Twardowski: Scientific Ethics
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lecture 1 Twardowski: Scientific Ethics 1 The School of Twardowski In Vienna in 1894, a 28- year- old disciple of Franz Brentano named Kazimierz Twardowski published his Habilitationsschrift. Entitled Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand de Vorstellungen (On the Content and Object of Presenta- tions), this treatise is now considered to be one of the most important and in- teresting works of modern philosophy. Soon after it appeared, during the 1895 winter semester the young Privatdozent of Vienna University was appointed Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Lvov (Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in German, Lviv in Ukrainian; Lemberg was at that time the capital of the Aus- trian province of Galicia) and started teaching his first course. These two dates mark the beginning of a process that resulted in the creation of the “school of Twardowski”, the Lvov- Warsaw philosophical school – Twardowski’s life’s work1 – which opened a new chapter in the history of Polish philosophy. Scholarly circles noted his treatise very favorably in a number of reviews in the most distinguished philosophical periodicals. His teaching activity, howev- er, seemed less promising at first; only a handful of students came to listen to the first lectures of this new professor. That was to change quickly. Over time the number of attendees soared to the point that the lectures had to be moved to the largest university hall, and later even to the town’s largest cinema. Very soon a smaller circle of disciples began to group around Twardowski, attracted by the professor’s style of work – the clarity and precision of his lec- tures, the thoughtful organizational framework of the philosophical seminars, the atmosphere of friendly free discussion in which the search for truth was the only concern, the seriousness of the professor’s approach to philosophy and to the social role of philosophical education. In all these respects Twardowski’s model was his own teacher, Franz Brentano.2 1 On Twardowski and the Lvov- Warsaw school, cf. Jan Woleński, Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov- Warsaw School, Dordrecht 1989. 2 More on the Brentano- Twardowski relationship: Roman Ingarden, “Filozofia w rozumieniu Brentany”, and “Działalność naukowa Twardowskiego”, in: Roman Ingarden, Z badań nad filo- zofią współczesną, Warszawa 1963. Also: Janusz Czerny, Kazimierz Twardowski – współtwórca brentanowskiego programu filozofii, Wrocław 1990 and Elżbieta Paczkowska-Łagowska, Psy- chologia i poznanie. Epistemologia Kazimierza Twardowskiego, Warszawa 1980. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004394322_002 2 lecture 1 Many of Twardowski’s disciples chose academic careers, teaching first in Lvov and later in Warsaw, Vilnius, Poznań and Cracow when Poland regained its independence after World War I. Strictly speaking, the school of Twardows- ki was not only a Lvov- Warsaw school, as in the interwar period its members held chairs of philosophy at all Polish universities except for Catholic Lublin University. Twardowski was a teacher of teachers. He supervised the doctoral disser- tations of more than 30 budding academics. The list of his doctoral students is impressive for its breadth of interest as well as the number, for it includes the psychologists Władysław Witwicki, Leopold Blaustein, Mieczysław Kreutz, Stefan Baley and others in that field; the historians of literature Juliusz Klein- er, Manfred Kridl and Stanisław Łempicki; the linguist Jan Kuryłowicz; the German philologist Zygmunt Łempicki; the classical philologist Ryszard Gan- siniec; and the philosophers Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski, Tadeusz Czeżowski, Izydora Dąmbska, Kazimierz Sośnicki, Franciszek Smolka, Zygmunt Zawirski, Daniela Gromska, Michał Treter, Karol Frenkel and others. Usually the term “Lvov- Warsaw school” denotes the best-known work in mathematical logic, as well as philosophical work on subjects amenable to analyses employing the tools of mathematical logic (theory of truth, mereol- ogy, many- valued logics, methodological problems, etc.). No doubt these were the primary concerns of the school in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in War- saw, where, in a happy coincidence, the interests of two groups of scholars overlapped: philosophers, trained in Twardowski’s school to approach philo- sophical problems with rigorous exactitude; and mathematicians who, follow- ing the research program proposed by Zygmunt Janiszewski, Wacław Sierpińs- ki and Stefan Mazurkiewicz, decided to concentrate their work on set theory, topology and mathematical logic. The two milieus cooperated very closely. How closely is to be seen in the telling fact that from 1920 to 1928 the journal of the Warsaw school of mathematics, Fundamenta Mathematicae, was co- edited by two mathematicians (Mazurkiewicz and Sierpiński) and two philosophers (Leśniewski and Łukasiewicz). Twardowski personally never became an ad- mirer of mathematical logic, but he followed its developments and encour- aged his students to do the same. The philosophical investigations of Twardowski himself and of his direct disciples – and their disciples – ranged over many other domains. The classical problems of philosophy, including those of ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of law and philosophy of religion, were regarded as worth consideration. Given that scope of interests and given Twardowski’s openness to different investi- gative approaches, it is clear that the most important unifying elements of his .