Imre Tóth (philosopher)

Imre Tóth (also Toth) was born in 1921, in Satu Mare, the year after the Treaty of Trianon recognized it as a part of Romania, to a very religious Jewish family that had fled from the 1920 pogroms. Resisting with the Communists during the Second World War and then excluded from the Party, he narrowly escaped death in the camps. After the war he studied at Babeș-Bolyai University. He is a philosopher, mathematician and science historian, who specialized in the philosophy of mathematics. He worked on non-Euclidean geometry, mathematical irrationality, freedom, Plato and Platonism, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. He died on May 11, 2010, in Paris.

In 1968 he was struck off the Romanian Communist Party, due to his harsh criticism of the government (he was accused of being an "idealist enemy", and an "agent of imperialism"), so he expatriated to Federal Republic of Germany and prosecuted his academic career teaching from 1969 to 1971 at the Goethe University Frankfurt and from 1971 to 1972 at the Ruhr University Bochum. Later until 1990 he held the chair of the History of Sciences at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Regensburg.

After the end of conflict he took up his studies at the Babeș-Bolyai University, attending classes in mathematics and philosophy from 1945 to 1948. Later on he would teach philosophy and history of mathematics at the University of Bucharest.

In 1940 Imre entered the underground resistance movement to the Nazis, joining a communist group: for these activities (in particular, for writing on a wall Down with fascism, down with the war, death to fascists) he was arrested and, after interrogation and torture, sentenced to death. He managed somehow to serve a mere six years in prison, and was joined there by news of the successful Operation Overlord (the Normandy landings of the Allies) on June 6, 1944, just as his deportation to Auschwitz along with the group of remaining Jewish inmates of that prison was practically underway.