Ivano Caponigro

Richard Montague (1930-1971) was a brilliant American logician and philosopher who, among other achievements, revolutionized our notion of language with an elegant "simple" theory of meaning that was a major breakthrough and started an entirely new subfield in linguistics and philosophy of language: formal semantics. Montague was also a man with a "complex" multi-faceted personality, sides of which were unknown even to some of the people who were close to him who found out about them after he was murdered at the age of 40. This project brings the whole Richard Montague into the light by investigating his intellectual contributions and personal life in order to write a biography that aims to be of interest not only for an academic audience but also for a broader group of readers.