Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz lived from December 12, 1890, born in Tarnopol, now Ternopil, to April 12, 1963, when he died in Warsaw, and was a Polish philosopher and logician, a prominent figure in the Lwów-Warsaw school of logic. He taught at the University of Lwów and the University of Warsaw and served as rector of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan from 1948 to 1952. His most significant achievement, developed in the 1930s, was categorial grammar, a flexible formal framework for analyzing the syntax of natural language that continues to influence formal linguistics. Earlier in the same decade he proposed radical conventionalism, an epistemological theory analyzing meaning through language dependent inferential rules, though he abandoned the position as the decade went on. He co-founded the journal Studia Logica and edited it from 1953 until his death, publishing around 200 papers and 17 books across semantics, semiotics and the methodology of science.