Noam Chomsky (1928-) 

Noam Chomsky was born in 1928 in Philadelphia, PA. He can be classified as, but not limited to, a linguist and political activist. He has composed and published many literary works that have been dispersed throughout the world and have touched all four corners. He has worked to further the study and understanding of linguistics from both the biological and psychological perspective. Despite his linguistical endeavors, Chomsky has made the time to work for furthering peace, justice and fighting oppression and ignorance throughout the world. He has spoken against political intellectuals who have physically or even psychologically forced other countries to adopt their doctrines, even when it meant speaking up against his nature country. Such was the case during the Vietnam War, when Chomsky opposed US military involvement within the Vietnam boarders.

Chomsky's interest in linguistics can be traced back to his undergraduate days at the University of Pennsylvania. The professor that oversaw this blooming interest was Zellig S. Harris. It was through this professor's suggestion that Chomsky should try to diagram a systematic structure of some language. So Chomsky turned his attention to doing just that with the Hebrew language and the initial creation of his undergraduate thesis in 1949. Which he then went on to rewrite and finish in 1951 as Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. In this paper, he tried to explain the dispersal of phonetic forms in Hebrew. Chomsky kept reworking this idea until its final publication as The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. At first, his book was denied publication time and time again. It was finally accepted and started many linguist down the path that Chomsky had started to carve.

Despite his work as a linguist, Chomsky is also a renowned intellectual, author, political activists, civil libertarian, and anarchist. After his undergraduate studies, Chomsky moved on to Harvard University as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of fellows. This was during the early fifties and the young Chomsky had created a structural theory of linguistics that caused quite a stir. After Harvard, Chomsky went on to teach linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Noam Chomsky
Laurea ad Honorem in Psychology of Bologna University (1/04/2005)
Lesson: "Human Nature Universales"