Some Introductory Thoughts on Contemporary Polish Ontology

Abstract

This book is a collection of articles authored by Polish ontologists living and working in the early part of the 21st century. Harking back to the well-known Polish Lvov-Warsaw School, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski,1 we try to make our ontological considerations as systematically rigorous and clear as possible – i.e. to the greatest extent feasible, but also no more than the subject under consideration itself allows for. Hence, the papers presented here do not seek to steer clear of methods of inquiry typical of either the formal or the natural sciences: on the contrary, they use such methods wherever possible. At the same time, I would like to draw attention to the fact that despite their adherence to rigorous methods, the Polish ontologists included here do not avoid traditional ontological issues, being inspired as they most certainly are by the great masters of Western philosophy – from Plato and Aristotle, through St. Thomas and Leibniz, to Husserl, to name arguably just the most important. The subject of the present volume is no single ontological issue, in that its purpose is to demonstrate the richness of ontology as currently practised in Poland. The articles contained here touch upon and range across the most important ontological issues: substance and dispositions, persons and knowledge, as well as language, time and mathematical objects – not to mention the ontology of action and the metaphysics of possible worlds. During the very first meeting of the Polish Philosophical Society in Lvov in 1904, Kazimierz Twardowski spoke the following words: “The one and only dogma of the Society will be the conviction that dogmatism is the greatest enemy of scientific work. Just as all radii of a circle, though originating from different points around its circumference, combine and meet in its center, so we wish all directions taken by the work and philosophical views of our Society to aim at just one goal: the illumination of the truth” (Twardowski, 1904, p. 241, trans. C. Humphries). The philosophical metaphor of a circle, in which various methods and issues, striving for true cognition, converge in the middle, fits well with the current book: the reader will encounter ontological analyses here