Chapter 7 Casimir Lewy and the Lvov-Warsaw School
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Abstract
The Polish-born British philosopher Kazimierz (known as Casimir) Lewy ( was an inspiring and influential lecturer and reader at the University of Cambridge who significantly contributed to the intellectual formation of a number of British philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century. He was a characteristically analytic philosopher along the lines of his Cambridge mentors, in particular G. E. Moore and John Wisdom. However, his philosophical interests arose in Warsaw through encounters with the writings and lectures of Tadeusz Kotarbiński. Even though Lewy was well acquainted with the tradition of Polish analytic philosophy, embodied in the Lvov-Warsaw School, and discussed it occasionally in his work, he was rather resistant to it. This paper provides an account of Lewy’s exposure to that school, and then suggests what the rationale of this resistance could be. Its sources are discerned in: (1) Lewy’s unrepentant affirmation of the existence of abstract objects, including concepts and propositions, and of modalities; (2) his flexible approach to logic and deference to the ordinary notion of entailment, and (3) his conception of philosophical analysis along the lines of G. E. Moore.