Henry Hiż

Henryk Hiż (; 8 October 1917 – 19 December 2006) was a Polish analytical philosopher specializing in linguistics, philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and ethics, active for most of his life in the United States, one of the youngest representatives of the Lwów–Warsaw school.

A disciple of Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Hiż studied at the University of Warsaw. During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, he participated in the Polish resistance movement as a cryptographer in the Home Army. In 1944 he took part in the Warsaw Uprising. In 1948, he defended his Ph.D. at Harvard University under W.V.O. Quine.

In 1950, he permanently emigrated to the United States. He kept in touch with the American logical environment, including with Alfred Tarski, and maintained lively contact with the Polish academic community. He lectured at the University of Pennsylvania between 1960 and 1988. In 1976 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 1982 he received the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award. He was a member of the Warsaw Scientific Society.

He published about one hundred original papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Strongly influenced by the Lwów–Warsaw school, initially in his research he was interested in semantics, formal logic and methodology of the sciences. From the late 1950s, he dealt mainly with linguistics in relation to logic and philosophy. He described himself as a naturalist and linguistic behaviorist, assuming that the linguistic work is primarily about linguistic behavior. He called himself a “negative utilitarian”; and was also a pacifist and an atheist.

Biography Early life and German occupation He was born on October 8, 1917, in Petrograd as the son of Tadeusz Hiż and Emilia née Elżanowska. He had an older brother, (1915–1999). In 1920, the family came to Poland, settling in Warsaw. Henryk's mother, Emilia, was an architect, while his father Tadeusz Hiż was a journalist, who kept in touch with the Warsaw's bohemian circles. Franciszek Fiszer was, among others, a frequent guest in their house. Years later, Henryk Hiż said that “he obtained a lot from his parental home”.

He attended the Mikołaj Rej High School in Warsaw, where he passed the matriculation examination in 1937. In the theater, he also met Ewa Kunina, Juliusz Osterwa and Iwo Gall.

In 1937 he enrolled at the University of Warsaw to study philosophy. He attended lectures and seminars in logic led by Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski and Alfred Tarski. After the fall of the uprising, he was taken prisoner by Nazi Germany and carried to an oflag in Lübeck, where he stayed until the liberation of the Allies.

In 1988 he retired In 1976–1977 he was a visiting professor of philosophy at the Jagiellonian University. and was buried at the Rakowicki Cemetery in Kraków, in the family tomb (LX headquarters, southern row, place 23).

Work and thought He specialized in logic and theoretical linguistics. Jan Woleński called him “an outstanding representative of Polish and American analytical philosophy”, “the youngest disciple of the Lwów–Warsaw school”, whose death resulted in the “real end” of this school.

Awards Guggenheim Fellowship (1976)

In 2010, the Polish Semiotics Society established the Henryk and Danuta Hiż Award as “an individual cash prize awarded in a competition for the best work on language philosophy and sign theory”. The Prize Fund is financial resources offered by Henryk and Danuta Hiż to a befriended Polish marriage, who then transferred the funds to the Polish Semiotic Society.