Warped Logic – Frank McNally on how a great Polish philosopher spent his final years in Ireland

In its entry on the great Polish philosopher Jan Lukasiewicz (1878-1956), one US encyclopaedia laments that after the second World War: he had “scant opportunity to continue [his] pedagogical work, holding a research position in a non-teaching institution in a country with no logical tradition”.

The country with “no logical tradition” was Ireland. But the verdict of the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is not as harsh as it might sound to laymen’s ears.

The logic in which Lukasiewicz dealt is a specialised discipline, the main places for the study of which, during the middle of the 20th century, did not include Dublin. Even so, as a refugee from the war-ravaged continent, Prof Lukasiewicz had to throw himself on the mercy of that city in 1946. And Dublin didn’t let him down.

He secured a job there specially created for him by taoiseach Éamon de Valera: a man who, when he wasn’t trying to fill Ireland with the laughter of happy maidens, was hiring as many foreign scientific geniuses as he could to add prestige to 1940s Ireland.

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The Polish logician thus lived out the last 10 years of his life in Ireland and did some of his most important writing here until his death in 1956.

Born in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Lukasiewicz had spent the first World War teaching at the University of Warsaw. In 1919, he interrupted a brilliant teaching career briefly to become minister for public education in newly independent Poland.

Between the wars, he was also a prominent member of the Lvov-Warsaw School of Philosophy, soon to be at the leading edge of logical thought in Europe. But the second World War changed his life forever.

Their home destroyed by German bombs, and much of his work along with it, Lukasiewicz and his wife endured several years in wretched living conditions. When the Nazis were finally defeated, they faced Soviet occupation instead. So they fled first to Germany, then Belgium.

And it was while in Brussels in February 1946 that the professor met a “Polish-speaking Irishman” who told him how scholars of his standing were welcomed in Ireland. Lukasiewicz applied immediately for a visa and was in Dublin by March.

A few months later, he “received a summons” to the taoiseach’s office, where he and his wife were greeted by de Valera, discovering – as Erwin Schrödinger and others had earlier – that the Fianna Fáil leader took a personal interest in the work of such scientific celebrities.

“We talked about mathematics because he himself was once a mathematics teacher,” Lukasiewicz recalled of the meeting. “He told me he would take care of my fate and he kept his word.”

The Polish man’s fate was to be appointed Professor of Mathematical Logic at the Royal Irish Academy, a new position for which the minister for finance Frank Aiken had to introduce a special estimate in the Dáil. The Irish Press, always close to the source on de Valera’s thoughts, rhapsodised about the appointment as follows:

“There is more in this than a gesture of sympathy towards a distinguished foreigner. To have a man of Dr Lukasiewicz’s standing amongst us to aid the cause of advanced study is a national gain. There are, fortunately, no frontiers in the realms of science and scholarship. The paths of light traverse oceans and strike across mountain ranges.

“War may put a temporary halt to the onward march of culture but the spirit of man is resilient and with the coming of peace the civilising process is resumed. With us, for reasons familiar to every student of history, there is a good deal of leeway to be made up in the sphere of higher education, and it is well that we should take every opportunity that offers itself to augment our limited resources.”

The job required Lukasiewicz to give a series of public lectures but left plenty of time for other activity, including the reconstruction of material lost in the war. In 1951, he also completed his definitive work: “Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic”.

Central to Lukasiewicz’s thought was the idea of breaking with Aristotle’s bivalent logic, wherein everything was either true or false, in favour of a three-valued system, allowing for something to be “possibly” true as well. That in turn led to the concept of “many-valued logic”, with multiple intermediate conditions.

An exhibition on “The Life of and Career of Professor Lukasiewicz, Polish Genius of Logic, Philosopher, and Post-War Refugee in Ireland” opened in Tuesday night at the Royal Irish Academy. Presented by the Polish embassy and compiled by Jacek Jadacki and Eoin Kinsella, it will run there until early next year. After that, it goes on nationwide tour.