Henryk Hiż (8 October 1917 – 19 December 2006) was a Polish analytical philosopher specializing in linguistics, philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and ethics, active for most of his life in the United States, one of the youngest representatives of the Lwów–Warsaw school.
During the German occupation of Poland in the World War II, he participated in the Polish resistance movement as a cryptographer in the Home Army.
He kept in touch with the American logical environment, including with Alfred Tarski, and maintained lively contact with the Polish academic community.
Strongly influenced by the Lwów–Warsaw school, initially in his research he was interested in semantics, formal logic and methodology of the sciences.
[4] Henryk's mother, Emilia, was an architect, while his father Tadeusz Hiż was a journalist, who kept in touch with the Warsaw's bohemian circles.
[1] After the establishment of the ghetto benches at the university, Hiż together with a group of students used to stand against the wall instead of sitting during the lectures, to manifest their opposition to the antisemitic attitude[5] of most of the then-academic staff and co-students.
After the outbreak of World War II, during the German occupation of Poland, Hiż continued his education in the underground university until 1944.
In the wartime he made friends with Jerzy Pelc, Klemens Szaniawski, Jan Strzelecki, Andrzej Grzegorczyk and Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński.
[1][5] Although he was a pacifist from a young age,[1] and he was to say that he would not be able to use a gun even in self-defense,[1] he joined the Home Army and became active in the Polish resistance movement.
[5] After the liberation, he enrolled in philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he and his wife studied under Chaïm Perelman and Eugène Dupréel.
[1] In the same year, Henryk and Danuta Hiż left for the United States, along with the post-war wave of Eastern European emigrants and refugees.
[1] “A short attempt to settle in the country after the war ended with disappointment”,[5] also due to the “Stalinist course slowly starting to dominate”[1] at the time.
[4] In the years 1958–1981 he was the Deputy Head of the research group on transformation and text analysis, subsidized by the National Science Foundation.
[1] He died on December 19, 2006, at Cape May Point[12] and was buried at the Rakowicki Cemetery in Kraków, in the family tomb (LX headquarters, southern row, place 23).
[1] Kotarbiński had the greatest impact on the formation of his views (in particular with his work Elements of the Theory of Knowledge, Formal Logic and Methodology of the Sciences, 1929).
With time, especially under the influence of American philosophers, Hiż began to abandon the absolutism of his professors in favor of pragmatism and pluralistic eclecticism.
[5] From the late 1950s, “he mainly dealt with linguistics and its logical and philosophical foundations”,[1] focusing his research program on the grammar theory of natural language.
Zellig Harris, who he met in 1951 at the University of Pennsylvania, and whom he considered the main creator of formal grammar, had the greatest influence on him in linguistics.
[1] He used the terminology introduced by Rudolf Carnap, although he consistently used the term sentence instead of proposition to designate the basic unit of logical examination (which revealed his ties with the Lwów–Warsaw school).
[1] In ethics, he advocated negative utilitarianism, recommending “taking care not of good for as many people as possible, but of reducing evil equally to every human being”.
[14] In 1992, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth, disciples and friends of Henryk Hiż contributed to the book Philosophical Excerpts (Fragmenty filozoficzne ofiarowane Henrykowi Hiżowi w siedemdziesiątą piątą rocznicę urodzin), edited by Jerzy Pelc.