Background
Kotarbinski, Tadeusz was born on March 31, 1886.
Kotarbinski, Tadeusz was born on March 31, 1886.
Lvov University.
Professor. Warsaw University, 1918-1960. President, Polish Academy of Sciences, 1957-1963.
Kotarbinski’s central idea he called it 'reism’—is that what really exists is only that which is referred to by genuine names and that only names of objects are genuine. The rest, ‘apparent names', figure as the grammatical subjects of sentences for which equivalents whose subjects are genuine names can be found. What is more, all objects are bodies, whether sentient or not: the thesis of ‘pansomatism’. Names that appear to refer to properties, universal, numbers, events, etc. arc all apparent and, in principle, climinable from discourse. Kotarbihski has also defended what he calls ‘radical realism’, the doctrine that material things themselves arc directly perceived, and not some mental surrogate. He has put forward an idiosyncratic theory of our knowledge of the mental states of others which he calls ‘imitationism’. ‘John is sad' means the same as ‘John experiences thus: I am sad' where ‘I am sad’ reports what I would say if I were acting as John is in John’s situation. A more or less independent invention of Kotarbinski's is the discipline of praxiology in which the scattered dictates of everyday practical good sense arc brought together, their leading concepts analysed and then the whole systematized under general principles. In ethics he advocates—-for he does not think basic ethical principles can be proved—what he calls independent ethics, independent, that is to say, of any institutional moral authority: church or party. Its primary principle is that of acting as the brave protector or guardian of others against suffering or misfortune. The leading philosopher of Poland in its great interwar epoch of logical fertility, Kotarbihski nobly lived up to his own professions, never compromising with the regime of the Colonels, with their even more nationalistic and anti-semitic opponents, or with the Marxist despotism by which they were replaced. He was a philosopher of quite exemplary honour and public spirit. Rational philosophy in Poland survived the Communist episode in which it was oppressed but not extinguished. Most senior figures in Polish philosophy after the limited, and soon further constricted, liberalization of 1956 under Gomulka were Kotarbinski’s pupils, if not his disciples. Praxiology led an organized life of its own. Reism, as Woleriski's two books (1989) show, is still a subject of discussion and has affinities with various forms of reductionism m the English-speaking philosophical world. Sources: Edwards: Z. Jordan (1963) Philosophy and Ideology, Dordrecht: Reidel.