Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum

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Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum

Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (December 5, 1899—April 1942) was a Polish logician and philosopher. She published some twenty research papers along with translations into Polish of three books by Bertrand Russell.[1] The main focus of her writings was on foundational problems related to probability, induction and confirmation.[2] She is noted especially for authoring the first printed discussion of the Raven Paradox[3] which she credits to Carl Hempel[4][5] and the probabilistic solution she outlined to it.[2] Shot by the Gestapo in 1942,[1] she, like her husband Adolf Lindenbaum, and many other eminent representatives of Polish logic, shared the fate of millions of Jews murdered on Polish soil by the Nazis.[6]

Biography[]

Janina Hosiasson was born on 6 December 1899 in Warsaw, the daughter of the merchant Josef Hosiasson and his wife Sophia Feigenblat.[7][1] She was a student of Tadeusz Kotarbinski and Jan Łukasiewicz.at the University of Warsaw.and received her doctorate there under Kotarbinski in 1926[1] with a dissertation on the "Justification of Inductive Reasoning".[2] She would then combine her continuing research with employment as a teacher of philosophy in a secondary school.[8] By the late 1920s she was a respected philosopher of logic of the Lwow-Warsaw school who actively participated in the second Polish Philosophical Congress held in Warsaw in September 1927 and (like her husband-to-be) delivered papers at the First Congress of Mathematicians from Slavic Countries held in Warsaw and Poznań in September 1929.[1] Janina then went, on a scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education, to spend the 1929/30 academic year studying philosophy in Cambridge.[1]

Hosiasson was one of the speakers at the first Unity of Science Congress in Paris 1935.[9][10] She is also known to have participated in the preliminary meeting for the same in Prague the previous year.[11][12] Around the end of October or beginning of November 1935, Hosiasson married mathematician and fellow logician Adolf Lindenbaum.[13] The couple would then reside together in the Zoliborz district of Warsaw.[1] After marriage Janina would use the surname Hosiasson-Lindenbaum.[14] She attended the second Unity of Science Congress held in Copenhagen in 1936[12] and had also (like Alfred Tarski) been scheduled to present her research at the fifth Unity of Science Congress at Harvard in September 1939.[14] Fatefully, however, she was unable to sail in time[14] - she applied for passage on the next boat to America after that taken by Tarski but her visa was denied.[11]

On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland. On 6 September 1939, with Warsaw under artillery fire, the couple fled the city on foot.[13] As Janina would report in letters to Otto Neurath and G.E. Moore,[15] their progress east was slow and the road repeatedly strafed by the Luftwaffe.[13] The couple became separated after Janina accepted a lift on a motorcycle to Rivne.[13] From there, she made her way to Vilnius where she eventually learnt her husband had taken refuge in Bialystok.[13] Soviet forces entered Poland on 17 September and both cities would fall under Russian occupation within the same month.[13] Janina later met her husband in Bialystok but, disagreeing about where best to survive, he chose to remain there whilst she returned to Vilnius (a city under Polish jurisdiction at the outbreak of war but which the occupying Soviets formally returned to a then notionally independent Lithuania).[13]

On 22 June 22, 1941, Germany invaded (the Polish territories annexed by) the Soviet Union and within days, their troops had entered Bialystok and, soon after, Vilnius.[1] At some point before July 1941 Adolf Lindenbaum moved to Vilnius but, rather than staying at his wife's downtown apartment, he would stay in a small satellite community in the east of the city.[13] At some point before the middle of August 1941, Adolf, along with his sister Stefanja, would be arrested and then, in nearby Naujoji Vilnia, shot by German forces or their Lithuanian collaborators.[13] Janina would later be arrested by the Gestapo and in April, 1942, after 7 months of imprisonment in Vilnius, she was transported to Paneriai, on the outskirts of the city, and shot.[1]

Select works[]

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i Zygmunt, Jan; Purdy, Robert (2014-12-01) [2014]. "Adolf Lindenbaum: Notes on his Life, with Bibliography and Selected References". Logica Universalis. 8 (3–4): 285–320. doi:10.1007/s11787-014-0108-2. ISSN 1661-8297.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c "Janina Hosiasson (1899 -1942)". European philosophy of science-- Philosophy of science in Europe and the Viennese Heritage. Galavotti, Maria Carla,, Nemeth, Elisabeth,, Stadler, Friedrich. Cham: Springer International Publishing. 2013-08-28. pp. 78–81. ISBN 9783319018997. OCLC 857813353.CS1 maint: others (link)
  3. ^ Beery, Janet L.; Greenwald, Sarah J.; Jensen-Vallin, Jacqueline A.; Mast, Maura B. (2017-12-02). "Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (1899-1942)". Women in mathematics : celebrating the centennial of the Mathematical Association of America. Cham, Switzerland. pp. 76–77. ISBN 9783319666945. OCLC 1015215187.
  4. ^ Vranas, P. B. M. (2004-09-01). "Hempel's Raven Paradox: A Lacuna in the Standard Bayesian Solution". The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 55 (3): 546. doi:10.1093/bjps/55.3.545. ISSN 0007-0882. S2CID 14761025. The exact origin of Hempel's paradox is shrouded in mystery. Although Hempel apparently did not formulate the paradox in print until 1943 ([1943], p. 128), Hosiasson-Lindenbaum formulated it as early as 1940 ([1940], p. 136): she attributed it to Hempel but gave no reference. (Hempel ([1945], p. 21 n. 2) referred to 'discussions' with her.) The paradox was 'foreshadowed' (Jeffrey [1995], p. 3) but by no means formulated by Hempel in 1937 ([1937), p. 222).
  5. ^ Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, Janina (1940). "On Confirmation". The Journal of Symbolic Logic. 5 (4): 133–148. doi:10.2307/2268173. JSTOR 2268173.
  6. ^ W‴jcicki, Ryszard (1997), Dalla Chiara, Maria Luisa; Doets, Kees; Mundici, Daniele; van Benthem, Johan (eds.), "The Postwar Panorama of Logic in Poland", Logic and Scientific Methods: Volume One of the Tenth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Florence, August 1995, Synthese Library, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, p. 499, doi:10.1007/978-94-017-0487-8_28, ISBN 978-94-017-0487-8, retrieved 2021-02-26, Such eminent representatives of Polish logic as Adolf Lindenbaum, his wife Janina Hossasion Lindenbaum, Mojiesz Presburger, Józef Pepis, Jan Salamucha, Z. Schmierer, Mordchaj Wajsberg shared the fate of millions of Jews murdered on Polish soil by Nazi's occupants.
  7. ^ Birth record of Yanina Hosiasson
  8. ^ "Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaumowa: the logic of induction / Anna Jedynak". Polish philosophers of science and nature in the 20th century. Krajewski, Władysław. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2001. p. 97. ISBN 9042014970. OCLC 50325256.CS1 maint: others (link)
  9. ^ Galavotti, Maria Carla (2018-10-25). "The Sessions on Induction and Probability at the 1935 Paris Congress: An overview". Philosophia Scientiæ. Travaux d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences (22–3): 213–232. doi:10.4000/philosophiascientiae.1629. ISSN 1281-2463. The First International Congress for the Unity of Science (Congrès international de philosophie scientifique) held in Paris in 1935 hosted two sessions devoted to “Induction” and “Probability” respectively. Outstanding representatives of the movement for scientific philosophy read papers in those sessions: the one on Induction hosted papers by Hans Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap, while the one on Probability hosted papers by Reichenbach, Bruno de Finetti, Zygmunt Zawirski, Schlick, and Janina Hosiasson..
  10. ^ Wolters, Gereon. ""Wrongful life" reloaded: Logical empiricism's philosophy of biology 1934-1936 (Prague/Paris/Copenhagen): With historical and political intermezzos (2018)". ResearchGate.
  11. ^ Jump up to: a b Burdman Feferman, Anita; Feferman, Solomon (2004). Alfred Tarski : life and logic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 108. ISBN 9780521802406. OCLC 54691904.
  12. ^ Jump up to: a b Szaniawski, Klemens, ed. (2012-12-06). The Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw School. pp. 1, 444. ISBN 9789400928299.
  13. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i Purdy, Robert; Zygmunt, Jan (2018), Garrido, Ángel; Wybraniec-Skardowska, Urszula (eds.), "Adolf Lindenbaum, Metric Spaces and Decompositions", The Lvov-Warsaw School. Past and Present, Studies in Universal Logic, Springer International Publishing, pp. 505–550, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-65430-0_36, ISBN 9783319654300
  14. ^ Jump up to: a b c McFarland, Andrew; McFarland, Joanna; Smith, James T. (2014-08-11). "p.335". Alfred Tarski : early work in Poland : geometry and teaching. McFarland, Andrew,, McFarland, Joanna,, Smith, James T. New York. p. 335. ISBN 9781493914746. OCLC 888074959.
  15. ^ JANINA HOSIASSON-LINDENBAUM’S LETTER TO GEORGE EDWARD MOORE (Appendix to) Szubka, T. (2018). "List Janiny Hosiasson-Lindenbaum do George’a Edwarda Moore’a." Filozofia Nauki, 26(1), 129-141.
  16. ^ Free to read online at JSTOR with registration - short review MacLane, Saunders (June 1941).similarly available with JSTOR registration and also available for full preview via Cambridge Core

Further reading[]

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