The Polish philosopher and logician Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz was born on December 12, 1890, in Tarnopol, Poland, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Ternopil, Ukraine). Ajdukiewicz's work was devoted to understanding how knowledge and the conception of knowledge depend on language.

Ajdukiewicz completed his secondary education in Lvov, Poland and subsequently studied philosophy, mathematics and physics at the university there. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Lvov in 1912 by writing a thesis on Kant's philosophy of space.

He then went to Göttingen University where the mathematician David Hilbert and the philosopher Edmund Husserl were lecturing. But one year later, he was drafted into the Austrian army and assigned to the Italian front. By the end of the First World War, however, he had joined the Polish army, from which he was demobilized in 1920.

Beginning in 1920 and until the outbreak of World War II, Ajdukiewicz was...