Polish Analytical Philosophy - Böcker

Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938) is the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School with its strong tradition in logic and its scientific approach to philosophy. Twardowski’s unique way of doing philosophy, his method, is of central importance for understanding his impact as a teacher. This method can be understood as a philosophical grammar, which is also how Leibniz conceived his universal language of thought.Analytic philosophy in the twentieth century can be characterized by its opposition to psychologism, on the one hand, and its opposition to metaphysics, on the other. This is changing now, as questions within the philosophy of mind and metaphysics are raised by analytic philosophers today.Maria van der Schaar shows in her book that we can improve our analytic methods by making use of Twardowski’s philosophical grammar. Twardowski’s positive attitude to psychology and metaphysics may also help us to develop an analytic metaphysics and to get a better understanding of the relation between psychology and philosophy.

This book examines the tension between formal and informal methods in philosophy. The rise of analytic philosophy was accompanied by the development of formal logic and many successful applications of formal methods. But analytical philosophy does not rely on formal methods alone. Elements of broadly understood informal logic and logical semiotics, procedures used in natural sciences and humanities, and various kinds of intuition also belong to the philosopher’s toolkit. Papers gathered in the book concern the opposition formality–informality as well as other pairs, such as methodology versus metaphilosophy, interdisciplinarity versus intradisciplinarity, and methodological uniformity versus diversity of sciences. Problems of the nature of logic and the explanatory role of mathematical theories are also discussed.

The volume contains works showing the comprehensive contribution of Kazimierz Twardowski, the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School, to the European analytical movement.The readers of the volume will learn, among other things, how the theoretically fertile distinction between act and product introduced by Twardowski turned out to be.Furthermore, this volume illustrates the importance of Twardowski’s defense of alethic absolutism.Finally, readers will learn about the conceptual tools developed by Twardowski, enabling the explanation of the phenomenon of still lingering prejudices, as well as Twardowski’s conception of rationality, and about his attitude towards formal and informal logic, as well as logical education. An undoubted novelty of the volume is that it provides a kind of parametrization of Twardowski’s continuously increasing position in global philosophy by referring to the complete bibliography of works by and on Twardowski in European languages (other than his native language) up until 2020.

In 1906, Jan Łukasiewicz, a great logician, published his classic dissertation on the concept of cause, containing not only a thorough reconstruction of the title concept, but also a systematization of the analytical method. It sparked an extremely inspiring discussion among the other representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School. The main voices of this discussion are supplemented here with texts of contemporary Polish philosophers. They show how the concept of cause is presently functioning in various disciplines and point to the topicality of Łukasiewicz’s method of analysis.

This collection consists of texts by four authors—Narcyz Łubnicki, Ludwik Fleck, Leon Koj, and Zdzisław Cackowski—who formed the first two generations of philosophers at the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University. They deal with the problems of human cognitive processes and activities, the structure of everyday and scientific knowledge, including its justification and normativity, extensional and intensional logic, semiotics and pragmatics, as well as the issue of human experience considered from the perspective of ethics and philosophical anthropology. The reader will learn about the history of the initiation and development of the science-oriented, anti-dogmatic, postulative method, and pragmatic directions of philosophical research conducted over half a century.

“The influence of [Kazimierz] Twardowski on modern philosophy in Poland is all-pervasive. Twardowski instilled in his students a passion for clarity [...] and seriousness. He taught them to regard philosophy as a collaborative effort, a matter of disciplined discussion and argument, and he encouraged them to train themselves thoroughly in at least one extra-philosophical discipline and to work together with scientists from other fields, both inside Poland and internationally. This led above all [...] to collaborations with mathematicians, so that the Lvov school of philosophy would gradually evolve into the Warsaw school of logic [...]. Twardowski taught his students, too, to respect and to pursue serious research in the history of philosophy, an aspect of the tradition of philosophy on Polish territory which is illustrated in such disparate works as [Jan] Łukasiewicz’s ground-breaking monograph on the law of non-contradiction in Aristotle and [Władysław] Tatarkiewicz’s highly influential multi-volume histories of philosophy and aesthetics [...] The term ‘Polish philosophy’ is a misnomer [...] for Polish philosophy is philosophy per se; it is part and parcel of the mainstream of world philosophy – simply because [...] it meets international standards of training, rigour, professionalism and specialization.”– Barry Smith (from: “Why Polish Philosophy does Not Exist”)