This book traces the development of formal logic from its origins inancient Greece to the present day. The authors first discuss the work oflogicians from Aristotle to Frege, showing how they were influenced by thephilosophical or mathematical ideas of their time. They then examinedevelopments in the present century.

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)

The systematic comparison of Avicenna’s Ilāhiyyāt of the Šifā' with Aristotle’s Metaphysics , accomplished for the first time in the present volume, provides a detailed account of Avicenna’s reworking of the epistemological profile and contents of the Metaphysics and a comprehensive investigation of this latter’s transmission in pre-Avicennian Greek and Arabic philosophy.

En 1910, Jan Lukasiewicz publiait Du principe de contradiction chez Aristote. Dans cet article, on explique les points principaux du livre de Lukasiewicz. Ce dernier affirme qu’Aristote n’a pas réussi dans sa tentative pour justifier le principe de contradiction. En fait, ce principe est moins logique qu’éthique, selon Lukasiewicz, et cela explique bien des difficultés posées par la théorie d’Aristote. On discute également de la façon dont Lukasiewicz utilise la notion d’« objets contradictoires », empruntée à la Théorie des Objets (...) de Meinong ; on montre que Lukasiewicz se situe dans le cadre d’une version brentanienne de l’aristotélisme. Certaines connexions entre Lukasiewicz et la conception wittgensteinienne de la nécessité ou le conservatisme logique de Quine sont indiquées. Le but de mon article est essentiellement d’encourager une lecture attentive du livre qui n’a pas reçu l’attention qu’il mérite parce qu’il a été écrit à l’origine en polonais. Souvent, les philosophes croient connaître son contenu à travers le résumé que Lukasiewicz écrivit en allemand en 1910, et qui a été traduit en anglais. Mais, en fait, il y a bien des choses importantes dans le livre qui n’apparaissent nullement dans le résumé.In 1910, Jan Lukasiewicz published On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle. In the present paper, I explain the main points in Lukasiewicz's book. Lukasiewicz claims that Aristotle was not successful in his attempt to justify the principle of contradiction. In fact, this principle is less logical than ethical, according to Lukasiewicz ; and this accounts for many of Aristotle's difficulties. Lukasiewicz's use of the notion of “contradictory objects”, taken from Meinong's Theory of Objects , is also discussed, and Lukasiewicz is shown to be situated within the Brentanian form of Aristotelism. I also indicate some connections between Lukasiewicz and Wittgenstein on necessity, and between Lukasiewicz and Quine on logical conservatism. The goal of the present paper is principally to encourage an attentive reading of a book that has not received the consideration it deserves because it was initially written in Polish. Often, philosophers believe that they grasp the content of the book through the brief abstract which Lukasiewicz wrote in German in 1910, and which has been translated into English ; but in fact there is much of importance which the abstract does not cover. (shrink)