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Barwise Award for Distinguished Contributions to Symbolic Systems

The Barwise Award honors distinguished contributions to the Symbolic Systems Program, broadly defined.

Photo of Jon Barwise
Jon Barwise (1942-2000), Director of the Symbolic Systems Program (1986-1989)

About the award:

The K. Jon Barwise Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Symbolic Systems Program was inaugurated in 2001, in honor of the late Kenneth Jon Barwise, Professor in the Department of Philosophy, who served as the first faculty director of Symbolic Systems and a member of the program's founding committee. Jon's untimely death from cancer in 2000 saddened all who knew him. He was an influential logician, mathematician, and philosopher, who came to Stanford in 1983 to co-found the Center for the Study of Language and Information, the research laboratory that spawned the Symbolic Systems Program and to which we maintain close ties to this day. Jon was only on our faculty for seven years, leaving in 1990 to teach at Indiana University, where he co-founded what is now the Cogntive Science Program there. During his time at Stanford, in addition to leading Symbolic Systems from 1986 through '89, Professor Barwise co-wrote (with John Etchemendy) the textbook Language, Proof, and Logic, and he gave our program its name: "Symbolic Systems".
 
 

Past recipients (and the years in which they received the Barwise Award) have been: