It is with great sadness that the Department of Philosophy remembers our cherished colleague Professor Emeritus Hans George Herzberger, a philosopher and logician with a varied set of interests from Gottlob Frege’s inexpressible to the silence of Buddha. He passed away in the Rishi Valley, India, on January 30, 2026, at the age of 93.
Born in 1932 into a secular Jewish family in Jena, Germany, he and his family left the country in 1935 after his father Max, a physicist working for Zeiss Optical, lost his position when Hitler came to power. With the recommendation letter from Albert Einstein, the elder Herzberger was able to find employment at Kodak in Rochester, New York.
Herzberger grew up in a lively household with many Jewish academics visiting in the postwar years. He attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, then spent two years in the army, stationed in France. When he returned to the United States, he entered Princeton for graduate studies. Since the university only financed PhD students for a limited time, Hans found employment after contacting Noam Chomsky who connected him with Zellig S. Harris and Henry Hiz at Penn University’s Department of Linguistics. Herzberger worked full-time for a couple of years on the world’s first computer program to analyze grammar, which they had developed. While in Philadelphia, he met his wife Radhika (née Jayakar), who had come from India to do an MA at Brwn Mawr.
After receiving his PhD in philosophy in 1961 on contextual analysis, Herzberger joined the University of California, Berkeley (while still working on the Penn University grammar analysis computer program) and later Case-Western Reserve University. He arrived at the University of Toronto in 1967, where he would spend the rest of his academic career. He loved the city and the department, becoming close friends with many colleagues such as Alasdair Urquhart, André Gombay, BK Matilal, and Jack Canfield.
Herzberger produced a number of seminal articles including “Dimensions of Truth” on Buridan and “Ordinal Preference and Rational Choice,” a classic milestone in the erosion of the idea that rational agents are maximizers of utility. The departmental history describes his work thusly: “In the philosophy of language and the history of semantics he studied topics such as the concept of truth, the semantic paradoxes, and canonical super-languages. His knowledge of the philosophy and history of logic was both wide and deep; he contributed to the literature on many-valued logics, supervaluations, and Buddhist logic. Value theory, especially questions concerning ordinal preference and rational choice, was another area of interest.”
Herzberger also developed his own formal theory of truth as a modification of Kripke’s and showed a deep interest both in the philosophy of Frege, and in the topic of the inexpressible and the ineffable. He was noted for his “quiet insistent hunger for understanding, independence of mind and intellectual honesty” in the introduction to Truth and Values: Essays for Hans Herzberger.
His student Archille Varzi, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, who left Italy to join U of T’s PhD program with the sole purpose of studying with Herzberger, remembers him fondly: “Hans shaped my intellectual life in ways that are hard to put into words. His mentorship at U of T had a profound and lasting influence not only on my education, but on the very way I think, write, and practice philosophy.”
James Tappenden, Professor at the University of Michigan, was another student of Herzberger’s and recalls his great impact on his work: “You can see Hans’s influence in everything I’ve written. In particular, my early work on truth was inspired by his profound research on truth and grounding, and my early writing on Frege shows the influence of a graduate Frege seminar he allowed me to take. Not because of any particular theorem or thesis, but because of his way of being and thinking: his hunger for understanding and the logical care he took in pursuing it. You can see his openness and curiosity in the breadth of his writings – not just technical work on truth and meaning, but work in Buddhist logic, on mysticism and the inexpressible.”
In 1991 Herzberger took early retirement and moved to India, where earlier his wife Radhika had opened the Rishi Valley School and made many invaluable contributions to the school and foundation that ran it. Together, they worked on Indian philosophy, specifically double negation in Buddhist logic as well as Bhartrhari’s paradox, which demonstrated that a 5th-century Sanskrit grammarian had anticipated self-referential paradoxes that Western philosophy treats as modern.
His daughter Maya Herzberger describes him as a “private man with a great sense of humour, always a witty comeback.” She adds that “although he was a pacifist, he was also a patriotic American, grateful for all that the country had given his family.”
The Department of Philosophy extends its heartfelt condolences to Herzberger’s wife Radhika and daughters Maya and Sunanda, as well as to the rest of his family and wide circle of friends from around the globe.
SHARE
