The influence of Kasimir Twardowski on modern Polish philosophy is all-pervasive. As is well known, almost all important 20th century Polish philosophers went through the hard training of his courses in Lvov. Twardowski instilled in his students an enduring concern for clarity and rigour. He taught them to regard philosophy as a collaborative effort, a matter of disciplined discussion and argument. And he encouraged them to work together with scientists from other disciplines — above all with psychologists, and also with (...) mathematicians — so that the Lvov school of philosophy would gradually evolve into the Warsaw school of logic. (shrink)

See revised version in Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy, chapter 4; available online at: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/book/austrian_philosophy/.

Brentanos Reflexionen über das Verhältnis von Wahrheit und Evidenz wurden erst 1930 herausgegeben. Ihre Kenntnis ist unentbehrlich für das Verständnis seines Verhältnisses zu den an ihn anknüpfenden Denkern, insbesondere zu Husserl.

This book grew out of an international symposium, organized in September 1986 by the Austrian Cultural Institute in Warsaw in cooperation with the Polish Philosophical Society. The topic was: The Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw School. Since the two phil osophical trends existed in roughly the same time and were close ly related, it was one of the purposes of the symposium to investigate both similarities and thp differences. Some thirty people took part in the symposium, nearly twenty contributions were (...) presented and extensively discussed. The sym posium owed much to the excellent organization and warm hospital ity shown by Dr Georg Jankovic, the Director of the Austrian In stitute. As the person in charge of the scientific programme of the symposium, I take pleasure to acknowledge this debt. It so happened that a month later another symposium of a similar character was held. It took place in the University of Manchester, on the occasion of the centenary of the births of Stanislaw Lesniewski, Tadeusz Kotarbiflski and Wladyslaw Tatarkie wicz. Some papers read at the Manchester symposium form a part of the present volume. It was not possible, for technical reasons (the time factor was one of them), to include in this book all the material from the two symposia. Certain contributions have appeared elsewhere (for instance, K. Szaniawski's 'Ajdukiewicz on Non-Deductive Inference' was published in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, Vol. 23). On the other hand, certain papers have been written special ly for this volume. (shrink)

Both ‘Sachverhalt’ and ‘state of affairs’ seem to have been derived from the juridical ‘status’ in the sense of 'status rerum' meaning: state or constitution of things. ‘Status’ signifies also in an extended sense ‘the way things stand, the condition or peculiarity of a thing in regard to its circumstances, position, order’. We describe the history of usage of ‘Sachverhalt’ from these beginnings, addressing the role of Goclenius, Lotze, Stumpf, Husserl and Adolf Reinach, whose theory of the relations between judgment (...) and Sachverhalt served as one starting point for the development of Reinach’s theory of speech acts in 1913. (shrink)

The story of this book of 'materials on Ludwik Fleck' is also the story of the reception of Ludwik Fleck. In this volume, some essential materials which have been produced by that reception have been gathered together.

I ON THE PRIMITIVE TERM OF LOGISTICf IN this article I propose to establish a theorem belonging to logistic concerning some connexions, not widely known, ...

Although the relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, this is the first full-length study of this key concept. Showing that mereology, or the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology, Simons surveys and critiques previous theories--especially the standard extensional view--and proposes a new account that encompasses both temporal and modal considerations. Simons's revised theory not only allows him to offer fresh solutions to long-standing problems, but also has far-reaching consequences for (...) our understanding of a host of classical philosophical concepts. (shrink)

This paper is a study of Brentano’s ontology, and more specifically of his theory of substance and accident as put forward toward the end of his life in the materials collected together as the Kategorienlehre or Theory of Categories. Here Brentano presents an auditious (re-)interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of substance and accidence. We show that on the Brentano initially defends, it is space which serves as the single substance upon which all other entities depend as accidents of space. In an (...) appendix, however, Brentano puts forward an even more radical suggestion, inspired by the physics of Kelvin. According to this final view, space itself is an accident of a deeper substance: the present time. (shrink)

A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar, we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the (...) account of truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of logical form’, which says that atomic sentences cannot have more than one truthmaker. In contrast to this, we uphold the mutual independence of logical and ontological complexity, and the authors outline formal principles of truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity. (shrink)

Im Zentrum der 1874 erschienenen bewußtseinspsychologischen Abhandlungen Brentanos steht die Beschreibung und Analyse des Psychischen. Damit bahnte sich jene Abwendung von der sensualistischen Tradition der philosophischen Bewußtseinslehre an, die in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls vollendet wurde.

Brentano uses terms in place of predicates (e.g. "a thinker" in place of "thinks") and characterizes the "is" of predication in terms of the part-whole relation. Taking as his ontological data certain intentional phenomena that are apprehended with certainty, he conceives the substance-accident relation as a defmeable type of part-whole relation which we can apprehend in "inner perception". He is then able to distinguish the following types of individual or ens reale: substances; primary individuals which are not substances; accidents; aggregates; (...) and boundaries. (shrink)

It is argued, on the basis of ideas derived from Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Husserl's Logical Investigations, that the formal comprehends more than the logical. More specifically: that there exist certain formal-ontological constants (part, whole, overlapping, etc.) which do not fall within the province of logic. A two-dimensional directly depicting language is developed for the representation of the constants of formal ontology, and means are provided for the extension of this language to enable the representation of certain materially necessary relations. The (...) paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between formal logic, formal ontology, and mathematics. (shrink)

Excerpt from Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie Uber den Begriff und die Aufgaben der Sprachphilosophie und allgemeinen Grammatik und ihr Verhältnis zur Psychologie. Erstes Kapitel. Begriff der Sprache und der Sprachphilosophie. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in (...) the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Die in diesem Band vereinten Aufsätze spiegeln Brentanos späte Ansichten wieder; die Einleitung wurde für den allgemein philosophisch interessierten Leser konzipiert und behandelt Brentanos Theorie des Kontinuums, des Ursprungs des ...

The familiar Vendler-Kenny scheme of verb-types, viz., performances (further differentiated by Vedler into accomplishments and achievements), activities, and states, is too narrow in two important respects. First, it is narrow linguistically. It fails to take into account the phenomenon of verb aspect. The trichotomy is not one of verbs as lexical types but of predications. Second, the trichotomy is narrow ontologically. It is a specification in the context of human agency of the more fundamental, topic-neutral trichotomy, event-process-state.The central component in (...) this ontological trichotomy, event, can be sharply differentiated from its two flanking components by adapting a suggestion by Geoffrey N. Leech and others that the contrast between perfective and imperfective aspect in verbs corresponds to the count/mass distinction in the domain of nouns. With the help of two distinctions, of cardinal count adverbials versus frequency adverbials, and of occurrence versus associated occasion, two interrelated criteria for event predication are developed. Accordingly, Mary capsized the boat is an event predication because (a) it is equivalent to There was at least one capsizing of the boat by Mary, or (b) because it admits cardinal count adverbials, e.g., at least once, twice, three times. Ontologically speaking, events are defined as those occurrences that are inherently countable. (shrink)

Reprint of paper first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1984.

Apart from Aristotle it is Comte who most influenced Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, especially with regard to methodological questions. Brentano follows Comte not only in his attack on 'metaphysical' sciences and in his claim that sciences in their positive stage deal with phenomena; he also takes over Comte's encyclopedic law, replacing, however, sociology with psychology. In order to lay the foundations of psychology, Brentano recommends all the scientific methods suggested by Comte, but states that psychology employs as its (...) genuine method inner perception, the neglect of which had led Comte to deny the autonomous status of psychology as a science. (shrink)