How much can a few words say?
Continue readingDear Friend, Dear Professor
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Category Archives: archive finds
Relationship status: It’s complicated
In a recent short biography of Ernst Nagel, Yvonne Nagel mentioned the meeting of Nagel and Hosiasson in Warsaw during his stay there in the fall of 1934. She wrote:
Ernest also enjoyed meeting a younger couple—Janina Hosiasson and her fiancé the mathematician Adolf Lindenbaum. (A)
I have always placed the beginning of Janina and Adolf’s engagement much later than the fall of 1934, so this was news. When I asked Yvonne for the exact source of her assertion, she quoted a letter that Nagel wrote from Warsaw to his friend Sidney Hook, relating having met a certain Ms Hosiasson and her fiancé, who was a mathematician. No name of said fiancé was given. But in the context of what has been published about Hosiasson and Lindenbaum so far, it was a reasonable conclusion to draw: here we have some mathematician referred to as Janina’s fiancé, and she did end up marrying a mathematician by the end of the following year—so the man mentioned in the letter must be Lindenbaum.
But I could not shake the feeling that something in here was not hanging together with everything else I knew about Janina’s life.
Continue readingMarch 29, 1942
The existing publications on Janina Hosiasson never mentioned a specific date of death. The most common time frame mentioned was April 1942, or simply the spring of 1942. But I was unable to find the original source of this belief: as it often happens with such publications, authors repeat what they saw elsewhere, often without citation, or rely on their own memory of events from decades ago.
Hosiasson on analogical reasoning
Continue readingWe are sleeping for the first time in a prison cell, where throughout the night our legs are hurting. Call this fact f1. Can we raise the degree of belief in the fact that the next night our legs will also hurt? Let us call this future fact f2. (…) Now our question comes down to whether there are any possible causes of f1 such that, if we assume them, f1 does not lower the level of confidence in f2. Suppose for instance that besides w the only possible cause of f1 is (next to some humidity in the cell) rainy weather on the day preceding the night when we were in pain, and the fact that on that day we stood outside for a long time, waiting for bread.
Fake soaps
The “Józef Hosiasson” department store was a respectable brand. While it started as a textile business, later on it specialized in beauty products. The company held exclusive distribution rights of Les parfums Chanel, as well as Bourjois cosmetics and a number of other French brands. Quality product must have been the focus of the business. Continue reading
Probabilities a priori, a posteriori, and a book
One of my recent academic projects has been to thoroughly read all of Janina Hosiasson’s published works. It is not a trivial task, and I believe that no one has actually done it (recently anyways). First, there are of course language barriers: she wrote and published in four languages. Second, there are issues of time and space: some of her articles happen to be in by now very obscure journals, magazines, and conference proceedings – not available digitally, and in some cases available only in a handful of hard copies. Continue reading
Where philosophers lived: Koszykowa 51
Alfred Tarski’s first address was Koszykowa 51, apartment 14 (in Warsaw, of course). He was born there and lived with his parents until his own wedding. And while apparently Mr. Teitelbaum senior struggled to meet his wife’s expectations regarding lifestyle and financial comfort, the location was definitely prime enough. Just off Marszałkowska, which was one of the best streets in the city: wide, well-lit, full of expensive shops and cafés. The building itself must have been one of those tall, ornate townhouses you see in old photographs, and down the street even today. Continue reading
From the archives: Pocket money
The Hosiassons had four children: Henryk, Stefan, Janina, and Ludwik. At least, those are the children we know of, or ones that lived long enough to finish school. Continue reading
Young philosophy in 1932
I had no idea that collecting old philosophy journals could be such a pleasure. But ever since I started spending more time in the archives, looking at letters and other pieces of paper from the past, having that tangible connection to the people who wrote them and on them became a little more special. This is why last year I started to buy any publications of Janina Hosiasson that I could get my hands on. Continue reading
Marta Sznajder 