Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum

Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (Russian: Янина Иосифовна Гозиасон, 6 December 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 were on foundational problems related to probability, induction and confirmation.[2] She is noted especially for her exegesis, in her 1940 paper On Confirmation, of the Raven Paradox[3] which she credits to Carl Hempel.[4] Shot by the Gestapo in 1942, she like many other eminent representatives of Polish logic such as Mojżesz Presburger, shared the fate of millions of Jews murdered on Polish soil by the Nazis.

Biography

Janina Hosiasson was born on 6 December 1899 in Warsaw, the daughter of the merchant Josef Hosiasson and his wife Sophia Feigenblat.[5][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 then became a secondary school teacher.[6] By the late 1920s.she was a respected philosopher of logic of the Lwow-Warsaw school who (like her husband-to-be) delivered papers at the First Congress of Mathematicians from Slavic Countries[1] held in Warsaw and Poznań in September 1929. 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]..

According to Zygmunt and Purdy "in late 1935, or (more likely) sometime in the first 7 or 8 months of 1936" Janina Hosiasson married mathematician and fellow logician Adolf Lindenbaum.[1] After marriage Janina would use the surname Hosiasson-Lindenbaum.[6] The couple then resided together in Zoliborz.[1] Janina had focused her research primarily on induction and the application of probability theory to inductive logic.[3] She had (like Alfred Tarski) been scheduled to present her research at the Unity of Science Congress at Harvard in September 1939 but she was unable to sail in time[6] - she applied for passage on the next boat to America after that taken by Tarski but her visa was denied.[7]

At the outbreak of World War II, on 6 September 1939, the couple moved to Vilnius (a city then in Poland - known as Wilno - that was annexed by the Soviet Union) but there separated with Adolf continuing on to Bialystok (it is unknown whether they saw each other after this). On 22 June 22, 1941, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union.Within days, German troops had entered Bialystok and, soon after, Vilnius. Around September, 1941 her husband was arrested in Bialystok.and it is generally thought (again, according to Zygmunt and Purdy) that he was killed by the Nazis that same year. Janina was 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 bibliography

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 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 – via Springer.
  2. 1 2 "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. pp. 78–81. ISBN 9783319018997. OCLC 857813353.
  3. 1 2 "Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (1899-1942)". Women in mathematics : celebrating the centennial of the Mathematical Association of America. Beery, Janet,, Greenwald, Sarah J.,, Jensen-Vallin, Jacqueline A., Mast, Maura B., Mathematical Association of America. Cham, Switzerland. pp. 76–77. ISBN 9783319666945. OCLC 1015215187.
  4. ↑ Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, Janina (1940). "On Confirmation". The Journal of Symbolic Logic. 5 (4): 133–148. doi:10.2307/2268173. JSTOR 2268173.
  5. ↑ Birth record of Yanina Hosiasson
  6. 1 2 3 "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.
  7. ↑ Burdman., Feferman, Anita (2004). Alfred Tarski : life and logic. Feferman, Solomon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 108. ISBN 9780521802406. OCLC 54691904.

Other Resources

Jedynak, Anna (2001). "Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum - The Logic of Induction". In Krajewski, Władysław. Polish philosophers of science and nature in the 20th century. Poznań studies in the philosophy of the sciences and the humanities. 74. Editions Rodopi B.V. (published April 2002). pp. 97–102. ISBN 9789042014978.

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