Philosophy and Logic in Central Europe From Bolzano to Tarski : Selected Essays

ways of doing it, but it is wrong to project it far into the past: it did not exist at the turn of the century and only became clearly apparent after the Second World War. I recently taught at an American university on the his­ tory of philosophy from Balzano to Husserl. The course title had to come from a fixed pool and gave trouble. Was it philosophical logic, the nine­ teenth century, or phenomenology? A logic title would connote over this period Frege, Russell, Carnap, perhaps a mention of Boole: not continental enough. The nineteenth century? The century of Kant's successors: Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuer bach, Marx, Nietzsche? What have they to do with Balzano, Lotze, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl and Twardowski? Even­ tually 'Phenomenology' was chosen, misdescribing more than half of the course. That illustrates the problems one faces in trying to work against the picture of the period which is ingrained in minds and syllabuses. This book arises from my efforts to combat that picture. I backed into writing about the history of recent philosophy rather than setting out to do so. The beginning was chance. In Manchester in the early seventies, at a time when most English philosophy departments breathed re­ cycled Oxford air, the intellectual atmosphere derived from Cambridge and Warsaw, spiced with a breath of Freiburg and Paris. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction: Central Europe in the History of Philosophy....Pages 1-11 Bolzano, Tarski, and the Limits of Logic....Pages 13-40 Brentano’s Reform of Logic....Pages 41-69 The Formalization of Husserl’s Theory of Wholes and Parts....Pages 71-116 Frege’s Theory of Real Numbers....Pages 117-141 The Anglo-Austrian Analytic Axis....Pages 143-158 On What There Isn’t: The Meinong—Russell Dispute....Pages 159-191 Lukasiewicz, Meinong, and Many-Valued Logic....Pages 193-225 On Understanding Leśniewski....Pages 227-258 A Brentanian Basis for Leśniewskian Logic....Pages 259-269 Leśniewski’s Logic and Its Relations to Classical and Free logics....Pages 271-293 A Semantics for Ontology....Pages 295-318 The Old Problem of Complex and Fact....Pages 319-338 Tractatus Mereologico-Philosophicus?....Pages 339-359 Wittgenstein, Schlick and the a Priori....Pages 361-376 Categories and Ways of Being....Pages 377-394 Back Matter....Pages 395-445 This book with an introduction by Witold Marciszewski, views the history of philosophy and logic from 1837 to 1939 from the perspective of the cradle of modern exact philosophy - Central Europe. In a series of case studies, it illuminates the developments in this region, most notably in Austria and Poland, examining thinkers such as Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Lesniewski, and Tarski, as well as the logicians like Frege and Russell with whom they bore a close resemblance. The book challenges established views about the history of philosophy and logic in Europe, and shows the vitality of the Central European tradition