The Strange Case of Savonarola and the Painted Fish. On the Bolzanization of Polish Thought

Résumé 0

When Twardowski came to Lvov in 1895, his aim was to establish a philosophical trend heavily inspired by Brentanism, although peppered with Bolzanian ideas. As shows from a comparison between the lectures in logic he gave in Vienna in 1894/5 and in Lvov in 1895/6, Twardowski's teaching activity in Poland was even more Brentanian than in Vienna, I There is little doubt that the reason for this is that Brentano's thought was unknown in late 19th Century Poland.' It is well-known that Twardowski's own thought was also significantly influenced by Bolzano, and that he played also a major role in disseminating some of Bolzano's ideas in Poland, the most important being perhaps the notion oftime-independent truth. 1 have previously discussed in several papers specific Bolzanian elements present in the Polish tradition. This paper will not, for the most part, add anything in particular to that. The new - and rather blunt hypothesis to be put forward here is that, despite appearances, Twardowski also contributed de facto to slowing down the reception of Bolzano's most modem logical discoveries. For in Poland Bolzano was to remain one logician among many for rather long. It was chiefly thanks to two factors that Bolzano's star could, slowly, begin to rise in Poland, or, at least, that the fundamental achievements of his logic could be known. One factor is antipsychologistic (more precisely Platonistic) influence coming from Husserl and from Twardowski's student Lukasiewicz. The other factor is the change in the conception of logic which took Polish logic from, say, Sigwart, to Tarski through Lesniewski and Lukasiewicz, What I am going to say is meant to have impact on the standard picture of the all-Brentanian background of the Lvov-Warsaw school, though my account will be limited to two pupils of Twardowski's of the first generation, Lukasiewicz and Lesniewski, I hope this paper will contribute both to the debate on the scope of Polish Brentanism, and to prompting further investigation into the reception ofBolzano's thought in Poland.