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Casimir Lewy

Casimir Lewy b. Warsaw, Poland 26 Feb. 1919; m 1945, Eleanor Ford; three sons ; died 8 Feb. 1991.

Education

Mikolaj Rej School, Warsaw; Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge and Trinity College, Cambridge (BA 1939 1st class hons., MA 1943, PhD 1943). His thesis was entitled "Some philosophical considerations about the survival of death".

Career

Stanton Student, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1939–41; Burney Student, University of Cambridge, 1940–42; Senior Rouse Ball Student, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1942–45; Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Liverpool, 1945–52; University Lecturer in Philosophy, Cambridge, 1952–72, Sidgwick Lecturer, 1955–72. Fellow of Trinity College, 1959. Visiting Professor of Philosophy: University of Illinois, 1951-2; University of Texas at Austin, 1967; Yale University, 1969; University Reader in Philosophy 1972-82; FBA, 1980.

Publications

Meaning and Modality, 1976; editor: G. E. Moore, Commonplace Book 1919–1953, 1962; G. E. Moore, Lectures on Philosophy, 1966; C. D. Broad, Leibniz, 1975; C. D. Broad, Kant, 1978; C. D. Broad, Ethics, 1985.

Published papers available for download in PDF format.

Influence

Lewy published very little, but he was a memorable and influential teacher. His Festschift Exercises in Analysis by Students of Casimir Lewy, edited by Ian Hacking, contains essays by some of his students who went on to become influential philosophers.

"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."
(Simon Blackburn interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, 21st April 2009 http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/224897/3/blackburn.txt)

He is commemorated at Cambridge by having the Philosophy Faculty Library named after him.

Essays and articles about Lewy

Holdcroft, D., 'Lewy, Casimir (1919–1991).' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, . 21 June 2010 </www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49873>.

Short biography (Wikipedia)

Hacking, I., 'Casimir Lewy, 1919-1991', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, V. Proceedings of the British Academy 138 (2006), pp. 171-180.

Hacking, I., ed.,‘Biographical note’, Exercises in Analysis, (1985), pp. 9–11

Anellis, H., ''Logic and Mathematics in the Library of Casimir Lewy', Modern Logic Vol. 4, no 3 (1994), pp.286-7.

Obituaries

The Guardian (15 Feb 1991); The Times (9 March 1991)

 

 

 

 

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