Lars Hertzberg is Professor emeritus in philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, in Åbo/Turku, Finland. He was born in 1943, and is a member of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. He received the degree of filosofie kandidat (M.A. equivalent) at the University of Helsinki in 1967, and that of Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1970. His supervisors were Erik Stenius (at Helsinki) and Norman Malcolm (at Cornell).
Hertzberg has taught at the University of Helsinki and the University of Arizona. He held the philosophy chair at Åbo from 1984 to 2007. He has been a research visitor at the University of Wales, Lampeter, and the University of Oregon.
Hertzberg's doctoral dissertation was called Explanations of Conduct. He has published a number of journal articles in English, Swedish and Finnish dealing with issues in the philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of the humanities and the thought of Wittgenstein. Some of Hertzberg's articles were published in a collection with the title The Limits of Experience (Acta Philosophica Fennica, 1994). He has translated some of Wittgenstein's work into Swedish (Über Gewisshet, Vermischte Bemerkungen, co-translator of The Blue and Brown Books). He has edited the collection Essäer om Wittgenstein (in Swedish), and with Martin Gustafsson, The Practice of Language (Kluwer 2002). For twelve years he wrote a regular column for the daily newspaper Åbo Underrättelser.
Hertzberg's regards the following as his most important articles (for references, see list of publications in this website):
- "The factual dependence of the language game"
- "The kind of certainty is the kind of language game"
- "Blame and causality"
- "On the attitude of trust"
- "Imagination and the sense of identity"
- "The limits of understanding"
- "The importance of being thoughtful"
- "The sense is where you find it"
- "How do sentences do it?"
- "Moral escapism and applied ethics"
Current research projects: The Ethical Will (ethics, philosophical psychology); Having Something to Say (philosophy of language).
Lars Hertzberg was married to Ann-Christin, who died in 2008. They have two sons and two granddaughters.
Hertzberg shares his life with Merete Mazzarella, writer and Professor Emerita of Nordic Literature at the University of Helsinki. They were married on 4 February, 2012.