Jerzy Giedymin

Jerzy Giedymin (September 18, 1925 – June 24, 1993) was a philosopher and historian of mathematics and science.

Giedymin, of Polish origin, was born in 1925.

He studied at the University of Poznań under Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. In 1953 Jerzy Giedymin succeeded Adam Wiegner at the Chair of Logic at the Faculty of Philosophy.

The so-called Poznań School was a Marxist current of philosophy marked by an idealisational theory of science which emphasised the scientific features of Marxism in close confrontation with contemporary logic and epistemology.

In 1968 Giedymin moved to England and attended seminars by Karl Popper at the London School of Economics.

In 1971 he came to Sussex to become Professor at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences of the University of Sussex.

Giedymin died during a trip to Poland on 24 June 1993.

Giedymin was convinced that Henri Poincaré's conventionalist philosophy was fundamentally misunderstood and thus underestimated. Giedymin argues that Poincaré was at the origin of much of the 20th century's innovations in relativity theory and quantum physics.

Giedymin's standpoint was much influenced by his exposure to Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz's perception of the history of ideas which in defiance of traditional empiricism reviews the philosophy of science of the early 20th century in the light of pragmatic conventionalism.