George Edward Hughes

George Edward Hughes (8 June 1918 – 4 March 1994) was an Irish-born New Zealand philosopher and logician whose principal scholarly works were concerned with modal logic and medieval philosophy.

His English parents George James Hughes and Gertrude Sparks moved to Scotland in the early 1920s, as a result of the Irish War of Independence.

He died in Wellington on 4 March 1994. Notable influences on Hughes' philosophical development included John Wisdom and Ludwig Wittgenstein, from whom he took classes at Cambridge; J. L. Austin, a leading exponent of ordinary language philosophy; and Arthur Prior, with whom he found much in common when they met in New Zealand.

[1] His early interests were in ethics and the philosophy of religion, but he is most widely known for books on modal logic co-authored with his colleague and former student Max Cresswell.

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