Today is Janina Hosiasson’s birthday: she was born on December 6th, 1899. I figured it would be a fitting moment for an update on the Janina Project.

First of all, the project is now official and handsomely paid for: thanks to the generosity of the ERC and the support of the University of Vienna, I can work on it exclusively for three years starting from October 2023. This official project, following the work I have done before, has two parts, which I usually refer to as the biography and the philosophy—although of course there is a lot of very interesting overlap between the two.

On the biographical side, I am currently working on a paper about Hosiasson’s academic career and the factors that determined its shape and form. On the philosophical side, I am preparing a paper about Hosiasson’s earliest works, looking mainly at the published parts of her PhD thesis and trying to understand where she was coming from, conceptually—especially when it comes to the notion of degree of belief and inductive reasoning. I am also trying to locate her in the wider philosophical landscape of the Lvov-Warsaw School. These two legs of the project are also coming together—very slowly—in a book manuscript.

Finally, a translation of collected works of Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (or a large part thereof) will be coming in a few years. It is not yet decided in what form it will appear, but I will make sure that it will be easily available.

In the background, the archive and history digging are happening as always. Recent adventures include following the traces of a Kaunas lawyer all the way to Uzbekistan, trying to locate a specific statue of Ogier the Dane in a Danish town, and trying to read a logic textbook in Lithuanian. I also desperately need a Polish speaker in the San Francisco area to carry out a library search for me at Berkeley.

Next year I hope to celebrate Hosiasson’s 125th in style, with a proper academic party celebrating her work and life, with a full lineup of philosophers and historians. Just a few months ago I was actually feeling quite pessimistic about the possibility of such an event. It is perfectly easy to find enough people to fill a week-long conference on Carnap, or Russell, or Wittgenstein. Bah, it is possible to fill a whole week with speakers obsessing over some single aspect of their work. But Hosiasson? Not so much, it seemed. I had been under the impression that I was pretty much the only person out there who was studying Hosiasson’s work in detail. Recently, I had discovered that this was wrong. I hope to introduce here soon the work of the brilliant young people who are interested in reading these relatively unknown texts and have interesting things to say about them. Great things are coming!