Pavel Tichý (Czech:[ˈpavɛlˈcɪxiː]; 18 February 1936,Brno,Czechoslovakia – 26 October 1994,Dunedin,New Zealand) was aCzechlogician,philosopher andmathematician.

He worked in the field ofintensional logic and foundedtransparent intensional logic, an original theory of the logical analysis ofnatural languages – the theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we learn, know and can communicate when we come to understand what a sentence means. He spent roughly 25 years working on it. His main work is a bookThe Foundations of Frege's Logic, published byWalter de Gruyter in 1988.

Tichý was born in Brno in 1936. His father was an insurance clerk. His family lived inZlín until 1948 when they moved toVsetín. At school he was already a brilliant student. He also liked playing music ofJaroslav Ježek on the piano. After finishing studies in Vsetín he moved toPrague followed by his parents. Tichý graduated in 1959 atCharles University in Prague. He stayed there tutoring as an assistant from 1961 to 1968 at the department of Logic in the Faculty of Philosophy. One of his other hobbies was carpentry. He was said to be a perfectionist in everything he did, whether he was learning a foreign language or making a table.

In 1968 he received an invitation fromExeter University in theUnited Kingdom. He was permitted to leave the country even though it was shortly after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in thePrague Spring. He decided not to return. In 1970 he emigrated with his family to New Zealand, by ship. He started teaching at theUniversity of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand where he became Professor of Philosophy at Otago in 1981. Tichý stayed teaching there until his death. He is remembered as a ferocious debater who liked to express his views directly regardless of any bad implications it could have. This made him a lot of friends but also a lot of enemies.

Four years after theVelvet Revolution, in 1993, Tichý was offered the position of Head of the Department of Logic at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts ofCharles University in Prague. He died before taking up this position.

• PhDr. (Charles University, 1959), thesis:Výklad Gödelovy věty o neúplnosti v prosté teorii typů [An Exposition ofGödel'sIncompleteness Theorem in theSimple Theory of Types]
• Candidate of Sciences (Charles University, 1964), thesis:Vyčíslitelnost ve vztahu k teoriím [On Computability w.r.t. Theories]
• Docent (Charles University, 1969), thesis:Intensions in Terms ofTuring Machines and On the Vicious Circle in Definitions: Two Studies in LogicalSemantics
• PhD (Exeter University, 1971), thesis:Contributions to the Theory ofPostulate Systems
• Associate Professor, University of Otago, 1978
• Professor, University of Otago, 1981

• P. Tichý (1988):The Foundations of Frege's Logic. De Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1988, 333 pp.,ISBN 3-11-011668-5
• V. Svoboda, B. Jespersen, C. Cheyne (Eds.) (2004):Pavel Tichý's Collected Papers in Logic and Philosophy. Filosofia, Prague and Otago University Press, Dunedin, 901 pp.,ISBN 1-877276-98-7

• Tichy's biography and bibliography – Transparent Intensional Logic website, Masaryk University, Brno
• Tichy's biography – Mac Tutor Biographies, University of St Andrews, Scotland
• Tichy's biographyArchived 2016-02-26 at theWayback Machine – University of Otago

• 1936 births
• 1994 suicides
• 1994 deaths
• Charles University alumni
• Czech logicians
• Academic staff of the University of Otago
• 20th-century Czech mathematicians
• 20th-century Czech philosophers
• Scientists from Brno
• Czechoslovak emigrants
• Immigrants to New Zealand

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Pages with Czech IPA
• Webarchive template wayback links