Kazimierz Twardowski

Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938) was an Austrian-born Polish philosopher. He was a student of Franz Brentano and the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School. His main work, On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894), established the need for the distinction between the content and the object of a presentation within Brentanian theories of the intentionality of mental acts. The distinction is a psychological, non-platonistic counterpart of Frege's distinction between sense and reference. Other students of Brentano, notably Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong, integrated the distinction between content and object in their works after the appearance of Twardowski's book. Twardowski spoke of contradictory objects before Meinong: he was the first philosopher to hold a theory of intentionality, truth, and predication in which thinking and speaking about non-existents, including contradictions, involves presenting and naming non-existents, including contradictory objects. Like Meinong, Twardowski belonged to a tradition of non-idealistic German-language philosophy that originated with Bernard Bolzano, and that influenced, via G. F. Stout, Moore and Russell's transition from idealism to analytic philosophy. After moving to Lvov in 1895, Twardowski devoted himself to establishing a tradition of scientific, i.e. rigorous and exact philosophy in Poland inspired by Brentano's views rather than to publishing his own ideas. As a result, his published oeuvre, written in Polish and German, is relatively small. Twardowski's unpublished manuscripts, often complete sets of lecture notes, constitute a considerable part of his philosophical corpus. According to Roman Ingarden, assessments of Twardowski's achievements and his role in history should be considered incomplete and hypothetical as long as they are based only on his published writings (Ingarden 1948, 18). Important projects for the edition and dissemination of Twardowski's manuscript material have been recently completed or are currently ongoing in Austria, France, Poland, Italy, and the Netherlands.^[1]

Twardowski was a sharp thinker and a writer of exemplary clarity. He wrote on signs, on meaning and reference, and on indexicality and truth, defending a non-platonistic view of time-independent truth; he wrote on the metaphysics of parts and wholes, on ethics, on the history of philosophy, on the relation between philosophy and psychology, and, importantly, on metaphilosophy. In Twardowski's times psychology was divided roughly in two camps: ‘Wundtian’ experimental psychology and ‘Brentanian’ descriptive pyschology (see the entries on Wundt and Brentano); although Twardowski sided mainly with Brentano's way of looking at psychology, he lectured on themes from experimental psychology such as optical illusion and established the first laboratory of empirical psychology in Poland. He developed a judgment-based theory of knowledge, and he valued analysis as a fruitful method in philosophy. This notwithstanding, it is a widespread convinction that Twardowski's most tangible success remains his extraordinary work as educator and initiator of philosophical activities in Poland. Indeed, Twardowski was a talented teacher, like Brentano, and he exerted, through his teaching, a powerful influence on generations of young Polish philosophers, such as Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski (who, in turn, taught Alfred Tarski) and Tadeusz Kotarbiński. This influence regarded first of all matters of method: Twardowski laid emphasis on ‘small philosophy’, namely on the detailed, systematic analysis of specific problems—including problems from the history of philosophy—characterised by rigor and clarity, rather than on the edification of whole philosophical systems and comprehensive world-views.