User:Physis/Imre Ruzsa

Imre Ruzsa (12 May 1921–2 July 2008) was a Hungarian philosopher and logician.

Background
He was born in Budapest, only 3 years after Hungary became a standalone country after the partition of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This country, having lost the First World War, faced that time one of the deepest crises of its history: losing war, detachment of two-third of its territory, revolutions followed by a counterrevolution, economical and social problems, extremely deep poverty of very large masses. Civil war and external intervention resulted finally in the restoration of former institutions (even kingdom itself), politics was imbued with a delay of ardent reforms. Although Hungary kept the external characteristics of a (conservative) democracy, but the explosive social problems were suppressed, the executive power of the state was kept overwhelming, with few control. Hungary's governor, Miklós Horthy was the eponymous character of this era. A short consolidation period was swept away by the Great Depression. The conservative elite tried to resist the awakening extreme right movements, but Hungary became allied with Germany, and despite of some unwillingness and resistance exerted by the conservative elite, Hungary became occupied by Germany, and took part in Holocaust.

In the Horthy era, Imre Ruzsa did not avoid the suffering as a political prisoner. He had the opportunity to begin his university studies only after the end of the Second World War. In the war, Hungary was allied with Germany, and became a disastrously affected war area by the end of the war: unlike some of its neighbors, a coup d'état prevented Hungary from voluntary capitulation, thus the front pushed through the country with disastrous civil and military losses. The performer of the coup leader was of extreme right that much, that even Hitler mistrusted him, and used him only as the last resort for keeping Hungary from “jumping out” (Horthy secretly pacted with the Allied Powers, later stopped the Holocaust, unprecedentedly in the Germany-occupied sphere, finally even declared capitulation to the Soviets). Hitler's plan succeeded: the new, so-called “Hungarist” leadership indeed restarted Holocaust and declared continuing war till total collapse. Factually, battles and death marches lasted till total Soviet occupation.

After the end of the war, Hungary counted as loser state, all its former political form became reorganized, also profound democratic and social reforms were initiated. At the same time, the country became a direct interest area of the Soviet Union.

It was only after the war that Imre Ruzsa could begin his university studies in Eötvös Loránd University, the oldest university of the country.

The short democratic period of the country lasted only few years, the Cold War forced Stalin to keep a tight hold on his “allied countries”, this resulted soon in destruction of the newly introduced democratic institutions, and in a close adaptation to the Stalinistic policy.

Imre Ruzsa had to face again the fate of a political prisoner. In 1956, he acquired the profession to teach mathematics and physics in grammar schools.

Although Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was beaten down with intervention, and the overall retorsion were severe, but after several years, a consolidation period began, with cautious softening. Despite of the weakening of the former direct authoritarian forms, the political background still influenced academic life largely. Like before, Marxism was regarded as a theory being superior to other social theories. Dialectic, being an axial part of Marxism was also overemphasized in scientific life. This lead to an overloading of the approach of dialectic: it was used as an explanatory principle above its possibilities. For contrast, some new sciences, like cybernetics, were accepted with suspicion, it was sometimes believed that these new fields had grown out of ideologies that are enemical to communism. Formal logic was regarded with ambivalence: although it was not rejected as pseudoscience or enemical ideology, but it played a secondary role behind “dialectic logic”, an approach that tried to grasp a logic of a general dialectical scheme.

Work in educational field
In the slowly softening atmosphere, Imre Ruzsa managed to lead and organize the education of a new generation in modern formal logic. Later, with the slow softening of ideological pressure, he succeeded to make his department independent from the other one that devoted itself to dialectic logic.

Scientific results
Among his results: he was inspired by Arthur Prior's concept about semantic value gap in sentential logic. Ruzsa worked out this idea also in he field of first-order logic, modal logic and generally, in intensional logic. This path proved to be successful also in the field of analysis of natural languages, he tried to apply the idea in Montague grammar, which proved to be fruitful.

As mentioned, he published several books that enabled that modern logic could be taught in Hungarian university education. Although these books provide comprehensive and standard introduction to the subject, but at the same time, they also contained some original approaches. For example, the author not only explained how we can base definitions on structural induction, but he also used a syntactical tool which formalized this concept. Everything what we usually define with structural induction can be regarded as generated by an appropriate formal grammar, so called “canonical calculus”. This is a string rewriting system, identical to Post canonical system. This served not only educational, didactic purposes. The notion of canonical calculus proved to be having interesting properties, something like introspection. The auxiliary concepts underlying this notion (e.g. substitution, deducibility) themselves can be defined via structural induction. Thus, these concrete instances of so-called “canonical calculi” could be generalized into a tool of greater expression power (“hypercalculus”). This path could be taken even further: self-reference with incorporating the idea of Gödel numbering, could be introduced in a straightforward way and another formalism based on Markov algorithm could grasp the notion of computability. With this tool, important metalogical theorems could be proved with less assumptions, maybe also with smaller learning curve. For example, this enabled a proof for Gödel's incompleteness theorem without a reference to arithmetics.