Philosopher and inventor of deontic logic, Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003), who was born in Helsinki, Finland, on June 14, was also a cultural critic of technoscientific progress. In philosophy, von Wright is best known as Ludwig Wittgenstein's successor in the chair of philosophy at Cambridge (1948–1951), and for participating in the publishing of Wittgenstein's papers posthumously. Von Wright was also a major contributor to the rebirth of modal logic in 1950s. Among his most important academic works are Norm and Action (1963), Varieties of Goodness (1963), and Explanation and Understanding (1971). The last had a distinctive role in efforts to bridge the gap between the Anglo-American and continental European traditions in philosophy.

Apart from his work within academic philosophy, von Wright was an important public intellectual in Finland and Scandinavia. Throughout his career he wrote philosophical essays in which he dealt extensively with the questions of the...