On the Phases of Reism

Abstract

Along with almost all the more important Polish philosophers of the twentieth century, Kotarbiński, too, was a student of Kazimierz Twardowski, and it is Twardowski who is more than anyone else responsible for the rigorous thinking and simplicity of expression that is so characteristic of Kotarbiński’s work. Twardowski was of course himself a member of the Brentanist movement, and the influence of Brentanism on Kotarbiński’s writings reveals itself clearly in the fact that the ontological theories which Kotarbiński felt called upon to attack in his writings were in many cases just those theories defended either by Twardowski or by other thinkers within the Brentano tradition. Lesniewśki, too, inherited through Twardowski an interest in. Brentano and his school, and as a young man he had conceived the project of translating into Polish the Investigations on General Grammar and Philosophy of Language of Anton Marty, one of Brentano’s most intimate disciples. Leśniewski, as he himself expressed it, grew up “tuned to general grammar and logico-semantic problems à la Edmund Husserl and the representatives of the so-called Austrian School” (1927/31, p.9).

I am grateful to Audoenus Leblanc, Czesraw Lejewski, Dieter Münch, Karl Schuhmann, Peter Simons and the editor for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.