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 of G. E. Moore to 1943, he attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein from the late 1930s until 1945.^[1]

He worked in philosophical logic but published scantily. According to Ian 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; several of his students went on to be influential philosophers including Hacking and Simon 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 the University 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 of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1958. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1980.

The library of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Cambridge is named after him.^[2]

Notes

1. ^ P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (1996) p.77, p.138.
2. ^ Faculty of Philosophy: About the Faculty of Philosophy

References

• British Academy Biographical Memoir: Ian Hacking, Proceedings of the British Academy, 138 pp.171-177

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