I shall elaborate more on the idea of anti-irrationalism proposed by the Polish analytic philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, a prominent member of the Lvov-Warsaw School of philosophy and logic. In my reading, anti-irrationalism stands in opposition not only to overt irrationalism, which is made clear by the term itself, but also to all forms of rationalism that tip toward something like worship of reason. Having characterized anti-irrationalism as it originally appeared in Ajdukiewicz’s works, I shall propose a certain reformulation of it, (...) so as to capture a broader philosophical legacy in Poland, primarily, yet not exclusively the Lvov-Warsaw School. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is presentation and critical analysis of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s concept of the world-view. Ajdukiewicz’s philosophy was strongly inspired by the rationalism of Kazimierz Twardowski as well as by some ideas of the Vienna Circle. However, in contrast to the latter's logical empiricism, Ajdukiewicz could be interpreted as holding that beliefs constituting our world-view have both logical value and cognitive content—they cannot be construed as mere expression of some emotions.

Stanislaw Lesniewski’s interests were, for the most part, more philosophical than mathematical. Prior to taking his doctorate at Jan Kazimierz University in Lvov, Lesniewski had spent time at several continental universities, apparently becoming relatively attached to the philosophy of one of his teachers, Hans Comelius, to the chapters of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic that dealt specifically with semantics, and, in general, to studies of general grammar and philosophy of language. In these several early interests are already to be (...) found the roots of the work that was to occupy Lesniewski’s life: a search for a definitive doctrine of what sorts of things there are in the world, or better, of what language must be like if it is adequately and efficiently to represent the world. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that it is the explicativecharacter of Tarski's semantic definition of truth given in his study of 1933 that allows forconsideration of a philosophical background of this definition in the proper sense. Given the explicativecharacter of this definition it is argued that the philosophical tradition that should be taken intoaccount with regard to this philosophical background is the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw Schoolin its connections with the School of Brentano. As an example of (...) the explanatory power ofconsidering this tradition as far as Tarski's philosophical choices are concerned I use here thenotion of sentence-inscription, i.e., the notion of that entity of which truth is predicated inthe definition in question. One of the consequences of these statements is that philosophicaldiscussions concerning the semantic definition of truth can be regarded from two points ofview. On the one hand, they may take the perspective of its explicational function, i.e., theperspective of its philosophical background. On the other hand, they might consider the philosophicalconsequences of the definition with respect to the goal of the explication, i.e., they may considerits philosophical content independently of its historical background. (shrink)

This article is polemical. It argues with those philosophers who see, in the semantic theory of knowledge of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, the significant and exclusive influence of Alfred Tarski’s semantic output. Listening to these philosophers, one gets the impression that they have overlooked the fact that the term “semantics” meant one thing in the case of Ajdukiewicz, presenting the semantic theory of knowledge, and something different in the case of Tarski, presenting the semantic theory of truth. There is another difference, related (...) to the abovementioned, and fundamental in the case of both these logicians, namely their different approach to language, which seems to escape the attention of those who write about the semantic theory of knowledge. Ajdukiewicz’s approach was intensional, while Tarski’s approach was extensional: for the first of them, the intensional interpretation of language was basic, as for the second, was the extensional interpretation. The philosophers with whom I argue overlook one more fact, namely the impact, difficult to overestimate, that the intentional theory of language of Edmund Husserl had on the emergence of the semantic theory of knowledge. This article tries to restore Tarski’s real role in the matter referred to in the title, and do justice to Husserl: after all, without his philosophy of the semantic theory of knowledge, as a metaepistemological project, it would not have come to be. It was only in the implementation of this project that some of the achievements of Tarski’s semantics were used. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł ma polemiczny charakter. Polemizuje on z głosami tych filozofów, którzy w semantycznej teorii poznania Kazimierza Ajdukiewicza widzą znaczący i nadto wyłączny wpływ semantycznego dorobku Alfreda Tarskiego. Słuchając głosów tych filozofów można odnieść wrażenie, że przeoczyli oni fakt, iż termin „semantyka” znaczył co innego w wypadku Ajdukiewicza, prezentującego semantyczną teorię poznania, a co innego w wypadku Tarskiego, prezentującego semantyczną teorię prawdy. Z tą różnicą, dotyczącą znaczeń terminu „semantyka”, wiąże się inna, fundamentalna w wypadku obu tych logików różnica, a mianowicie (...) ich odmienne podejście do języka, co zdaje się umykać uwadze tym piszącym o semantycznej teorii poznania, z którymi zamierzam polemizować. Podejście Ajdukiewicza było intensjonalne, natomiast podejście Tarskiego – ekstensjonalne, co mówiąc mam na myśli to, że dla pierwszego z nich podstawową była intensjonalna interpretacja języka, a dla drugiego – interpretacja ekstensjonalna. Filozofowie, z którymi polemizuję, przeoczają jeszcze jeden fakt, a mianowicie trudny do przecenienia wpływ, jaki na powstanie semantycznej teorii poznania miała intencjonalna teoria języka Edmunda Husserla. Niniejszy artykuł stara się przywrócić właściwą miarę Tarskiemu w tytułowej sprawie oraz oddać sprawiedliwość Husserlowi, bez filozofii którego semantycznej teorii poznania, jako metaepistemologicznego projektu, by nie było. A przecież to ów projekt legitymizował jego realizacje i dopiero w nich były wykorzystywane niektóre osiągnięcia semantyki Tarskiego. (shrink)

Tadeusz Kotarbiski is widely recognized as a major philosopher of theLvov–Warsaw school. His reism, which is a contribution to semantics andontology, is still discussed and debated, and his most original creation, praxiology,has grown into an entire research field. However, Kotarbiski's philosophy ofscience has not received much attention by later commentators. This paper attemptsto correct this situation by considering the hypothesis that Kotarbiski succeededalready in 1929 in formulating a position that can be regarded as an early version ofscientific realism. Unlike most (...) other ``scientific philosophers'' before the mid-thirties,he was able to combine ontological realism (by defending a form of physicalism andnominalism) and semantical realism (by defending the classical correspondence theoryof truth). He was also a critical epistemological realist. Further, in spite of theinstrumentalist flavour of his reductionist programme in eliminating terms apparentlyreferring to abstract entities, Kotarbiski accepted theories as statements with truth values and theoretical entities as long as they can be understood as physical bodies. (shrink)

What is the exact relationship between analytic philosophy and philosophy of science? In this paper, I will address this question from the perspective of research traditions, with the help of recent histor- ical studies on analytic philosophy. The two groups are particularly focused: the Polish philosophers and the logical empiricists in Berlin. Neither of them is unknown to us. However, by taking seriously their connection to the development of analytic philosophy and philosophy of science as research traditions, I believe, the (...) understanding of our own tradition may be improved. (shrink)