- Casimir Lewy
Casimir Lewy (
Warsaw 26 February 1919 -8 February 1991 ) was a Polish-born British philosopher. His father, Ludwig Lewy, was a doctor and died when he was a boy, so he grew up with his mother's family. A doctoral pupil ofG. E. Moore to 1943, he attended lectures byLudwig Wittgenstein from the late 1930s until 1945. [P. M. S. Hacker , "Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy" (1996) p.77, p.138.]He worked in
philosophical logic but published scantily. According toIan 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". He was an influential teacher, but, according to Hacking, misleading in his denigration ofP. F. Strawson . Several of his students went on to be influential philosophers including Hacking andSimon Blackburn .After nine years at the Mikolaj Rej school in Warsaw, he travelled to the UK in 1936. He was admitted to the
University of Cambridge that year, and graduated in 1939 aged twenty. Remaining in the UK, he taught at theUniversity of Liverpool , and then from 1952 at Cambridge as a University Lecturer. He became Doctor of Philosophy in 1943, with an essay entitled Some Philosophical Considerations about the Survival of Death. He also helped Moore as an assistant editor of the journal Mind while Moore was lecturing in the United States, and he participated in meetings of the Moral Science 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.The library of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Cambridge is named after him. [ [http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/library/links.html Faculty of Philosophy: About the Faculty of Philosophy ] ]
Notes
References
*British Academy Biographical Memoir: Ian Hacking, Proceedings of the British Academy, 138 pp.171-177
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.