Abstract

Tarski's general conception of logic placed it at the center of all rational thought, and he took its aim to be the creation of a unified conceptual apparatus. In pursuit of this conviction, from his base at the University of California in Berkeley in the post-war years he campaigned vigorously on behalf of logic, locally, nationally and internationally. Though Tarski was ecumenical in his efforts to establish the importance of logic in these various ways, in his own work—even that part of it which is considered to be philosophically significant—he was first and foremost a mathematician, and, even more so, a set-theoretical one. The paper traces this particular conception of logic back to the influence of his teachers in set theory and topology in Warsaw, and then details how it affected his explication of the notions of satisfaction, truth, logical consequence and logical term