The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences,
Palestine@MIT,
the MIT Arab Students Organization,
the MIT Muslim Students Association,
and MIT World
are proud to host
The Current Crisis in the Middle East
Dr. Noam Chomsky
Thursday September 21, 2006 at 7:00 PM in MIT room 32-123*
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=54-100&mapsearch=go
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Avram Noam Chomsky is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at MIT. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of theoretical linguistics made in the 20th century.
Noam Chomsky has been engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed a wide range of opinions on politics and world events which are widely cited, publicized and discussed.
Chomsky's intellectual life had been divided between his work in linguistics and his political activism, philosophy coming as a distant third. Nonetheless, his influence among analytic philosophers has been enormous due to three factors. First, Chomsky contributed substantially to a major methodological shift in the human sciences, turning away from the prevailing empiricism of the middle of the twentieth century: behaviorism in psychology, structuralism in linguistics and positivism in philosophy. Second, his groundbreaking books on syntax (Chomsky (1957, 1965)) laid a conceptual foundation for a new, cognitivist approach to linguistics and provided philosophers with a new framework for thinking about human language and the mind. And finally, he has persistently defended his views against all takers, engaging in important debates with many of the major figures in analytic philosophy (Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Searle, to cite a few) throughout his career.
For more info on Dr. Chomsky visit http://www.chomsky.info/bios.htm
