Þorsteinn Gylfason

This is an Icelandic name. The last name is a patronymic, not a family name; this person is properly referred to by the given name Þorsteinn.

Þorsteinn Gylfason (12 August 1942 – 16 August 2005) was an Icelandic philosopher, translator, musician and poet. Þorsteinn distinguished himself in Icelandic public life with his writings in newspapers, journals and publications.

His life and accomplishments

Early life

Þorsteinn was born and raised in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland. His parents were Guðrún Vilmundardóttir and Gylfi Þorsteinsson Gíslason, a university professor and government minister. He was the brother of Vilmundur Gylfason, a politician, and Þorvaldur Gylfason, an economist.

Þorsteinn graduated from the Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík gymnasium in 1961 and subsequently received a grant to study at Harvard University. He left Harvard with a B.A. degree in philosophy, having studied under the tutelage of Willard Van Orman Quine. He returned home for graduate studies in Icelandic, and later attended the University of Munich and Magdalen College, Oxford from 1965 to 1971. At Oxford, he studied under Gilbert Ryle and befriended well-known characters from philosophical circles, such as Alfred Jules Ayer. This influence affected his work in philosophy to a considerable extent.

Career

Þorsteinn worked as an assistant professor at the University of Iceland from 1971, and was made full professor in 1989. He was visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the London School of Economics.

Þorsteinn received a number of awards and acknowledgements for his works, amongst them the Þórbergur Þórðarson and National Icelandic Literature Prizes in 1997. In 1994, he was awarded the Knights Cross of the Icelandic Falcon by Icelandic president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir for his contributions to Icelandic culture and academia.

Works

Þorsteinn wrote 12 books on philosophy and philology, including An Essay on Man (1970), An Essay on the World (1992), Thinking in Icelandic (1996) and Justice and Injustice (1998). He also published over 37 academic papers in various philosophical journals and composed poetry and lyrics, either with musical composer Atli Heimir Sveinsson or to the music of Kurt Weill and Richard Wagner.

His translations to Icelandic included On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, Søren Kierkegaard's Repetitions, Plato's Phaedo, Descartes' Meditations, all of whom were published by the Icelandic Literature Society, for which he served as a series chief editor for almost two decades.

Philosophy

Þorsteinn's philosophical work was mostly in the philosophy of language and mind and political philosophy. His method and style of philosophy was very much rooted in the analytic tradition, through influence from men such as W.V.O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. He also found inspiration in the continental philosophers, especially from existentialism in the style of Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, whose works he translated into Icelandic. Later on, his focus was on contemporary work by Elizabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke, John Rawls, Philippa Foot, Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty.

Þorsteinn's early works (An Essay on Man in particular) are in the style of 20th century logical positivism—highly suspicious of esoteric Hegelian metaphysics. He later turned away from comprehensive theories to focus on specific problems. He considered himself an analytic philosopher insofar as "the ideas that have proven to be the most fruitful and inspiring, have been those of scholars generally considered to be 'analytic philosophers'. He usually said he was not much of a utilitarian neither in personal thinking nor politics and favoured deontology and virtue ethics.

His final words when describing himself as a philosopher were: "I believe that no philosophical theory can avoid paying the utmost heed to the natural sciences."

Death

Þorsteinn was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the stomach on 12 August 2005 and died four days later. His funeral took place in Reykjavík Cathedral.

Publications

Books

Booklets

Principal essays in books or periodicals

Principal poems in periodicals and anthologies

Works for the stage

Main translations into Icelandic

External links

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