Czeslaw Lejewski: From North to South to North

瑣事を一つ。
第二次世界大戦中の Nazis の侵略により、国を追われた知識人は数多くいます。Europe の東辺りから大西洋を渡って America などの西側に逃れた人々がいました。なかには東回りで America に着いた人もいます。私たちのよく知っているところでは、例えば Gödel さんがそうです*1。また Löwith さんもそのようです*2
先日以下の文献を読んでいると、

  • Peter Simons ''An Obituary for Czeslaw Lejewski,'' in: BLC Newsletter, British Logic Colloquium, September 2002

Lesniewski の研究で有名な Lejewski さんの場合は、かなり様子が違っていたようです。

Czeslaw Lejewski was born in Minsk, then in the Russian Empire, on 14 April 1913. In 1920 his family moved to Lublin in Poland, where he attended Gimnazjum (roughly: Grammar School). From 1931 he studied Classics at Warsaw University, where he obtained a master's degree in 1936 with a dissertation on tropes in the sceptics. After military service he returned to the university in 1937 to study for a PhD in Classics, concentrating on ancient logic. This interest drew him to courses and seminars on logic given by Jan Lukasiewicz and Stanislaw Lesniewski and philosophy with Tadeusz Kotarbinski. His dissertation 'De Aenesidemi Studiis Logicis' was examined and passed among others by Lukasiewicz, but he was unable to take his degree due to the outbreak of war. He was taken prisoner by the invading Soviets and spent two years in terrible conditions in Soviet labour camps, before joining the 3rd Polish Army after the Nazi invasion of the USSR. There followed in 1942 an extraordinary odyssey by land and sea from Russia to Britain via Iran, Iraq, Egypt, South Africa, South America, and the USA. He worked for the Polish H.Q. in London where he remained until demobilized in 1948. He then taught English to Poles, marrying an English woman in 1949. (He remarried in 1973 after his wife Pauline's death and is survived by his second wife Joan.)*3

大変ですね、これは。逃避行を巡る冒険譚があれば、聞いてみたかったです。

*1:John W. Dawson, Jr., Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel, A K Peters, 1997, pp. 148-51.

*2:'Karl Löwith (1897-1973) taught philosophy at Marburg University. However, due to the outbreak of the war, he was forced to quit his position. In Italy, he met Kuki Shuzo (九鬼周造, 1888−1941), who introduced Löwith to teach philosophy in Japan. Fortunately, Löwith was offered a teaching post in Tohoku University from 1937 to 1941. Löwith returned to Germany in 1953 and became an important figure in the postwar phenomenological movement.' 現象学を語る会、'Tradition of Phenomenology in Tohoku University (東北大学における現象学の伝統),' in Tradition of Phenomenology in Tohoku University Home Page, Section 1: Tohoku University (東北大学). http://sites.google.com/site/tupheno/home/touhokudaigaku. America に渡るくだりについては、例えば、野家啓一、「総論 現象学と社会批判」、野家啓一編、『哲学の歴史 第10巻 危機の時代の哲学 【20世紀 I 】』、中央公論新社、2008年、40-41ページ。

*3:Peter Simons, ''An Obituary for Czeslaw Lejewski,'' in: BLC Newsletter, British Logic Colloquium, September 2002, section 3. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~exr/blc/NewsSep02.html