Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, born in Tarnopol in 1890 and died in 1963, was a Polish philosopher and logician and a leading figure of the Lwów-Warsaw school of logic. He studied philosophy, physics and mathematics at the university in Lwów, where his teachers included Twardowski and Sierpinski, and heard Hilbert in Göttingen. His doctorate under Twardowski concerned Kant on space. He later taught at Lwów, at Poznań, where he was rector from 1948 to 1952, and at Warsaw, and he edited the journal Studia Logica from 1953 until his death. His fields of research centered on model theory and the philosophy of science. His best known contribution is categorial grammar, developed in the 1930s, in which syntactic units combine by function and argument relations, an idea that still shapes formal linguistics. He also proposed an early system called radical conventionalism.