Jan Wolenski

One can often encounter an opinion that Polish scientific philosophy deserves to be much better known than actually is. This book is thought as a response to such a claim. The papers collected in this volume are divided into two parts: Background and Influence and History and Systematics. However, there is no sharp borderline between themes which are touched in both parts. Generally speaking, all papers of the first part relate the Lvov-Warsaw School to some philosophical movements external to it whereas the papers collected in the second one focus on internal issues connected with the school . Since the Polish school of mathematical logic is much better known than the Polish analytic philosophy we decided to omit here any treatment of the former. Thus, this collection centers on purely philosophical matters. We projected this volume not as an exhaustive panorama of Polish analytic philosophy but rather as a series of essays on particular persons or topic. As a result one can find here papers on Twardowski. Ajdukiewicz, Kotarbinski, Tarski and Lukasiewicz as well as on ethics on science, nominalism, and the methodology of psychology. We hope that this book will contribute to a better knowledge and evaluation of Polish achievements in analytic philosophy. We would like to express our gratitude to Professor Leszek Nowak, the editor-in-chief of Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, who initiated the idea of the collection and helped in its preparation

This paper investigates relations between truth and consistency. The basic intuition is that truth implies consistency, but the reverse dependence fails. However, this simple account leads to some troubles, due to some metalogical results, in particular the Gödel-Malcev completeness theorem. Thus, a more advanced analysis is required. This is done by employing the concept of ω-consistency and ω-inconsistency. Both concepts motivate that the concept of the standard truth should be introduced as well. The results are illustrated by an interpretation of the well-known logical square and its generalization.

This paper investigates the concept of aletheia in ancient philosophy from the pre-Socratics until Aristotle. The meaning of aletheia in archaic Greek is taken as the starting point. It is followed by remarks about the concept of truth in the Seven Sages. The author discusses this concept as it appears in views and works of philosophers and historians. A special section is devoted to the epistemological and ontological understanding of truth. On this occasion, influential views of Heidegger are examined. The paper is concluded by a review of various meanings of truth in Aristotle

This paper examines the problem of genesis of logic in the light of naturalism as a philosophical view about the nature of knowledge and reality. The main difficulty of naturalism as far as applied to logic consists in reconciling genetic empiricism (all cognition starts with experience) and abstract nature of logic. Anti-naturalism (Platonism, for example) maintains than empiricism is not able to explain how logical theorems as a priori assertions are accumulated. To defend naturalism one should note that experiential character of knowledge can be understood phylogenetically or ontogenetically. The former account is more suitable for naturalism and allows us to investigate genesis of logic by glasses of evolutionary theory. This way can be supplemented by an appeal to genetics. Both theories can explain how logical competence, that is ability to use deduction, arose in humans. The author claims that the structure of the genetic coded has some properties that became transformed into logical rule. Some analogies between consequence operation and topological closure are employed in analysis