The book provides a historical and systematic exposition of the semantic theory of truth formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1930s. This theory became famous very soon and inspired logicians and philosophers. It has two different, but interconnected aspects: formal-logical and philosophical. The book deals with both, but it is intended mostly as a philosophical monograph. It explains Tarski’s motivation and presents discussions about his ideas as well as points out various applications of the semantic theory of truth to philosophical (...) problems. (shrink)

The paper examines the interplays between logic and politics in the Polish School of Logic starting from 1914. The Polish School of Logic flourished between 1920 and 1939. Philosophically, it was influenced by Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938). For Twardowski logic is fundamental for every kind of human activity, professional and private and this means that every argument should be formulated and proceed by correct inferential rules. These rules involve semiotics, formal logic and methodology of science. The paper shows how this position (...) was shared by Twardowski’s students, including Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Kotrabiński, as well as by the next generation of logicians and philosophers and especially by Alfred Tarski. These authors considered logic, philosophy and science as completely neutral with respect to politics and ideology but they also considered logical skills as indispensable in political activities. (shrink)

This volume is a result of the international symposium “The Tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School in European Culture,” which took place in Warsaw, Poland, September 2015. It collects almost all the papers presented at the symposium as well as some additional ones. The contributors include scholars from Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Poland. The papers are devoted to the history and reception of the Lvov-Warsaw School, a Polish branch of analytic philosophy. They present the School’s achievements as well as its (...) connections to other analytic groups. The contributors also show how the tradition of the School is developed contemporarily. The title will appeal to historians of analytic philosophy as well as historians of philosophy in Central Europe. (shrink)

One can often encounter an opinion that Polish scientific philosophy deserves to be much better known than actually is. This book is thought as a response to such a claim. The papers collected in this volume are divided into two parts: Background and Influence and History and Systematics. However, there is no sharp borderline between themes which are touched in both parts. Generally speaking, all papers of the first part relate the Lvov-Warsaw School to some philosophical movements external to it (...) whereas the papers collected in the second one focus on internal issues connected with the school . Since the Polish school of mathematical logic is much better known than the Polish analytic philosophy we decided to omit here any treatment of the former. Thus, this collection centers on purely philosophical matters. We projected this volume not as an exhaustive panorama of Polish analytic philosophy but rather as a series of essays on particular persons or topic. As a result one can find here papers on Twardowski. Ajdukiewicz, Kotarbinski, Tarski and Lukasiewicz as well as on ethics on science, nominalism, and the methodology of psychology. We hope that this book will contribute to a better knowledge and evaluation of Polish achievements in analytic philosophy. We would like to express our gratitude to Professor Leszek Nowak, the editor-in-chief of Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, who initiated the idea of the collection and helped in its preparation. (shrink)

Tadeusz Kotarbinski is one of towering figures in contemporary Polish philosophy. He was a great thinker, a great teacher, a great organizer of philosophical and scientific life, and, last but not least, a great moral authority. He died at the age of 96 on October 3, 1981. Kotarbinski was active in almost all branches of philosophy. He made many significant contributions to logic, semantics, ontology, epistemology, history of philosophy, and ethics. He created a new field, namely praxiology. Thus, using an (...) ancient distinction, he contributed to theoretical as well as practical philoso~hy. Kotarbinski regarded praxiology as his major philosophical "child". Doubtless, praxiology belongs to practical philosophy. This collection, howewer, is mainly devoted to Kotarbinski' s theoretical philosophy. Reism - Kotarbinski' s fundamental idea of ontology and semantics - is the central topic of most papers included here; even Pszczolowski' s essay on praxiology considers its ontological basis.,Only two papers, namely that of Zarnecka-Bialy and that of Wolenski, are not linked with reism. However, both fall under the general label "Kotarbinski: logic, semantics and ontology". The collection partly consists of earlier published papers. (shrink)

The larger part of Yearbook 6 of the Institute Vienna Circle constitutes the proceedings of a symposium on Alfred Tarski and his influence on and interchanges with the Vienna Circle, especially those on and with Rudolf Carnap and Kurt Gödel. It is the first time that this topic has been treated on such a scale and in such depth. Attention is mainly paid to the origins, development and subsequent role of Tarski's definition of truth. Some contributions are primarily historical, others (...) analyze logical aspects of the concept of truth. Contributors include Anita and Saul Feferman, Jan Wolenski, Jan Tarski and Hans Sluga. Several Polish logicians contributed: Gzegorczyk, Wójcicki, Murawski and Rojszczak. The volume presents entirely new biographical material on Tarski, both from his Polish period and on his influential career in the United States: at Harvard, in Princeton, at Hunter, and at the University of California at Berkeley. The high point of the analysis involves Tarski's influence on Carnap's evolution from a narrow syntactical view of language, to the ontologically more sophisticated but more controversial semantical view. Another highlight involves the interchange between Tarski and Gödel on the connection between truth and proof and on the nature of metalanguages. The concluding part of Yearbook 6 includes documentation, book reviews and a summary of current activities of the Institute Vienna Circle. Jan Tarski introduces letters written by his father to Gödel; Paolo Parrini reports on the Vienna Circle's influence in Italy; several reviews cover recent books on logical empiricism, on Gödel, on cosmology, on holistic approaches in Germany, and on Mauthner. (shrink)

Logical theory codifies rules of correct inferences. On the other hand, logical reasoning is typically considered as one of the most fundamental cognitive activities. Thus, cognitive science is a natural meeting-point for investigations about the place of logic in human cognition. Investigations in this perspective strongly depend on a possible understanding of logic. This paper focuses on logic in the strict sense; that is, the theory of deductive inferences. Two problems are taken into account, namely: do humans apply logical rules (...) in ordinary reasoning?; the genesis of logic. The second issue is analyzed from the naturalistic point of view. (shrink)

The volume aims to show the variety of research currents of the Lvov-Warsaw School and the ways in which these currents are developed today. The content of the book is divided into three parts: “Logic and Semiotics”, “Metaphysics and Ontology”, and “Psychology and Sociology”.

The book is a collection of the author¿s selected works in the philosophy and history of logic and mathematics. Papers in Part I include both general surveys of contemporary philosophy of mathematics as well as studies devoted to specialized topics, like Cantor's philosophy of set theory, the Church thesis and its epistemological status, the history of the philosophical background of the concept of number, the structuralist epistemology of mathematics and the phenomenological philosophy of mathematics. Part II contains essays in the (...) history of logic and mathematics. They address such issues as the philosophical background of the development of symbolism in mathematical logic, Giuseppe Peano and his role in the creation of contemporary logical symbolism, Emil L. Post's works in mathematical logic and recursion theory, the formalist school in the foundations of mathematics and the algebra of logic in England in the 19th century. The history of mathematics and logic in Poland is also considered. This volume is of interest to historians and philosophers of science and mathematics as well as to logicians and mathematicians interested in the philosophy and history of their fields. (shrink)

According to a common opinion, the word ‘semantics’ , derived from the Greek word semantikos , appeared for the first time, at least in modern times, in the book Essai de semantique, science de significations by M. J. A. Bréal . However, Quine says in his lectures on Carnap:As used by C. S. Peirce, “semantic” is the study of the modes of denotation of signs: whether a sign denotes its object through causal or symptomatic connection, or through imagery, or through (...) arbitrary convention and so on. This sense of semantic, namely a theory of meaning, is used also in empirical philology: empirical semantic is the study of historical changes of meanings of words.1For Bréal, semantics was a branch of general linguistics. In particular, semantics was occupied with so-called lexical meaning and its changes through time. Thus, semantics in this sense belonged to what was called “the diachronic treatment of language”. This tradition is fairly alive in contemporary linguistic theory. Quine’s description of the word ‘semantic’ in Peirce corresponds, which Quine explicitly states, to its use in philology. However, some linguists ascribe a more theoretical role to lingustic semantics. Karl Bühler is an example. In his Sprachtheorie he says that a theory of semantic functions of language is a part of theory of language.2 This account is to be found also among philosophers. It is also rather obvious that Peirce did not limit his semantic only to empirical studies. Linguists also use the word ‘semasiology’ instead of ‘semantics’; Bühler proposed the term ‘sematology’ for a general theory of symbols. (shrink)

Church's Thesis (CT) was first published by Alonzo Church in 1935. CT is a proposition that identifies two notions: an intuitive notion of an effectively computable function defined in natural numbers with the notion of a recursive function. Despite the many efforts of prominent scientists, Church's Thesis has never been disproven. There exists a vast literature concerning the thesis. The aim of this book is to provide a one volume summary of the state of research on Church's Thesis. These include (...) the following: different formulations of CT, CT and intuitionism, CT and intensional mathematics, CT and physics, the epistemic status of CT, CT and philosophy of mind, provability of CT and CT and functional programming. Adam Olszewski, is assistant professor of the philosophy of mathematics and mathematical logic at the Department of Philosophy of Pontifical Academy of Theology, Cracow (Poland). Jan Wolenski is professor of philosophy, Institute of Philosphy, Jagiellonian University, Cracow (Poland). He is one of the most distinguished logicians in Poland. Robert Janusz is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy of Ignatius College, Cracow (Poland). (shrink)

This volume portrays the Polish or Lvov-Warsaw School, one of the most influential schools in analytic philosophy, which, as discussed in the thorough introduction, presented an alternative working picture of the unity of science.

This paper investigates the concept of aletheia in ancient philosophy from the pre-Socratics until Aristotle. The meaning of aletheia in archaic Greek is taken as the starting point. It is followed by remarks about the concept of truth in the Seven Sages. The author discusses this concept as it appears in views and works of philosophers and historians. A special section is devoted to the epistemological and ontological understanding of truth. On this occasion, influential views of Heidegger are examined. The (...) paper is concluded by a review of various meanings of truth in Aristotle. (shrink)

This paper reports some attempts undertaken in Poland in the 1930s to modernize Thomism by means of modern logic. In particular, it concerns J.M. Bocheski and J. Salamucha, the leading members of the CracowCircle. They attempted to give precise logical form to the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas. Other works concerned the concept of transcendentals, the levels of abstraction, and the concept of essence.

This paper presents the life and work of Alfred Tarski, one of the most distinguished and influential logicians in the entire history.

This paper provides an interpretation of Father Bocheński’s saying “Beyond logic there is only nonsense.” He considered the battle against superstitions of various kinds as one of the most important intellectual and social duties. The phrase in itself suggests that logic is a weapon in the mentioned battle. Logic is understood broadly, that is, as semantics, formal logic and the methodology of science, and was considered by Bocheński as the main instrument of rational philosophy. Hence, the formula under discussion has (...) an explicit metaphilosophical significance, although Bochenski’s understanding of the concept of differs from that of the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

This paper discusses the concept of nothing (nothingness) from the point of logic and ontology (metaphysics). It is argued that the category of nothing as a denial of being is subjected to various interpretations. In particular, this thesis concerns the concept of negation as used in metaphysics. Since the Leibniz question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ and the principle of sufficient reason is frequently connected with the status of nothing, their analysis is important for the problem in question. (...) Appendix contains a short critical analysis of Heidegger’s famous statement Das Nichts nichtet. (shrink)

The semantic theory of truth, formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1939s, is primarily a mathematical theory. On the other hand, it also has a considerable philosophical content. This paper presents the second aspect of this theory. It can be shown that several traditional philosophical issues pertaining to the concept of truth can be illuminated by Tarski’s account of truth. It concerns, for instance, the idea of correspondence, the relation of truth and logic, the problem of the relativity/absoluteness of truth, (...) etc. (shrink)

. This papers examines formal properties of logical squares and their generalizations in the form of hexagons and octagons. Then, several applications of these constructions in philosophical analysis are elaborated. They concern contingency (accidentality), possibility, permission, axiological concepts (bonum and malum), the generalized Hume thesis (deontic and epistemic modalities), determinism, truth and consistency (in various senses. It is shown that relations between notions used in various branches of philosophy fall into the same formal scheme.

In this article the author first described the developments which brought to focus the importance of consistency proofs for mathematics, and which led Hilbert to promote the science of metamathemat-ics. Further comments and remarks concern the (partly analogous) beginnings of the work on the decision problem, Gödel?s theorems and related matters, and general metamathematics. An appendix summarizes a text by the author on completeness and categoricity.

This paper examines two arguments againstpsychologism advanced by Frege andHusserl. The first argument says that thelaws of logic cannot be justified by thelaws of psychology, because the formerand a priori and certain, but the latterare probable only. The second argumentpoints out that the status of logicallaws as universal principles of thinking isnot intelligible on the psychologisticinterpretation of logic. The author tries toshow how to examine both arguments bymetalogical devices.

A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.

Józef M. Bocheński began his philosophical career as an eclectic philosopher, then switched to Thomism and finally became a representative of the analytic school. As a Thomist he wanted to reform this orientation by the resources of modern formal logic. This tendency culminated in the establishment of the Cracow Circle (established in 1936) whose members were Bocheński, Jan F. Drewnowski, Jan Salamucha, and Bolesław Sobociński. However, the program of the Cracow Circle was rejected by most Thomists who considered traditional logic (...) as an entirely sufficient device of philosophy. Bocheński was very disappointed by this attitude of his Thomist fellows. His evolution toward analytic philosophy, free of any ideological pressure, can be regarded as his reaction to the conservatism of Thomism. (shrink)

Kazimierz Twardowski is most commonly known as the teacher of great philosophers and the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School. As a philosopher however, he is primarily remembered for his famous comparison of the contents and objects of various kinds of representations, a comparison that remains enshrined in European thought.In fact, he attained important results in many other branches of philosophy as well. For instance, in ontology, he laid the foundations for the modern theory of formal structure of objects, and he (...) introduced the theoretically fruitful pair of terms, action-product. In epistemology, he developed a profound analysis of the notion and criteria of truth; and he provided a forceful account of the errors underlying relativist theories of truth. In methodology, he drew an explicit distinction between the processes of discovering, systematising, and grounding in science, and he offered accurate descriptions of the nature of psychology and other humanities. In logic, he offered decisive arguments on behalf of the idiogenetic conception of judgement, and he improved the traditional typology of adjectives.These achievements are of significance that is not only historical. Kazimierz Twardowski's work, formulated in plain, precise language, are instructive and inspiring for contemporary students of philosophy. (shrink)

The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook, all by leading experts in the field, provide the most extensive treatment of various epistemological problems, ...

Hence, the title The Heritage of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz seems to reflect the general idea of this collection. Most papers collected here were specially ...

The brief article of 1910 which is translated here is, as the prefatory note explains, significant for understanding both the way in which ?ukasiewicz came to many-valued logic and the influences under which he stood at the time.

This papers discuss the place, if any, of Convention T (the condition of material adequacy of the proper definition of truth formulated by Tarski) in the truth-makers account offered by Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith. It is argued that although Tarski’s requirement seems entirely acceptable in the frameworks of truth-makers theories for the first-sight, several doubts arise under a closer inspection. In particular, T-biconditionals have no clear meaning as sentences about truth-makers. Thus, truth-makers theory cannot be considered as (...) the semantic theory of truth enriched by metaphysical (ontological) data. The problem of truth-makers for sentences about future events is discussed at the end of the paper. (shrink)

This paper discusses the main logical ideas put forward by Jan Łukasiewicz within their historical context and further development.