Jacek Malinowski Andrzej Pietruszczak

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION IN TORUN:´ 1992–2003

The aim of this book is to present the papers centered upon the subjects of For- mal Ontology and Logical Philosophy. The idea of investigating philosophical problems by means of logical methods was intensively promoted in Torunby´ the Department of Logic of Nicolaus Copernicus University during last decade. The main driving force behind the initiative and subsequent realizer of this am- bition was Jerzy Perzanowski, who headed the Torunian Department of Logic since October 1992 until June 2003. Another aim of this book is to present to the philosophical and logical audience the activities of the Torunian Department of Logic during this decade. The papers in this volume contain the results concerning Logic and Logical Philosophy, obtained within the confines of the projects initiated by the Depart- ment of Logic and other international research projects in which the Torunian Department of Logic took part. To sketch the general setting of the Torunian enterprises in the area of Logic and Philosophy we would like to present here a brief history of the Department. The Department of Logic was founded by Tadeusz Cze˙zowski in the very beginning of the existence of Nicolaus Copernicus University in 1945. In Octo- ber 1945 he took over the position of professor at the First Chair of Philosophy in the Philosophical Seminar at the Faculty of Humanities. Six years later this chair changed its name to “Chair of Logic”. Nicolaus Copernicus University is a direct successor of Jan Kazimierz Uni- versity in . For this reason, the research in the Department was from the beginning strongly influenced by the extraordinarily rich and fruitful tradi- tion of logical investigations which had thrived in between the World Wars and had been established by such prominent logicians and philosophers as Jan Łukasiewicz, , Stanisław Lesniewski,´ Leon Chwistek, Tadeusz Kotarbinski,´ Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Mordechaj Wajsberg, and Adolf Lindenbaum. All the logicians and philosophers mentioned above belonged to the famous Lvov- School of Philosophy founded by Kazi- mierz Twardowski. Tadeusz Cze˙zowski belonged to the most prominent repre- sentatives of this School.

In: J. Malinowski and A. Pietruszczak (eds.), Essays in Logic and Ontology (Poznan ´ Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 91), 9–16. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006. 10 Jacek Malinowski, Andrzej Pietruszczak

After Tadeusz Cze˙zowski had retired in 1960 the position of the Head of De- partment was taken over in 1965 by Leon Gumanski´ who directed it until his re- tirement in 1991. The next year Professor Jerzy Perzanowski was appointed the Head of the Department of Logic of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun´ and he steered it for a bit more than a decade, until 2003.1 As we mentioned it above our main goal is to present the activities of the Torunian Department of Logic and the results of the projects initiated during this decade. The period of last thirteen years was the time of the intensive growth of the ventures and achievements of the Department. Many logicians and philosophers contributed to them in the form of considerable results of research as well as by initiating and promoting valuable projects. We believe however that the activity and cordiality of Profesor Perzanowski was crucial for all the accomplishments of the Department during this decade. We would like to stress that each of the papers presented in this volume is inspired by some of numerous projects of the Department.

The Journal “Logic and Logical Philosophy” In 1993 there appeared the first volume of Logic and Logical Philosophy, its publisher being the Nicolaus Copernicus University Press. The leading ambi- tion of the journal was, and still is, to promote application of logical methods in Philosophy, Cognitive and Computer Sciences, Linguistics and related disci- plines. Along with the first issue of the journal the gap has been filled between purely logical journals publishing formal results on logical systems and journals publishing informal considerations concerning problems that could be consid- ered by means of logical tools. In the period of thirteen years thirteen volumes of Logic and Logical Philos- ophy appeared. About seventy authors published more than one hundred orig- inal research papers. The editorial policy of the journal has been successful in attracting a broad audience of logicians and philosophers. In this volume we present eight papers contributed by the authors cooperat- ing with the journal. None of these papers is devoted to purely logical investi- gations. The following three of them represent the mainstream of investigations in Formal Ontology — the subject intended to belong to the core of the scope of Logic and Logical Philosophy. The paper “At the crossroads of logic and ontology: A modal combinatorial analysis of why there is something rather than nothing” by Dale Jacquette contains a comprehensive analysis of the idea of making logic the basis of ontology. Uwe Meixner’s paper “An onto-nomological theory of modality” presents a logical theory of ontological modality. Roberto

1Between those periods prof. T. Szczurkiewicz (1960–1965) and prof. J. Pawlak (1991/1992) were the wardens of Department of Logic.