Abstract
In ‘De Veritate: Austro-Polish contributions to the theory of truth from Brentano to Tarski’ Jan Wolenski and Peter M. Simons related an intriguing story of the “Austro-Polish obsession with truth”.1 Woleński and Simons mention the Bohemian philosopher Bernard Bolzano several times, with particular reference to absoluteness and sempiternity of truth in Twardowski and niewski. My aim will be to cast more light on the extent of Bolzano’s legacy in Leśniewski’s early theory of truth, though leaving aside the foregoing aspects of absoluteness and sempiternity of truth for simple reasons of space. As a premise, from a purely historical perspective the following should be taken into account. First of all, while a general consideration of Bolzano’s indirect influence upon the Lvov-Warsaw School (mediated by Twardowski) now seems to be established at least among some eminent scholars, 2 it seems on the contrary very difficult to answer positively about any direct influence of Bolzano upon Leśniewski, namely whether Leśniewski was influenced by Bolzano through reading the Wissenschaftslehre. Moreover, it must be stressed that since some elements of this connection may be ascribed to traditional logic, it seems more than natural that these two authors have them in common. Actually in his WissenschaftslehreBolzmo gave us also a powerful fresco of traditional logic, re-elaborated in an extremely refined and original way, while Leśniewski was to describe his Ontology as “a certain kind of modernized ‘traditional logic’”.3
I am grateful to Ettore Casari, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Betti, A. (1998). De veritate: Another Chapter the Bolzano-Leśniewski Connection. In: Kijania-Placek, K., Woleński, J. (eds) The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy. Synthese Library, vol 273. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5108-5_11
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