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"
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