A Golden Age in Science and Letters: The Lwów–Warsaw Philosophical School, 1895–1939 Peter Simons The University of Warsaw has a splendid modern library with 60,000 m 2 of floor space. It resembles a shopping centre. The long and elegant modern building on ulica Dobra (a typical Varsovian street-name), on the low ground between the old University and the Vistula, was opened in 1998 replacing the previous hopelessly inadequate facilities. It has an imposing sequence of copper-green “great texts” on its front side in Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Latin, Polish, music, and mathematics. These are international symbols, posting Warsaw’s claim to international status. But inside, once one has passed the malllike coffee-shop, bookshops, post office, crèche, travel shop and student facilities, one enters the hallowed area of the catalogue hall and reading areas, passing up a staircase between four circular concrete pillars, each around 10 m high. Most students probably do not give then a glance but they contain a vital clue to Poland’s intellectual past and current identity. For the pillars are topped by life-size concrete statues of four great Polish philosophers …
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They are, in this picture, and from right to left, Kazimierz Twardowski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Alfred Tarski, and Stanisław Leśniewski. Around each pillar wind texts by each of the philosophers, the reading of which would require a spiralling motion from top to bottom beyond the capabilities of anyone without a mechanical hoist. I can think of no other country in the world which would so honour its philosophers, and wish here to explain why this should be so, focussing especially on these four great men. Philosophy is international and truth knows no borders, but philosophy may flourish or fail to flourish in a given country because of the effects of politics, culture, education systems, and the accidents of personality and circumstance. So how did Polish philosophy, meaning simply philosophy in Poland, come to flourish? In the nineteenth century, Poland did not exist as a state, and its memory was kept alive by culture and language alone. In the Prussian and Russian parts of Poland, Polish culture, language and letters were vigorously and often brutally suppressed. Only in the Austrian part, called Galicia, were there universities, and these universities not only admitted Polish students but allowed instruction in the Polish language. Such was the mildness of Austrian imperialism by comparison with its more rigorous Prussian and Russian counterparts – small wonder then that the Austrian empire succumbed earlier than the other two. Those two Polish universities were the ancient Jagiellonian University of Kraków (1364), and the slightly more recent Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (1661). There was no reason to suppose Poland would ever give rise to a great movement in philosophy. Its philosophers in the nineteenth century were thirdrate romanticists and messianists, not to be compared with Europe’s finest. This was to change.
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On 25 November 1895 a philosopher was appointed to a vacant position of Extraordinary Professor in Lwów. His name was Kazimierz Twardowski. A son of Polish parents, he was born in 1866 in Vienna and went to school and university there. His teacher was the great German–Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano. For political reasons Brentano could teach but not officially supervise Twardowski, who finished his dissertation Idee und Perzeption bei Descartes in 1891 under the philosopher Robert Zimmermann. He then took work as a clerk in an insurance firm. In 1894 he submitted his Habilitationsschrift with the title Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen (On the Theory of the Content and Object of Presentations). This slim book of a hundred or so pages is one of the clearest texts of modern philosophy. It makes and fixes for ever a distinction whose ignoring had plagued philosophy at least since the seventeenth century: the distinction between what an idea of about (its object) and what it is like in itself (its content). So for example I may have an idea of the victor of the Battle of Jena and another idea of the vanquished of the Battle of Waterloo. These are, from the point of view of their content, quite distinct: one cannot tell, from thinking one, that it is about the very same object as is the other: Napoleon Bonaparte. Such, and other things, were the subject of Twardowski’s remarkable little treatise. It was presumably on the strength of this book that Twardowski was suggested for the vacant position in Lwów. Once he arrived there he quickly set about vitalizing and reorganizing philosophical activity in Austrian Poland. He switched to his parents’ language, Polish, and spent his energies less on original research than on teaching and on the professional organization of philosophy. In the course of the next years he founded the Polish Philosophical Society with its journal Ruch filozoficzny. In the course of an academic career that lasted almost until his death in 1938 he educated the cream of Poland’s future philosophers. His work was characterized by a limpid clarity which set the standard for future writing on philosophical topics in the Polish language, and led to Polish, along with English and German, being one of the three foremost media of analytical philosophy in the twentieth century. Several of Twardowski’s works have
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appeared in English, edited by my former colleague Johannes Brandl (Salzburg), and Jan Woleński (Kraków). Historically the most influential was a short work called “O tzw. prawdzywach względnych” (“On so-called relative truths”), published in 1900 in Polish and in 1902 in German translation. In this paper Twardowski argues forcibly that the concept of truth is an absolute one, not relative to places, times, persons or circumstances. With few exceptions, Poles held and continue to hold this (correct) position. Polish philosophy attained early at Twardowski’s hands its virues of clarity and sensible realism. Twardowski, the father of Polish analytical philosophy, is buried in Lwów. The first new talent to join Twardowski in Lwów was Jan Łukasiewicz (1878– 1956). Like his teacher, Łukasiewicz learnt from Austrian philosophy, in his case that of Alexius Meinong (Graz), where Łukasiewicz visited in 1908–9 after achieving his Habilitation in 1906. What Łukasiewicz may have learnt from Meinong was an iconoclastic and sceptical attitude to traditional logic. It was Łukasiewicz who first introduced the methods of mathematical logic, as represented by the work of Couturat (1905) and Whitehead and Russell (1910), into teaching in Lwów. In 1910 Łukasiewicz published the monograph O zasadzie sprzeczności u Arystotelesa (On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle). In this work he claimed that the principle of contradiction (that no proposition is ever true at the same times as its negation), claimed by many to be the cornerstone of logic, is neither unambiguous not underivable nor selfevident, but arises through practical reasons. Some time during the First World War he came to the view that statements about the indeterminate future (e.g., there will be a sea-battle tomorrow) require for their analysis a third status in addition to truth and falsity. This third status, which Łukasiewicz called “possibility” (możliwość), meant that not all propositions are either true or false. Łukasiewicz developed between 1917 and 1920 a system of logic which allowed this third truth-value, and thus inaugurated properly (despite some sketchy precedents in the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century) the first many-valued logic, thereby breaking the monopoly of so-called classical or bivalent (two-valued) logic.
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In 1916 Łukasiewicz became Professor at the University of Warsaw, reopened under German occupation, but in 1918 resigned to become Minister of Higher Education in Prime Minister Jan Paderewski’s cabinet. This office did not detain him long, and he returned as Professor of Logic in the Department of Mathematics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. He served twice as Rector of the University of Warsaw. He and his students developed in particular the study of many-valued logics and the logic of propositions. Łukasiewicz invented a special notation for logic which did not need brackets (parentheses) and to this day this is known as “Polish notation”. Łukasiewicz stumbled almost by accident on ancient logic, in examining a student’s dissertation, and discovered that it had been badly misrepresented by historians. He thereupon set about a proper study of the history of logic using the methods and knowledge of modern logic, and in the process became the undisputed father of the modern study of the history of logic. A book on the history of logic was lost during the chaos of the Second World War, but in the late 1940s Łukasiewicz rewrote it and published it in English. It became a classic: Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic (Oxford, 1951). In 1944 Łukasiewicz and his wife fled Warsaw to Germany, where they had a friend in the philosopher Heinrich Scholz in Münster. After staying in Belgium his plight came to the attention of Irish Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, who as a former mathematics teacher had some sympathy for mathematical achievement. De Valera arranged for Łukasiewicz to have a research professorship at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, where he remained from 1947 until his death in 1956. In 1996 it was my pleasure to be co-organiser of the only scientific meeting held up to that time on Łukasiewicz, in Dublin, where Łukasiewicz lies buried. It is odd that Łukasiewicz, the clearest writer and best stylist among the Polish logicians, should be so little honoured elsewhere, and it may have to do with right-wing sympathies of him and his wife which endeared him neither to Poles nor the victors of the war. Those unaffected by these political things may be more sanguine, and it was my privilege to be a member of the editorial committee on his collected works. I have published one paper on Łukasiewicz showing his many-valued logic to have been anticipated by Meinong. My paper included a
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translation of their extant correspondence and was reprinted in my 1992 collection Philosophy and Logic in Central Europe from Bolzano to Tarski. Other students of Twardowski before 1914 in Lwów included the philosophers Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Tadeusz Czeżowski, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Roman Ingarden, and Stanisław Leśniewski. There was a lively publishing activity coming from Lwów at this time and many of the topics taken up later were first aired at this time. After the war, when Poland regained her independence at long last, these young philosophers moved into positions of influence. In 1918 Leśniewski was offered a second chair of logic in Warsaw. So Warsaw had not only one chair in mathematical logic, it had two, which was at that time two more than any other university on the planet. Leśniewski (1886–1939) was the most rigorous of Twardowski’s students. He had studied in Germany and Switzerland before doing his Ph.D. in Lwów. Having been born in Serpukhov as son of a railway engineer and going to school on Russia, he spoke Russian as well as German, and he spent the war years in Moscow. In 1911 his attention had been caught by the description of logical paradoxes in the foundations of mathematics, mentioned in an appendix to Łukasiewicz’s 1911 monograph, and he spent the rest of his short life trying to provide a consistent foundation for mathematics. In the process he produced, between 1914 and 1930, the most original systems of logic of any in the twentieth century. Leśniewski died in 1939 of throat cancer almost certainly caused by smoking. When he died he was almost friendless, having alienated most of his collegues by intemperate attacks and an increasingly vehement anti-Semitism. In the end his only friend was his best friend, Tadeusz Kotarbiński. The two were born just three days apart in March 1886. Leśniewski is widely regarded as the most exact logician who ever lived. His principles are expressed with uncompromising precision and scrupulous attention to detail. He claimed his proudest achievement was a formally precise definition of ‘definition’, which even in abbreviated symbolic form takes up two
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pages and contains 18 main clauses. He was the perfect logical engineer, with zero tolerance of mistakes. His exactness made him a hard taskmaster and he only ever had one doctoral student: Tarski. Leśniewski’s systems are unorthodox and little followed, although I regard them all as in several ways better than their rivals. But their manner of presentation was so forbidding that they never caught on in the logical or mathematical fraternity. At his death Leśniewski was working on a book on paradoxes. His manuscripts were kept by his student Bolesław Sobociński, who once used them to cover up a list of teachers in the Underground University when visited by the Gestapo. Tragically, the manuscripts were lost in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and much of the work of Leśniewski had to be painfuly reconstructed by his students after the second war. One of Leśniewski’s last students was Czesław Lejewski, later professor in Manchester when I studied there, and whom I had the pleasure to bring out to Salzburg for a semester after his retirement in 1984. I have published a number of papers on Leśniewski, trying to show how to understand some of the odder parts of his system and argue their merits. These have met with a singular lack of echo. I also incorporated ideas from his work on the theory of part and whole (mereology) into my Austrian Habilitationsschrift with the title Parts (Oxford 1987 and 2000). Leśniewski has been the “Cinderella” of Polish logic but in many ways he is the most radical of all her logicians. Leśniewski was a fearsome debater and an inveterate unmasker of inexactness. His reputation in Warsaw was so terrifying that prospective authors were frightened to submit articles to Przegląd filozoficzny, and the editor wrote to Łukasiewicz to ask him for help. Shortly thereafter, Łukasiewicz wrote back that Leśniewski had been taught humility: “God has made a scourge for the back of Leśniewski, and the name of the scourge is ‘Teitelbaum’.” The young Alfred Teitelbaum, born in Warsaw on 14 January 1901, was a child prodigy and a mathematical genius. Although born into a Jewish family, Alfred soon came to mistrust and dislike religion for its divisiveness: later he was to say “Religion divides people, but logic brings people together”. To distance himself from his background he changed his name to ‘Tarski’. A probably false legend tells that when he went to his father Ignacy Teitelbaum for financial help on
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getting married, Papa Teitelbaum advised him crossly to go and ask for money from Papa Tarski. When his wife and children were in Warsaw during the war, the fact that their name did not sound Jewish may have helped to save their lives. Tarski started getting new results in his teens. By the time of his doctoral study he had already solved several open problems, and his 1924 dissertation, partly published in French, opened up the way to the development in Leśniewski’s systems. Leśniewski used to say proudly that he had 100% geniuses as doctoral students. Tarski had the good fortune to study both philosophy and mathematics at a time when Poland had fine representatives of both. His maths professors included Stefan Mazurkiewicz, Wacław Sierpiński and Kazimierz Kuratowski, who had cleverly steered Polish mathematics into the relatively young fields of logic, set theory and topology, where they could compete on even terms with the established mathematical nations of Gemany, France, Britain and America. From the start Tarski combined mathematical ability beyond that of his philosophy teachers with philosophical acumen beyond that of his mathematics teachers. He was proud to have the profession ‘Logik’ (Logician) in his passport, and claimed that only in Poland was such a thing thinkable. Tarski soon joined Łukasiewicz and Leśniewski as the third pillar of the Warsaw School of logic. Unfortunately there was no permanent position for him: Warsaw already had two more logic chairs than anywhere else and money was short. In a contest for the Chair of Logic at Lwów Tarski lost out to the logician–painter Leon Chwistek, whose work was at that stage better known abroad through Bertrand Russell, who recommended Chwistek. Tarski wrongly imagined himself the victim of anti-Semitic plotting. As it was he continued to earn his living as a maths teacher in a Warsaw gimnazjum until 1939, despite being by this time world-famous among experts. Tarski’s most considerable achievement of this period was the monograph O pojęcie prawdy w językach nauk dedukcynych, published in 1933 (though written in 1929–30). In this remarkable work, the single most impressive achievement of Polish logic, he manages to do something many had said could
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not be done: to show how to define the concept of truth for certain languages used in mathematics and logic. He manages to do this while retaining Twardowski’s idea that truth is absolute. The paper is so rich in content that it is still being mined for insights today, and almost all later twentieth century thinking on truth takes off from Tarski, even though most people no longer agree with the details of his work. It set off a good part of the work of logical semantics and model theory, which have been paramount in modern logic. With this and his other many considerable achievements, Tarski ranks as one of the four greatest logicians of all time. along with Aristotle, Frege and Gödel, and one of Poland’s truly world-class thinkers., along with Copernicus, Marie CurieSkłodowska, and Stephan Banach. Tarski incidentally co-operated with Banach in a paper of 1924 which showed that under certain not unintuitive assumptions it is possible to finitely decompose a sphere into parts which can be reassembled into two spheres of exactly the same size as the original. People still do not know quite what to make of this Tarski–Banach Paradox. In the Summer of 1939 Tarski travelled on the S.S. Piłsudski to the USA, where he participated in a Unity of Science conference at Harvard. While he was there, Hitler’s armed forces attacked Poland and he was unable to return. After some odd jobs in New York and elsewhere he eventually got a position at the University of California in Berkeley, where he stayed until his retirement. In 1946 Tarski’s wife Maria and their children Jan and Ina, who had survived the war, the 1944 Uprising and the march out of Warsaw, were reunited with their father in California. Tarski went on to become a respected figure in American academic life, and had a string of considerable Ph.D. students, certainly the most successful logic teacher in history. Yet he never managed to convince mathematicians to take logic wholly seriously, and even to a sympathetic reader his papers have a certain flatness to them, despite the profundity of their results. As a teacher he appears to have been personally inspiring however. When Tarski died in 1983 the foremost logic periodical Journal of Symbolic Logic devoted an unprecedented two issues to surveys of his influence and the many fields he explored: it took several people to write surveys of the areas opened up by this one man.
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Tarski published mainly in German and French until the war, thereafter in English. A collection of translations of his pre-war papers was published in 1956 under the title Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, and his Collected Papers in four volumes in 1985. An Alfred Tarski Centenary Conference was held in Warsaw on 28 May – 1 June 2001 at the Stephan Banach Centre and the Mathematics Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. It brought together many of his students, colleagues, and admirers from mathematics and philosophy. Also present were his daughter Ina and her children and grandchildren, and Tarski’s biographer the American Anita Feferman, whose husband Solomon Feferman was one of Tarski’s American students. Sadly the standard of the papers was not up to that of the Master, which says something both about American academics on European summer vacation and about the decline of logic in Poland since the Second World War. I gave a talk called “Nominalism, Truth, and Languages that Grow”, which attempted to show how to capture some of Tarski’s insights into truth in a manner which would have been congenial to Tarski’s Doktorvater Leśniewski, who was known to disapprove of the 1933 monograph. My aim was not merely historical: I think a theory along those lines is more correct than Tarski’s own. I have not written about the many other philosophers in the Lwów–Warsaw School, nor shall I, for lack of time. But many attained professorships and positions of respect and renown. The most considerable as a philosopher was Twardowski’s son-in-law Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, a post-war Rector of the University of Warsaw and sometimes known (playing on the title Magnificus for the Rector) as ‘Kazimierz the Magnificent’. To him and other survivors of the war – nearly all the many Jewish philosophers and logicians were murdered – such as Tadeusz Kotarbiński fell the honourable task of freeing Polish intellectual life in the 1940s and 1950s of the baleful ascendancy of Marxism– Leninism. That Poland should have won this battle first among the Soviet satellites speaks for the quality of Polish intellectual life, not least in philosophy.
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Poland’s present philosophers and logicians remember their unprecedented and unprogrammed Golden Age, but cannot match it. The third and fourth generations do not come up to the stature of their noble predecesors, though Poland still punches well above her weight in logic and mathematics. The most successful outcome of recent years has been the full uncovering and documenting of the history of the Lwów–Warsaw School, whose “official” historian is my friend and colleague Jan Woleński, Professor of the Jagiellonian University. His Filozoficzka szkoła lwowsko-warszawska of 1984 was the definitive statement of this history, and its English translation (in which I assisted by checking some of the English) brought the story to the rest of the world. In November 1995 the centenary of the School was celebrated by a dualvenue conference, in Lwów (L’viv) in the Ukraine, and in Warsaw. Recalling my first and to date only (chaotic) visit to Lwów in 1991 I decided to miss the first part, and stories of the events in Lwów persuaded me I had been right: the money donated by American foundations mysteriously vanished and participants found themselves sleeping the first night on bare floors in an unused and unheated university building. The Polish part by contrast was very sedate: the venue was the Pałac Staszić and everything functioned smoothly. I recall eating with an Anglo-Irish-Swiss colleague in the Hotel Bristol on the very night Kwaśniewski was elected President. My own small part in the history has been to write occasional articles on Polish logic and philosophy and its representatives, for collections, journals and encyclopedias. I have dug out a few things here and there but do not regard myself as anything more than a snapper-up of trifles. Though I know more about the history of Polish logic and philosophy than most people in Britain, few people even in the profession know very much if anything, so it is no great achievement. In my own work however I try to combine the Polish virtues of exactness with common sense and a broad knowledge of history as a corrective guide. Of the four figures at the entrance to the catalogue hall in the University Library in Warsaw, one, Tarski, is very well known outside Poland; two, Łukasiewicz
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and Leśniewski, are a little known, and the founder of the School Twardowski is known hardly at all, although as a philosopher (not logician) he was indeed the most considerable before the generation of Ajdukiewicz and Kotarbiński. But he deliberately chose to forfeit his own research career for a life of teaching and administration and organization, promoting a rich and scientifically fruitful philosophical life in Poland. History has shown his efforts to have been amply rewarded and so he clearly deserves his place on the first pillar, since it was through his efforts that a renascent country became one of the world’s great philosophical nations. Postscript 2010 Since I wrote this article, there have been a number of developments, some of them welcome, others not. For lack of resources, people and time, neither the projected proceedings volume of the 1996 Dublin conference, nor, more importantly, the planned collected edition of Łukasiewicz’s works has appeared. The plaque that was put up at the time to commemorate him at his old Dublin residence of 57 Fitzwilliam Square has disappeared. In 2009 I followed in Łukasiewicz’s footsteps and emigrated to Dublin. I teach at Trinity College, just a few steps from the Royal Irish Academy where he worked. Czesław Lejewski died in 2001, and I managed to acquire his scientific books and papers (all postwar, obviously) for the University of Leeds, where they reside in Special Collections. Sadly neither I, nor presumably anyone else, has had time to appraise them. The ideas of my talk from the 2001 Tarski conference were worked up into a paper “Truth on a Tight Budget: Tarski and Nominalism”, published in a nice collection of essays, New Essays on Tarski and Philosophy, edited by Douglas Patterson, and published in 2008 by Oxford University Press. I have also published articles about Leśniewski and Twardowski and I am still working on giving logic a nominalist semantics such as Leśniewski and Tarski might have accepted. Anita and Sol Feferman completed and published their biography of Tarski, which reveals him to have been a notable ladies’ man as well as great logician. Another conference on Łukasiewicz was held at Nancy in 2003, organised by Roger Puivet and others. (It joyously coincided with
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England’s winning the Rugby World Cup. On the night of the final I was dining with conference participants and on returning to the hotel asked the hotelier who had won. With palpable Gallic distaste he replied, “Les godons” (the English). That is an old and mildly pejorative expression going back six hundred years to the Hundred Years’ War, when the English soldiers in France were often heard to say “Goddam!” You learn something new every day.) Sandra Lapointe and others organised a nice conference on the Golden Age of Polish Philosophy in Montreal in 2004. My talks from all these conferences, like my translation of his completeness paper, all remain unpublished for various reasons. I sometimes think my work on Łukasiewicz is jinxed. At the 2007 APA Meeting in Chicago Sandra also organised a workshop on Twardowski. It was very poorly attended, though the small group of enthusiasts did teach each other things. So interest in the Poles remains scant and patchy outside Poland. However, Jan Woleński, Jacek Juliusz Jadacki and other Poles continue to write about the movement in the old country, and there are several scholars abroad who are doing good work, notably Arianna Betti in Amsterdam, and Anna Zielińska and Wioletta Miskiewicz in Paris. So the future is of historical studies on this Golden Age is, if not rosy, not wholly bleak.
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