The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
Avram Noam Chomsky Quotes
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
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| Birth: | 7th December, 1928 |
| Nationality: | American |
| Profession: | Activist, Critic, Historian, Linguist, Logician, Philosopher, Professor |
About
Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the elder son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure.
Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 master's thesis—The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew—as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation, and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar. Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.
Chomsky joined the staff of MIT in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.
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