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

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

The aim of this project is to uncover the historical and biographical factors that determined the career of Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum as a female, Jewish and Polish philosopher in the 1930s, and to analyze her original contributions to the philosophy of probability. If we are to tell the full story of inductive logic and the philosophy of probability of the 1930s and 1940s, Hosiasson-Lindenbaum's work has to be included in it. Yet, in spite of having been involved in all of the branches of inductive logic and philosophical theory of probability at the period, as well as working with the most important thinkers in this area, Hosiasson-Lindenbaum is missing from the histories of philosophy. The first gap in our knowledge of Hosiasson-Lindenbaum's philosophy that needs to be filled is that her whole body of work has to be considered in the task of reconstructing her philosophical position, rather than the handful of papers that were published in English. Without that, we will have no precise understanding of what her contributions were. It is also important that we understand why she did not gain the same prominence as her contemporaries. The first objective of the project is to identify the ways in which Hosiasson-Lindenbaum's social status and the details of her (academic) biography influenced the uptake of her ideas in the philosophy community. What were the factors influencing JHL’s academic career before World War II? What were the exact factors that led to the ultimate failure of the attempts to rescue JHL as a refugee scholar during World War II? 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. What was her own conception of probability: was she a logicist influenced by Keynes, or an early subjectivist developing a logic of partial belief functions? What was her role in the birth of confirmation theory, and how did her own work in that area come about?

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