Casimir Lewy ( pl, Kazimierz Lewy; 26 February 1919 – 8 February 1991) was a
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles
Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...
philosopher of Jewish descent.
He worked in
philosophical logic
Understood in a narrow sense, philosophical logic is the area of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. Some theorists conceive philosophical ...
but published scantly. He was an influential teacher; several of his students went on to be prominent philosophers, including
Simon Blackburn
Simon Blackburn (born 12 July 1944) is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his effort ...
,
Edward Craig,
Ian Hacking
Ian MacDougall Hacking (born February 18, 1936) is a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and been ...
,
[ and ]Crispin Wright
Crispin James Garth Wright (; born 21 December 1942) is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean (neo-logicist) philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skep ...
.
Life
His father, Ludwig Lewy, was a doctor and died in 1919 when he was an infant, so he grew up with his mother Izabela's family. After nine years at the Mikolaj Rej school in Warsaw, he travelled to the UK in 1936 with the intention of improving his English. He was admitted to Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge that year to read Philosophy, supervised by John Wisdom
Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom (12 September 1904, in Leyton, Essex – 9 December 1993, in Cambridge), usually cited as John Wisdom, was a leading British philosopher considered to be an ordinary language philosopher, a philosopher of mind ...
, and graduated in 1939 aged twenty with first-class honours in Part II of the Tripos. He had already published four short articles in the journal ''Analysis
Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...
''. A doctoral student of G. E. Moore
George Edward Moore (4 November 1873 – 24 October 1958) was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the founders of analytic philosophy. He and Russell led the turn from ideal ...
to 1943, he attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...
from the late 1930s until 1945. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1943, with a thesis entitled ''Some philosophical considerations concerning the survival of death''. During this period, the international situation, as well as the political situation in Poland was rapidly deteriorating. Lewy spent most of the Long Vacation of 1938 in Poland, returning to Cambridge just before the Munich crisis
The Munich Agreement ( cs, Mnichovská dohoda; sk, Mníchovská dohoda; german: Münchner Abkommen) was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. It provided "cession to Germany ...
. But it was not until Germany invaded Poland in 1939 that he realized he would not be able to return to his native country. Most of his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
.
Remaining in the UK, he taught at the University of Liverpool
, mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning
, established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...
, and then from 1952 at Cambridge as a University Lecturer. He also helped Moore as an assistant editor of the journal ''Mind
The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...
'' while Moore was lecturing in the United States, and he participated in meetings of the Moral Sciences Club
The Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, founded in October 1878, is a philosophy discussion group that meets weekly at the University of Cambridge during term time. Speakers are invited to present a paper with a strict upper time limit of ...
. He taught at the Faculty of Moral Science in Cambridge in the years 1943–45. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge ...
from 1958. He became a Fellow of the British Academy
Fellowship of the British Academy (FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are:
# Fellows – scholars resident in the United Kingdom
# C ...
in 1980.
According to his student Ian Hacking
Ian MacDougall Hacking (born February 18, 1936) is a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and been ...
, "He had early acquired the conviction that one should publish only when one got something absolutely right, so he left very little in print."
In a 2009 interview with Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn
Simon Blackburn (born 12 July 1944) is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his effort ...
said of Lewy: "At Cambridge the great influence on all of us in Trinity was Casimir Lewy; he was a Polish Jew who had left Germany just in time before the Second World War. He lost either all or nearly all of his family; he was a charismatic teacher with an enormous influence on a whole generation of philosophy students in Trinity—Ian Hacking, Edward Craig and myself, Crispin Wright—many of us became academics." A Festschrift, ''Exercises in Analysis by Students of Casimir Lewy'' shows his influence on many Cambridge philosophers that he taught.
The Casimir Lewy Library of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Cambridge is named after him.
Publications
* '' Meaning and Modality'', Cambridge University Press, 1976.
*For a full listing of published papers, book reviews and critical notices see: ''Casimir Lewy's papers.''
See also
*List of Poles
This is a partial list of notable Polish or Polish-speaking or -writing people. People of partial Polish heritage have their respective ancestries credited.
Science
Physics
* Czesław Białobrzeski
* Andrzej Buras
* Georges Charpak ...
(philosophers)
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lewy, Casimir
1919 births
1991 deaths
20th-century British philosophers
20th-century Polish philosophers
Alumni of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
British people of Polish-Jewish descent
Jewish philosophers
Polish emigrants to the United Kingdom
Fellows of the British Academy