Who Says Philosophy is Useless?

My favorite part of newspapers are the obituaries. It is, of course, sad to read about deaths, but at the same time one learns about the accomplishments of lives that otherwise do not make the news. Such was my experience this morning when I read the obituary of Dr. Amir Pnueli, a professor of computer science at New York University. Born in Israel in 1941, Dr. Pnueli was a pioneer in the field of temporal logic, the branch of logic that studies inferences that involve propositions that change their truth values over time. Dr. Pnueli was interested in solving a very practical problem: as computers have become more complex, it has also become harder to verify that the calculations that the programs are performing were correct. To solve this problem, Dr. Pnueli drew on the work of a twentieth-century philosopher and logician, Arthur Prior. Prior was the founder of what at the time was called tense logic, though Prior was interested in using the logic to answer philosophical questions about free will and the metaphysics of time. But Dr. Pnueli realized that Prior's system can be applied to solve the problems facing computer scientists. He published his results first in a 1977 paper and his work earned him the prestigious Turing Award in 1996. As Kenneth Chang, the New York Times obituary writer, notes, "chip makers now use software employing temporal logic to verify that millions of transistors are calculating as designed, and programmers use temporal logic to minimize the number of bugs in their software." So your reading of this blog ultimately depends on work that a philosopher did in the middle of the last century.

I extend my condolences to Dr. Pnueli's family and colleagues. Perhaps an appropriate tribute will be for me to answer the question, "What is philosophy good for?" with his name.