson and one of his former mentors Nelson Goodman, Chomsky did research for
several years at Harvard University on the grammatical constructions of Hebrew.
In 1955 he presented a doctoral thesis on syntactic structures entitled
"Transformational Analysis", which would pave the way for his
revolutionary concept of transformational grammar.
Chomsky then joined the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge where he was first appointed
professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, before being
promoted and take the Ferrari P. Ward chair in 1966. Finally in 1976 he became
"Institute Professor", a title which is given to members of the
faculty who have made major contribution to both their field as well as the MIT
community. In total, Chomsky would teach linguistics at MIT for fifty years,
retiring from the job in 2005.
A question often asked throughout the
years by many people, including Chomsky himself, has been whether there is
connection between Chomsky’s theoretical pioneering linguistics and his
activist progressive politics. And if so, how strong is it? Chomsky today gives
essentially the same answer to the question as he has throughout his career.
Already in an 1971 interview he answered in a most interesting and genuinely
honest way:
In strictly academic circles Noam
Chomsky is best known as the theoretician who came up with the theory of
transformational generative grammar, which revolutionized cognitive and
linguistic sciences in the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, it has
had a very important impact on both the analytic philosophy take of philosophy
of language and philosophy of mind, as distinct to the continental philosophy one.
Philosophy of language investigates
the use, nature and origins of language. Whereas philosophy of mind studies the
nature of the mind, its properties, but also consciousness. We must think of
what is known as the mind-body problem (Descartes), and particularly the
discussion of the origin of knowledge common to both philosophy of language and
philosophy of mind. The analytic and continental traditions approach each
philosophy in ways that are significantly different.
It is important to note it is increasingly
argued today that the opposition between analytic (Anglo-American) and
continental (European) or critical philosophy is a division that needs to be
transcended. One proponent of this view is the continental philosopher Simon
Critchley, who teaches at the European Graduate School (EGS). He points out
that just as continental philosophy can sometimes be guilty of obscurantism,
analytic philosophy can as often be accused of scientism. Nevertheless, there
are important differences in how they approach both philosophy of language and
philosophy of mind. Furthermore, since they are closely related to both
Chomsky’s linguistics and his politics, it is therefore critical to point to
some of the main ones here.
Not surprisingly, Chomsky situates
himself in the analytic tradition. Moreover, Chomsky has dismissed and accused
some of the leading figures of the 20th century of a kind of obscurantism
including Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, referring to them
as a "postmodernist cult". In the mid nineties Chomsky was being
asked about them and as a response he posted a final statement saying why he
sees them that way.
More telling still of the
philosophical difference, in 1971 Chomsky was invited to debate the French
thinker Michel Foucault on Dutch television for The International Philosophers
Project. It gave rise to a fascinating debate, which has been published several
times since then, most recently as The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
(2006). Chomsky argued for the concept of human nature as a political guide for
activism. Indeed, Chomsky believes human nature to be something that is largely
definable, and even as he concedes that we may never get to a perfect
definition, he wants to act with the best definition we have. While Foucault on
the other hand sees no human nature except for the concept of it, which is
inevitably ridden with power. He argued that any notions of human nature cannot
escape such influence and must therefore first be critiqued as such, which he
considers to be an urgent task.
Chomsky wants to find between his
analytic philosophy and his politics seems more easily found in continental
critical thought.In analytical philosophy language is studied as a separate
discipline, whereas in continental philosophy language is studied within its
many branches, say from existentialism to deconstruction and beyond. If we
consider how the two approach philosophy of mind, it is important to note that
continental philosophy instead of putting much of the emphasis on logical
analysis, it opens up the exploration to other forms of understanding of the
human condition.
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