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Early Life
Avram Noam Chomsky December 7th, 1928 in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. From an early age, Noam was allowed to develop his creative mind by attending a school that encouraged self-directed learning. This freedom to explore would lead him to find a group of Jewish intellectuals to engage in discussion with, serving as a foundation for many ideas he would carry the remainder of his life. -
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College Years
Noam attended the University of Pennsylvania (UP) where he would eventually discover his interests particularly in the field of Linguistics. Noam would go on to earn his PhD in linguistics from UP in 1955, having done a large portion of his linguistic theory development during this time. -
Syntactic Structures
In 1957, Noam would publish Syntactic Structures a book that would cement his linguistic theory and restate a lot of the information he previously discussed in lectures he had given. The basis of Noam's linguistic theory is that children are not a blank slate, but instead the basis of grammar and other linguistic aspects are innate in humans and then developed based on environment. This theory was groundbreaking and serves as the foundation for much of modern linguistic studies. -
Political Ideology
As described in many of his works, Noam is considered somewhat of a socialist/libertarian. His primary beliefs revolve around a society where members have maximum input in the development of their own communities and aspects of the government that whose existence cannot be justified should be considered illegitimate. -
Legacy
Noam Chomsky is still alive and active. Noam still conducts lectures where he speaks on a variety of topics including language, psychology, philosophy, and social justice. Noam is also still a major political activist. -
References
Lohnda, Terje. “Noam Chomsky.” Oxford Bibliographies, 2017, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0142.xml. McGilvray, James A.. "Noam Chomsky". Encyclopedia Britannica, 3 Dec. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Noam-Chomsky. Accessed 4 December 2021. “Noam Chomsky and Progressive Politics” The Institute of Politics at Harvard University, https://iop.harvard.edu/iop-now/noam-chomsky-and-progressive-politics-millennial-take.