S. Amsterdamski – författare

Polish philosophy of science has been the beneficiary of three powerful creative streams of scientific and philosophical thought. First and fore- most was the Lwow-Warsaw school of Polish analytical philosophy founded by Twardowski and continued in their several ways by Les- niewski, Lukasiewicz, and Tarski, the great mathematical and logical philosophers, by Kotarbinski, probably the most distinguished teacher, public figure, and culturally influential philosopher of the inter-war and post-war period, and by Ajdukiewicz, the linguistic philosopher who was intellectually sympathetic with the anti-irrationalist (as he would say), logistic and meta-theoretical inquiries of the Vienna Circle. Second was independent and lively Polish Marxism, with its fine development of social research under Krzywicki, a social anthropologist and younger contemporary of Engels, and then after the war the economist Lange, the philosophers Schaff, Kolakowski, Baczko, and many others.Finally there has been a wide range of philosophical, scientific and humanistic scholar- ship which lends its various qualities to the understanding of both the logic of science and the historical situation of the sciences: we mention only that great and humane physicist Infeld, the phenomenologist with deep epistemological interest Ingarden, the historian of scientific ideas Zawirski, the historian of philosophy and aesthetics Tatarkiewicz, and the mathematical logicians such as Mostowski and Szaniawski.

Polish philosophy of science has been the beneficiary of three powerful creative streams of scientific and philosophical thought. First and fore- most was the Lwow-Warsaw school of Polish analytical philosophy founded by Twardowski and continued in their several ways by Les- niewski, Lukasiewicz, and Tarski, the great mathematical and logical philosophers, by Kotarbinski, probably the most distinguished teacher, public figure, and culturally influential philosopher of the inter-war and post-war period, and by Ajdukiewicz, the linguistic philosopher who was intellectually sympathetic with the anti-irrationalist (as he would say), logistic and meta-theoretical inquiries of the Vienna Circle. Second was independent and lively Polish Marxism, with its fine development of social research under Krzywicki, a social anthropologist and younger contemporary of Engels, and then after the war the economist Lange, the philosophers Schaff, Kolakowski, Baczko, and many others.Finally there has been a wide range of philosophical, scientific and humanistic scholar- ship which lends its various qualities to the understanding of both the logic of science and the historical situation of the sciences: we mention only that great and humane physicist Infeld, the phenomenologist with deep epistemological interest Ingarden, the historian of scientific ideas Zawirski, the historian of philosophy and aesthetics Tatarkiewicz, and the mathematical logicians such as Mostowski and Szaniawski.

In this book I have tried to develop further the ideas expressed in my previous work, Between Experience and Metaphysics, which was published in the same series in 1975. Several years have passed since the original Polish edition (and then 1 the Italian translation) of this book appeared. The fact that the principal ideas expressed in it have withstood, as I see it, the brunt of criticism, has led me to remain basically with the original text. Two main changes have, however, been introduced. First, I have added an Appendix containing the original version of a paper I presented at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in June 1988 and a short postscript to that paper referring to comments made during two dis­ cussions at the Kolleg. Let me briefly explain the reason for this addition. In recent years the landscape for historical and philosophical in­ terpretation of the evolution of scientific knowledge has altered. The strongest of the new contenders for epistemological recognition are social constructivists, who analyze in detail how knowledge is produced within specific social settings, including the instruments and procedures of par­ ticular laboratories and the economic and political realities of particular scientific communities. The local character of these studies raises the question of whether they can ever provide generalizable epistemological claims.