Zygmunt Zawirski

(b. 28 September 1882, Mala Berezovytsya, near Zbarazh, Ukraine; d. 2 April 1948, Końskie)

After completing high school in Lviv (Lwów) in 1901, from 1901 to 1906 Zawirski studied philosophy, mathematics and physics at Jan Kazimierz University, under the guidance of Kazimierz Twardowski. He continued his studies in Berlin (1909) and Paris (1910), and obtained his doctorate in Lviv in 1910, again under Twardowski’s supervision. He went on to teach mathematics and introductory philosophy at high schools in the city. He gained his habilitation degree in 1924 at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, with a dissertation on the axiomatic method in natural science. From 1924 to 1928 he lectured in philosophy at the General Faculty of Lwów Polytechnic, and in 1928 took the chair in the theory and methodology of science in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science at Poznań University. He moved again to the Jagiellonian University in 1937, and worked in the underground education movement during the Second World War. His research interests included principally the methodology of science, as well as the theory of cognition and ontology, especially in relation to problems concerning the development of physics, in particular the theory of relativity and quantum theory. He was the leading Polish expert of his time in the field of learning combining physics and philosophy. He was also interested in applications of mathematical logic. He is regarded as one of the precursors of quantum mechanics.

Roman Murawski

J. Woleński, Filozoficzna szkoła lwowsko-warszawska, PWN, Warsaw 1985.
R. Murawski, Filozofia matematyki i logiki w Polsce międzywojennej, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Toruń 2012.
R. Murawski, Logika na uniwersytecie w Poznaniu, Nauka Polska. Jej Potrzeby Organizacja i Rozwój XXVIII (LIII) (2019), pp. 19–35.