(Sao Paulo) American linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, was released from a hospital in Sao Paulo on Tuesday and will continue his “treatment” at home, we learned from the hospital denying false rumors about his death that circulated on the internet.
La Beneficência Portuguesa de Sao Paulo indicated in a medical bulletin sent to AFP that “patient Avran Noam Chomsky was released from the hospital to continue his treatment at home”, without further details.
The hospital’s press release was released after unsourced information on the death of the 95-year-old intellectual appeared on social networks.
“It’s not true, he is fine,” wrote his wife Valeria Chomsky, in response to an email from AFP.
According to the newspaper Folha from Sao Paulo, Mr Chomsky was hospitalized in the Brazilian city after suffering a stroke in June last year which affected the right side of his body.
Valeria Chomsky is Brazilian and the couple has had a residence since 2015 in the city.
Considered the founder of modern linguistics, Mr. Chomsky stated in his work Syntactic Structures (1957) that language is an innate faculty and that a “generative grammar”, a set of universal rules of language, is inscribed in the human brain.
But he became a central figure of the 20e and XXIe centuries especially for his role as a committed intellectual, in his radical criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and Israel, as well as the media.
This opponent of the Vietnam War and the American invasion of Iraq also became close to Latin American left-wing leaders such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the current Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
For many years, Mr. Chomsky was a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Arizona.