Casimir Lewy | |
|---|---|
 1938 pastel drawing byStanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz | |
| Born | Kazimierz Lewy (1919-02-26)26 February 1919 |
| Died | 8 February 1991(1991-02-08) (aged 71) Cambridge, England |
| Education | |
| Education | Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (PhD, 1943) |
| Thesis | Some philosophical considerations about the survival of death (1943) |
| Doctoral advisor | G. E. Moore[2] |
| Other advisor | Ludwig Wittgenstein |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic |
| Institutions | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Doctoral students | Simon Blackburn |
| Notable students | Edward Craig,Ian Hacking,Crispin Wright |
| Main interests | Philosophical logic (modal logic) |
| Notable ideas | The notion oftruth as aproperty ofpropositions is prior to the notion of truth as a property ofsentences[1] |
Casimir Lewy (/ˈlɛvi/;Polish:Kazimierz Lewy[ˈlɛvɨ]; 26 February 1919 – 8 February 1991) was aPolish philosopher of Jewish descent.
He worked inphilosophical logic but published scantly. He was an influential teacher; several of his students went on to be prominent philosophers, includingSimon Blackburn,[3]Edward Craig,Ian Hacking,[3] andCrispin Wright.
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,[4] he travelled to the UK in 1936 with the intention of improving his English. He was admitted toFitzwilliam House, Cambridge, that year to read Philosophy, supervised byJohn Wisdom, and graduated in 1939 aged twenty with first-class honours in Part II of the Tripos.[5] He had already published four short articles in the journalAnalysis.[6] A doctoral student ofG. E. Moore to 1943, he attended lectures byLudwig Wittgenstein from the late 1930s until 1945.[7] He received hisPhD from Cambridge in 1943, with a thesis entitledSome 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 theMunich crisis. But it was not untilGermany 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 theHolocaust.
Remaining in the UK, he taught at theUniversity of Liverpool, and then from 1952 at Cambridge as a University Lecturer. He also helped Moore as an assistant editor of the journalMind while Moore was lecturing in the United States, and he participated in meetings of theMoral Sciences Club. He taught at the Faculty of Moral Science in Cambridge in the years 1943–45. He was a Fellow ofTrinity College, Cambridge from 1958. He became aFellow of the British Academy in 1980.
According to his studentIan Hacking, "He had early acquired the conviction that one should publish only when one got something absolutely right, so he left very little in print."[8] Hacking also wrote, in his 2014 bookWhy is there philosophy of mathematics at all (p.260), "... Lewy's man was G.E. Moore, of whom he became the literary executor, and from whom he learn to be a `careful analytic philosopher'."
In a 2009 interview with Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge philosopherSimon Blackburn 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."[9] A Festschrift,Exercises in Analysis by Students of Casimir Lewy[10] shows his influence on many Cambridge philosophers that he taught.
The Casimir Lewy Library of thePhilosophy Faculty at the University of Cambridge is named after him.[11]
For a full listing of published papers, book reviews and critical notices see:Casimir Lewy's papers.[12]
