Casimir Lewy

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Casimir Lewy (Warsaw1919-1991) was a Polish-born British philosopher. A doctoral pupil of G. E. Moore to 1943, he attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein from the late 1930s until 1945.

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, but, according to Hacking, misleading in his denigration of P. F. Strawson.

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. Remaining in the UK, he taught at the University of Liverpool, and then from 1952 at Cambridge as a University Lecturer. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1958. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1980.

The Philosophy library at the University of Cambridge is named after him.

[edit] Reference

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