What was and what could have been: Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum's role in the philosophy of probablity.

2026-07-22

Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (1899-1942) was a philosopher working on inductive reasoning and the interpretation of probability. In spite of her impressive publication list and international recognition, she never managed to secure a university post; and the histories of analytic philosophy barely engage with her work. This project will contribute to our understanding of what led to her exclusion from the philosophical canon, and develop a thorough analysis of the full body of her work—establishing what her rightful position in the history of analytic philosophy actually is. The first objective of the project is to understand how the career of Hosiasson-Lindenbaum and the uptake of her ideas in the philosophy community were influenced by her social status and her academic biography. This will be done by analysing her academic and social environment in Warsaw, focusing on how it shaped her intellectual development and how it determined her chances and recognition as a professional philosopher. Then, I will look at the last period of her career: her unsuccessful efforts to secure funding as a refugee scholar during World War II. I will identify the causes that led to the rejection of her appeals. The working hypothesis here is that the factors identified in these two parts are relevant to the uptake of Janina Hosiasson’s ideas in the wider philosophical community. The second objective is to reconstruct Hosiasson-Lindenbaum’s position on the foundational questions in philosophy of probability and inductive logic and to evaluate its conceptual and historical importance. This will be achieved by a detailed study of her whole body of work, spanning over thirty published and unpublished items, and her correspondence with other philosophers. Based on this analysis, I will first reconstruct her own position on the nature of the concept of probability. Then, I will establish what was her role in the development of confirmation theory.

Austria

2025-10-01