Paul Gochet

Paul Gochet (21 March 1932 – 21 June 2011) was a Belgian logician, philosopher, and emeritus professor of the University of Liège. His research was mainly in the fields of logic and analytic philosophy. He is perhaps best known for his works on Quine's philosophy. Gochet was born in Bressoux near Liège. He graduated from the University of Brussels (ULB) with degrees in Romance philology in 1954 and philosophy in 1959. He spent a year in England attending the courses of A. Ayer at University College London (1957) and J. L. Austin at Oxford in 1958. He received his PhD from the University of Liege in 1968. He was an assistant at the University of Liège from 1962 and became an ordinary professor in 1972, teaching logic and English-language philosophy. He held various visiting and research positions at international universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and the Collège de France. Gochet's interests included language, logic, and knowledge. He was instrumental in introducing analytic philosophy to the French-speaking community. His work extended to the formal semantics of natural language, modal and intensional logics, and later to applications in computer science and artificial intelligence, particularly epistemic logic. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium and the International Institute of Philosophy.