Lvov-Warsaw School. Past, Present and Future

The beginnings of the Lvov School, later on called the Lvov-Warsaw School, are connected with the person of Kazimierz Twardowski, a disciple of Franz Brentano, and his taking the post of Head of the Chair of Philosophy at Lvov University. It was thanks to Twardowski that a modern school of philosophy was established, which was where a host of outstanding philosophers, logicians, psychologists, university professors and organizers of scholarly life in independent Poland came from. Owing to the activity of the School, multiplicity of attitudes and a variety of represented views, not only philosophical, it was also possible to develop formal logic and mathematics, and the accomplishments of representatives of these disciplines are often included into pioneering and seminal on the global scale.

J. Lukasiewicz and S. Lesniewski were the founders of the world-famous Warsaw School of Logic. The former propagated the idea of applying logical tools to the classical metaphysics. The latter built three systems of logic (prototetic, ontology, mereology), which showed formal values and applications in the spirit of nominalism. Their disciples were, among others, A. Tarski – the author of a pioneering dissertation on semantic theory of truth (1933) and, following World War 2, the founder of the Californian School at Berkeley, S. Jaskowski, A. Lindenbaum, S. Lejewski, B. Sobocinski, J. Slupecki, M. Wajsberg.

The works by the following disciples of K.Twardowski can also be considered seminal: K. Ajdukiewicz – in the field of logical theory of language (significant for the so-called mathematical linguistics; Y. Bar-Hillel, N. Chomsky), and also in the area of logical analysis of epistemology; T. Kotarbinski – the founder of reism (nominalistic philosophical conception) as well as praxeology – science of effective action.

Logical theory of science was the subject matter successfully dealt with by T. Czyzowski, Z. Zawirski, I. Dambska, M. Kokoszynska-Lutmanowa, J. Hosiassion1–Lindenbaumowa, J. Kotarbinska, H. Mehleberg.

The flourishing of the Polish school of logic and philosophy before the outbreak of WW2 received a lot of attention worldwide. After the War, the Lvov-Warsaw School ceased to exist. Its representatives, who had managed to survive the turmoil of war, went to live in different parts of Poland and all over the world, having left the output, which – despite the communist regime – was able to revive and develop a new Polish logic, owing to continuation of its traditions and strong connections with multiple disciplines: philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, semiotics and others.

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