Jan Wolenski

This paper is devoted to analysis of co-called paradox of confirmation formulated by C. G. Hempel in the 1930s. In particular, the author proposes a solution of this puzzle. The proposal consists in refining the concept of confirmation by adding a clause that if A confirms a hypothesis h, the former must be a logical consequence of a latter, eventually derived with the help of additional assumptions. This leads to an additional constraint requiring that confirmations act relatively to sets of reference. Finally, if h and h’ are logically equivalent, a sentence A confirms both to the same degree if and only if related sets of reference are the same

This paper argues that science is not dependent on philosophical assumption and does not entail philosophical consequences. The concept of dependence and entailment is understood logically, that is, are defined via consequence operation. Speaking more colloquially, the derivation of scientific theorems does not use philosophical statements as premises and one cannot derive philosophical theses from scientific assertions. This does not mean that science and philosophy are completely separated. In particular, sciences leads to some philosophical insights, but it must be preceded by a hermeneutical interpretation

Finland is internationally known as one of the leading centers of twentieth century analytic philosophy. This volume offers for the first time an overall survey of the Finnish analytic school. The rise of this trend is illustrated by original articles of Edward Westermarck, Eino Kaila, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. Contributions of Finnish philosophers are then systematically discussed in the fields of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, ethics and social philosophy. Metaphilosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy are highlighted by the Finnish dialogue between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory.

Władysław Witwicki was first of all a psychologist, but he graduated in philosophy from Lvov University, being one of the earliest pupils of Kazimierz Twardowski. He was a representative of the descriptivistic branch of the Lvov-Warsaw School. In the area of phsychology he put into practice the important postulate of his teacher, who persuaded his students to write original handbooks, giving Polish scholar contributions their due: it is how the work on Witwicki's Psychology began. In the area of philosophy he was particularly interested in the foundations of (descriptive) psychology. Witwicki's ontological and epistemological views are close to realism. In ethics he defended the absolute character of moral norms against scepticism and relativism. In general, Witwicki subscribed to anti-irrationalism, the common standpoint in his School

Non-existence provides big problems for ontology and modest for logic. Logical problems of non-existence consist in licensing inferences in which sentences with empty terms are involved. The standard predicate logic solves this question by presupposing that every individual constant has an object to which it refers. This means that empty domains are excluded from semantics for the first-order logic. However, there is a temptation to consider logic without existential presuppositions.The ontological problem of non-existence leads to the question of the meaning of 'nothing'. We encounter "various conceptions of nothing" in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to our times. However, nothing (or nothingness) is always a negation of being. Since we have distributive and collective (mereological) concepts of being, we also should distinguish nothing in the distributive and mereological meaning. This difference is important because only the former leads to the paradox of nothing of all nothings, analogical to the paradox of all sets. A closer analysis of the nothing in the distributive sense shows that any meaningful talk about non-existence requires a relativisation to a fixed domain of discourse. This seems; to entail that the empty set is the formal model of nothing what means that the concept of absolute nothing in the distributive sense is simply inconsistent. To some extent, being and nothing are mutually dual. This motivates that the concept of nothing is governed by so-called dual logic connected with processes of rejection. More specifically, statements on "nothing" are not asserted but rejected.