Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky : biography

December 7, 1928 –

In this line of thought, Chomsky has recognized the limits of human reason and has shown a clear rejection to scientism, in the acknowledgment that scientists can not explain everything:

Atheism and religious views

On several occasions Chomsky has been asked about his religious views, to which he replied on one occasion:

In a discussion with Lawrence M. Krauss and Sean M. Carroll, Chomsky gave a similar response:

Chomsky has called the Bible "probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon". While he thinks that "in principle people should not have irrational beliefs", he has demonstrated that his position is not categorically anti-religious. He has recognized that there is a radical difference between the Christianity of the Gospels and that of most governments and religious organizations. He has spoken favorably of liberation theology and has recognized the work of movements that have tried to restore and recover the principles of primitive Christianity. He once said:

Influence

Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in various fields of study. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky’s generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar … with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne’s Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.

Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "… I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 … Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer’s intuition!"

Biography

Childhood: 1928–45

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Barsky 1997. p. 9. His father, Dr. William "Zev" Chomsky (1896–1977) had been born in Ukraine, then a part of the Russian Empire, and had fled to the United States in 1913 to avoid conscription into the army. Here, he began work in sweatshops in Baltimore, Maryland, before getting teaching work at the city’s Hebrew elementary schools, using his money to fund his studies at Johns Hopkins University. He married Elsie Simonofsky – a native of what is now Belarus who grew up in the United States – and they moved to Philadelphia, where they both began teaching at the Mikveh Israel religious school. William eventually rose to the position of school principal. In 1924 he was appointed to the faculty at the country’s oldest teacher training institution, Gratz College, where he became faculty president in 1932. In 1955, he also began teaching courses at Dropsie College. Independently, he was involved in researching Medieval Hebrew, eventually authoring a series of books on the language: How to Teach Hebrew in the Elementary Grades (1946), Hebrew, the Story of a Living Language (1947), Hebrew, the Eternal Language (1957) and Teaching and Learning (1959), as well as an edited version of David Kimhi’s Hebrew Grammar (1952).Barsky 1997. pp. 9–10. Described as a "very warm, gentle, and engaging" individual, William Chomsky placed a great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and independent in their thinking, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a view that would subsequently be adopted by his son.Barsky 1997. p. 11.