| Date | Text | |
|---|---|---|
12 Apr 1963
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz |
death Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz Died 12 Apr 1963 at age 72 (born 12 Dec 1890). Polish logician and semanticist who was the chief contributor to the Warsaw school of philosophy and logic, and is credited with developing in 1920 the first deductive theory for the study of logic based on syntax. The dominant theme of Ajdukiewicz's thought was the problem of the dependence of our knowledge and conception of knowledge on language. His main contributions are in the field of logical syntax (with the theory of semantical categories) and in epistemology, with the so-called “radical conventionalism,” a doctrine where he claimed that there exist conceptual apparatuses which are not intertranslatable and that scientific knowledge grows through the replacement of one such conceptual apparatus by another. |
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12 Apr 1963
Alfred Métraux |
death Alfred Métraux Died 12 Apr 1963 at age 60 (born 5 Nov 1902). Swiss anthropologist noted for his pioneering contributions to South American ethnohistory and the examination of African culture in Haiti. While director of the ethnological institute at the University of Tucumán, Argentina, (1928-34) he wrote two classic works on the ethnohistory of the extinct Tupinambá Indians of Brazil. He made an expedition to Easter Island (1934-35), after which he argued that Easter Island's indigenous population is Polynesian, both culturally and physically, and that the island's well-known monolithic sculptures are native creations rather than Asian or American Indian ones. After travelling the Amazon (1947-48) he studied the Haiti island culture (1949-50). He viewed voodoo as a structured, complex religious system with African origins. |
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