Leon Chwistek Biography

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The Polish philosopher, logician, painter, and aesthetician Leon Chwistek was born in Zakopane, Poland on January 13, 1884. His father was a doctor, and his mother a pianist. As a philosopher, Chwistek was particularly noted for his opposition to the metaphysical and idealistic modes of thought that were so prevalent in his lifetime.

Chwistek grew up in the pleasant town of Tatras where he was a friend of Stanislaw Witkiewicz. As a student in Cracow, he studied mathematics and philosophy at the Jagellonian University at the same time that he attended the Academy of Fine Arts.

After earning a doctorate in 1906, Chwistek became a teacher at the same gymnasium where he himself had studied. Upon being awarded a scholarship, he traveled abroad to study logic and mathematics, and attended the lectures of David Hilbert and Henri Poincaré.

After the First World War, Chwistek began lecturing in mathematics at the University of Cracow, becoming a qualified lecturer there in 1928. In 1921, he published his theory on the plurality of realities. In his theory, there are four concepts in reality: natural reality, physical reality, reality of sensation, and reality of images. He argued that each of these concepts has its own sphere of applications, and none should be confused with another. Chwistek applied his ideas to the study of movements and styles in art, which he felt should be evaluated based on form, rather than reality.

As a logician and mathematician, Chwistek believed that abstract concepts existed only as names, and were themselves without objective meaning. Starting with the views of Bertrand Russell, Henri Poincaré and David Hilbert, Chwistek developed the field of rational semantics, which he argued could be applied to problems in philosophy, science, social theory, and art.

In 1924, he proposed his theory of constructive types. In it, the members of a class are of a higher type than the class, and there is no highest type.

Between 1930 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1940, Chwistek was a professor of logic at the University of Lvov. In 1940, being sympathetic to Marxism-Leninism, he took political refuge in the Soviet Union, where he involved himself in scientific research and political activity.

Chwistek died in Moscow on August 20th, 1944. He is today remembered for proposing the simple theory of types to eliminate the paradoxes of the theory of classes, for his criticism of the use of existence axioms in logic and mathematics.