New York Times Obituary

SHARON, Conn., March 1 (AP) - Alfred Habdank Korzybski, scientist and author, an early authority on general semantics, died early today at Sharon Hospital at the age of 70. Death was due to a coronary thrombosis, with which he was stricken at his home in near-by Salisbury shortly after midnight.

Surviving is his widow, Mira Edgerly Korzybski of Chicago, a portrait painter, whom he married in 1919.

A pioneer in semantics, Mr. Korzybski founded a new school of psychological-philosophical semantics which he named general semantics. He had hundreds of followers throughout the world and was consulted by many scientists and scholars. Widely credited with having expanded semantics from its ordinary concern with only the meaning of words in a new system of understanding human behavior, Mr. Korzybski held the conviction that "in the old construction of language, you cannot talk sense."

A Biographical Sketch

 Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski

A Biographical Sketch

 by

Charlotte Schuchardt

Born Into A World In Flux

 
The world into which Alfred Korzybski was born on July 3, 1879, in Warsaw, Poland, was stirring under the weight of oppressions, and the impacts of new outlooks. Repeated partitions of Poland by the Austrians, Prussians am Russians had only intensified the nationalistic feelings of the Poles, and in Warsaw they were chafing under the rule of Czar Alexander II; Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna was reigning over his Hapsburg Empire; the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Hegel had seeped into the fabric of German life and. were greatly influencing Western cultures; fired by Marx and Engels, workers were rebelliously, surreptitiously, banding together; only twenty years earlier Darwin's Origin of Species had begun a storm of controversy in England; and there was feverish activity in science, as a revolutionary new era led by Faraday, Bunsen, Maxwell, etc., was breaking ground and laying the foundations for the even greater discoveries to come.