Zbigniew Orbik

Izydora Da˛mbska was one of the most outstanding representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School and a disciple of both the School’s founder Kazimierz Twardowski and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Interest in the School was the result of Twardowski’s program of scientific philosophy, which was adopted by the vast majority of his students. This program assumed that the basic condition for practicing philosophy in a scientific manner is the precise use of language by a philosopher. One of the scholars who devoted most attention to language was Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Da˛mbska accepted that the philosophical program of the School was opposed to the trend shared by many contemporary schools at the time which belonged to the so called current of linguistic philosophy. According to this trend, language is the only object of philosophical investigation. The analysis of Ajdukiewicz’s concept of language is one of her most interesting achievements in the domain of philosophy of language. This concept, called by Da˛mbska ‘the immanent concept of language’, is the basis of Ajdukiewicz’s well-known radical conventionalism.

The article presents ethical work of an outstanding representative of the philosophical Lvov-Warsaw School – Izydora Dąmbska. The conviction that philosophy is a science and is axiologically grounded was inherited from her teacher Kazimierz Twardowski. According to this point of view, being a philosopher means realization of both intellectual and moral values. The text gives an insight into the ways Dąmbska understands the term ethics and her notion of the most fundamental terms of axiological ethics: assessment, values, norms. The four distinguished by her issues of scientific ethics: the issue of ethical criteria, sources of morality, moral foundation and range of ethics are also examined. Dąmbska’s achievements in the history of ethics, her reflections on ethics’ independence from religion and on teaching ethics at school are also presented.