Background
Twardowski, Kazimierz was born in 1866 in Vienna.
Descriptive empiricist philosophical reformer
Twardowski, Kazimierz was born in 1866 in Vienna.
Philosophy, University of Vienna.
1894-1895, Lecturer at Vienna. 1895 1930, Professor of Philosophy. University of Lvov.
At the turn of the century Twardowski’s emphasis on a new, intellectually responsible mode of inquiry contributed to the transformation ot European philosophy and had a decisive influence on the intellectual and cultural life of Poland. He was opposed to nebulous speculation and destructive skepticism, and wanted to make philosophy more scientific through the clarification ot its problems, a rigorous analytical methodology and the elimination of conceptual obscurities. He believed that the radical empiricism of Brentano's ‘descriptive psychology could be the basis of this new, scientific philosophy. However, he needed to go beyond Brentano, and in his Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen (1894) he argued that, whereas a mental act and its content form a single unity, the object of a mental act is invariably extraneous to that act and its inherent content. This analysis, which not only led Twardowski to his general theory of the objects of thought but also contributed to the demise of psychologism in logic and philosophy, influenced Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl and to some extent Moritz Schlick. and through them much of early twentieth-century philosophy. Later Twardowski formulated a non-psychologistic and non-Platonizing account of logic based upon the distinction between mental acts and their products, extended this to a general theory and clarification of the sciences and repeatedly examined the various methodological issues of psychology. He was critical of reductive materialism, defended introspection as a source of knowledge and presented a lucid critique of relativism in his influential ‘O tak zwanych prawdach wzglednych’ [On so-called relative truths] (1900). As a teacher, Twardowski transformed Polish philosophy and endowed it with a distinct style. He organized the teaching of philosophy, initiated regular philosophical meetings, founded the first Polish psychological laboratory (1901), the Polish Philosophical Society (1904). and in 1911 the quarterly journal, Ruch Filozoficzny, which he edited until his death and which is still published by the Polskie Towarzystwo Filozoficzne-Warszawa. In 1935 he became the chief editor of Studia Pliilosophica, a periodical publishing works of Polish philosophers in foreign languages. He was also the editor of a number of series of original works and translations, many of them inspired by him. such as Wladyslaw Witwicki’s acclaimed translations of Plato. At the turn of the century Twardowski’s emphasis on a new, intellectually responsible mode of inquiry contributed to the transformation of European philosophy and had a decisive influence on the intellectual and cultural life of Poland. As Twardowski devoted more and more time to his educational activities, his own work was bound to suffer; and to a degree this accounts for why his students tended to pursue their own independent lines of inquiry. For example, his best known students, Jan Lukasiewicz. Stanislaw Lesniewski. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Kotarbihski differed from Twardowski methodologically in their emphasis on the philosophical relevance of symbolic logic, and both Lesniewski’s ‘ontology' and Kotarbinski’s ‘reism’ were reactions to what was seen as Platonism in Twardowski’s general theory of objects. However, his influence—not unlike that of G. E. Moore—was due less to his specific doctrines than his emphasis on free and responsible inquiry. His students never ceased to thank him for that as also for his personal example. Sources: Bibliography in Ruch Filozoficzny 14 (1938): 14-39, compiled by D. Gromska.