Volume 1, Issue 9: Aspects of a philosophical school

Aspects of  a philosophical school

Anna Drabarek, Jan Woleński, and Mateusz M. Radzki (eds.), Interdisciplinary Investigations into the Lvov-Warsaw School. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.pp. xxi-289.Hardcover ISBN 978-3-030-24485-9. €106.99.

Historians of philosophy of science already have their preferences. Besides a small group of scholars, people usually do not go beyond the borders of Hungary (and it is represented also rarely and never for its own sake). But philosophy of science, or perhaps better, scientific philosophy was pursued and developed in Eastern Europe as well, especially in Poland. Though this fact is often admitted, detailed investigations are still lagging behind German, Austrian or English studies.

      Recently Anna Drabarek, Jan Woleński, and Mateusz M. Radzki edited a volume on the Interdisciplinary Investigations into the Lvov-Warsaw School in Michael Beaney’s History of Analytic Philosophy series. This engaging volume is devoted to various aspects of the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS) and their interdisciplinary matrix of scholars and topics. Although the book’s title is a little bit misleading since we are not offered interdisciplinary investigations into the LWS School (there are only 1-2 shorter chapters into sociological and cultural issues of the movement), but we got quite classical philosophical investigations into the interdisciplinary inquiries of the LWS School. This is not a problem, however, as what we got is interesting and we might learn a lot about Polish philosophy (almost all of the references are to primary and secondary Polish sources), but we shall be right about our expectations based on the title.

Part 1 serves as a general entry to the volume. Jan Woleński’s paper is a helpful and concise introduction to the most important issues of the LWS, setting already an important problem, namely how to define or handle philosophical schools. Being associated with “more than sixty philosophers, which is a lot” (p. 25), the LWS presents an especially interesting case, but surprisingly not that complex case. He notes, as the joining relation, the views and interests of the members, the person of a founder and a shared location. It would be compelling to make here a detailed comparison between the LWS and the Vienna Circle to check whether Woleński’s suggestion is suitable, but one of the biggest virtues of the volume is that it does not consider the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism, so I shall not do that either. All the essays of the volume present the LWS as a self-standing philosophical movement that deserves our attention in its own right and not because it might be related to, contrasted with or debated in the context of other major twentieth-century movements.

      Nonetheless, Part I is not a typical introductory set; as its title suggests, “History, Culture and Axiology”, we find here essays on the axiological project of the LWS (Anna Drabarek), a short piece on how LWS members considered the university and its task in knowledge-production (Włodzimierz Tyburski), a stunning paper about the victims and survivors of the Holocaust (where Elżbieta Pakszys shows how the survivors were influenced in their methods of philosophy), and finally a longer piece about the interpersonal and intertextual relations in the LWS (Anna Brożek).

            Brożek’s essay should have come after Woleński’s chapter as it seems to continue the discussions of how to conceive and develop a fresh discussion about philosophical influences inside and outside a school. Brożek distinguishes various forms and modes of interaction and influence between philosophers and takes her examples from the LWS to substantiate her claims. I will mention only one point here. When Brożek discusses how to measure the influence of A on B, one might rely on B’s testimony, that is, on B’s declaration that B was influenced by A. The author has two counter suggestions; (1) B may be insincere and makes a case of influence just because A is a fancy philosopher and being influenced by A is an important event, thus there comes the declaration. All right. Brożek goes on: “Secondly, philosopher B may be mistaken in their claim of being influenced by A. In order to be influenced by A (in a positive or negative way), one must at least understand the content of A’s work. And it is often the case that influence is only apparent due to a lack of understanding” (p. 92).

            Despite the fact that I entirely agree with Brożek’s last claim, namely that many influences are due to a lack of possible misunderstanding, I would not consider this as only “apparent”. Who is the judge to tell that what were A’s original and real intentions and philosophical insights? While we can imagine cases where B’s reading of A is obviously biased in one way or another, but that doesn’t mean that B was sincere in reading A’s work in a definite way and B indeed believed that A’s work conveyed the given ideas that influenced B. Also, isn’t it the case that A could be wrong about the “real” implications of her work? Or if we would like to avoid such notions as “real”, we may say that A could be wrong about what are all the implications of her way. So my point is simply that while being influenced due to misunderstanding is a usual case, it is not less important, real or genuine case of influence. No one knows the exact views of A thus a neat space for discussion and for the most varying influences could be opened up always.

            The next part of the volume is devoted entirely to psychology. The three chapters (by Stepan Ivanyk, Teresa Rzepa, and Amadeusz Citlak) show clearly that when modern psychology was born in Germany and Austria at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Polish psychologists (often educated originally as philosophers), were in the frontline to discuss the various forms of mental phenomena and the relation between the natural world and the human psyche in it. Perception, judgment, cognition and the will are discussed in a somewhat summarizing form; nonetheless, we still get the idea of what was going on in Poland and what Polish psychologist might have contributed to the international scene. We are talking here only about a possibility, as most of the Polish psychologists did not wish to enter that scene and their achievements remained within the countries border. (But I will come back to this below.)

            Finally, the third part of the volume discusses some logical and methodological issues taken broadly. We got a shorter piece about many-valued logics that present really novel ideas though (necessarily) in a quite technical form (Mateusz M. Radzki). Though the paper mirrors the logical and scientific spirit of the LWS truly, a more generally and informally stated conclusion might help the non-professional reader to grasp the significance of the results.

            The opening paper of the part presents two widely discussed notions or options, as you wish, namely rationalism and nominalism (Witold Marciszewski). The first epistemological idea emphasizes the role of rational (or cognitive) elements in our knowledge-production practices, while nominalism aims to stress (often quite exclusively) the role of the senses that might process individual sensations and empirically induced contents. The debate is an old one and it went through many changes under different names. Marciszewski tries to bring in some pragmatic elements to combine the sensual and the cognitive elements in science and knowledge-production (utilizing some of methods and tools form the LWS), but the whole paper induces the feeling in the reader that he/she is dealing with some form of general introduction to philosophy.

      The two last chapters of the part and of the volume deal with the methodology of scientific philosophy and the possibilities of interdisciplinary scholarship especially within the context of scientific philosophy. Marcin Będkowski presents two examples of how the method of “paraphrase” works, that is, how can one provide such translations of problematic statements that are thought to be meaningful and respectful. The first example is of Kotarbiński’s reductive paraphrase to translate non-reistic statements (containing abstract and general terms) into reistic statements (containing only such expressions that refer to spatiotemporal things). The other example is of Ajdukiewicz more liberal way of handling problematic philosophical statements by trying to translate them into a determinate and unambiguous logical language. Finally, in the last chapter, Jarosław Maciej Janowski presents a relatively rarely discussed figure, namely Zygmunt Zawirski, and his metaphilosophical views on how to integrate philosophy and science to yield scientific philosophy. Janowski presents and summarizes some contemporary ideas about what interdisciplinary consists in, but the paper might be seen rather as in introduction to this important issue.

            If one wants to formulate some general consequences or morals from these chapters, we could say the following. Members of the LWS School and especially its found and initiator, Twardowski thought that the aim of philosophy and science is to discover the truth. This truth-orientation is formulated on many places (see, e.g., 156, 243, but many other chapters mention it in a certain form), and shows a quite distinct characteristic of twentieth-century philosophy of science. Tracking truth was not a distinctive aim of logical empiricists, of conventionalists, of positivists in general, but despite Frege’s efforts, the formation of analytic philosophy had a more diverse relation to truth. It might be interesting to uncover the philosophical and sociological roots of this truth-orientation. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Rudolf Carnap started to publish his papers and volumes on the semantical conception of truth, Otto Neurath launched numerous attacks (logical, epistemological, methodological, and even political) against the pursue of semantical truth. He explained Carnap’s search for an objective truth by the idea that it was taken from Tarski, who took it from those members of the LWS School that were concerned with Aristotle and Scholastic philosophy. Neurath often exaggerated a certain line of thought to make a point more visible, but as the reader takes a quick look at the chapters of this volume, it seems that Neurath was indeed on to something. Although many details have been revealed about LWS and truth, there is still much to do here. (The relevant Neurath-Carnap correspondence was published recently, see Jordi Cat and Adam Tamas Tuboly (eds.), Neurath Reconsidered: New Sources and Perspectives, Cham: Springer, 2019, pp. 521-685.)

            The other characteristic feature of the LWS School that became obvious from this volume is that members of the movement did not submit to current intellectual fashions (see, e.g. p. 171). One example could be the psychologists discussed in Part II who avoided psychoanalytic inquiries and developed rather such practices that became widely known often just later. But the same might be true of the semanticists as well; namely that most LWS members developed their semantic views and did not subscribe to the back then spreading syntacticism in (meta)logic. (It might be interesting and important to note that semantical investigations had two different routes in Poland: namely a representational one followed by Tarski, and a more communicative-inferential ideal, pursued e.g. by Chwistek.) They also went against the current regarding ethics and action-theory, namely as most analytic philosophers (with some exception, like Bertrand Russell) did not regard ethics and human actions as philosophically important and legitimate fields (at least this is the usual story), members of the LWS struggled for many decades to produce scientifically motivated theories of culture and values.

            Avoiding current trends in order to develop something entirely different and novel is just one thing. Disseminating that new knowledge and approach is another. Unfortunately, the LWS was quite unsuccessful regarding their knowledge dissemination. As they published most of their papers, reports, and books in Polish, neither in Western nor in Middle-Europe did scientists and philosophers know much about what was going on in Poland and what philosophers and scientists did there. In fact, Teresa Rzepa wrote in her chapter, “the Lvov School of Psychology might be called a ‘school of wasted opportunities’” (p. 148). Rudolf Carnap complained about this already in the early 1940s when he said that investigations into semantics were hindered by years because almost all the technical details and results of the LWS School were published in Polish. Interestingly, even Hungarian philosophers were in a somewhat better position; due to their various links to Austria (during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and after that), they were able and willing to publish in German for many decades.

            There is a quite puzzling curiosity about nationalism. As nationalism often comes hand in hand with a certain predilection towards national languages, spreading the results of national scientists to show the world the (alleged) greatness of a given nation shall be related to international languages (either natural or auxiliary ones), because otherwise, they will be just “wasted opportunities”. Polish philosophers were not nationalist of course; rather nationalists persecuted them and this caused eventually the dissolution of the School. The fate of its members shall be an important document in choosing our methodology of knowledge dissemination for even broader audiences.

            All in all, Interdisciplinary Investigations into the Lvov-Warsaw School is a really fascinating document for its aims and motivations. Though some more details would have been really helpful along the road, it offers new perspectives and ideas for sure. Though it is already late for a nice Christmas gift, you have an entire new year to get your hands on it!

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Supported by the MTA BTK Lendület Morals and Science Research Group and by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship. I owe a special thanks to Mateusz M. Radzki for his kind and supportive help.