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 the 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, Stanisław (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. For two years he was an actor at the School Theater of the Reduta Institute. In 1938, he performed in the play Kościuszko near Racławice (Kościuszko pod Racławicami) directed by Maria Dulęba, portraying historical figure Bartosz Głowacki. In the theater, he also met Ewa Kunina, Juliusz Osterwa and Iwo Gall. In the late 1930s he associated with the so-called “democratic youth”, becoming one of the founding members of the anti-fascist Democratic Club in Warsaw.
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. He was most influenced by Tadeusz Kotarbiński, to which he later referred as his master. After the establishment of the ghetto benches at the university, Hiż together with a group of students used to stand against the wall instead of sitting during the lectures, to manifest their opposition to the antisemitic attitude of most of the then-academic staff and co-students.
After the outbreak of World War II, during the German occupation of Poland, Hiż continued his education in the underground university until 1944. At the time, he was appointed an assistant to Kotarbiński and Łukasiewicz, and ran the classes in their absence. In the wartime he made friends with Jerzy Pelc, Klemens Szaniawski, Jan Strzelecki, Andrzej Grzegorczyk and Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński.
Although he was a pacifist from a young age, and he was to say that he would not be able to use a gun even in self-defense, he joined the Home Army and became active in the Polish resistance movement. Later he justified that “a few roundups morally or nervously forced him to” do that. He worked in the Home Army's General Command, in the ciphers department. Mathematician Stefan Mazurkiewicz taught him encryption. In 1943 Henryk Hiż married Danuta Wicentowicz. In 1944 he took part in the Warsaw Uprising, in the rank of second lieutenant (podporucznik). 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. He considered the decision of Polish military command to start an uprising “unwise”.