Hans Kamp

Who is Hans Kamp?

Johan Anthony Willem Kamp is a Dutch philosopher and linguist, responsible for introducing Discourse Representation Theory in 1981. Kamp received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1968, and has taught at Cornell University, University of London, University of Texas, Austin, and University of Stuttgart. His dissertation, Tense Logic and the Theory of Linear Order is devoted to functional completeness in tense logic, the main result being that all temporal operators are definable in terms of "since" and "until" - provided that the underlying temporal structure is a continuous linear ordering. Kamp's 1971 paper on "now" was the first employment of double-indexing in model theoretic semantics. His doctoral committee included Richard Montague as chairman, Chen Chung Chang, Alonzo Church, David Kaplan, Yiannis N. Moschovakis, and Jordan Howard Sobel.