Tadeusz Kotarbiński

Works

• 1929Elements of the Theory of Knowledge, Formal Logic and Methodology of the Sciences

  The textbook of the Lwów–Warsaw School and the main statement of reism: only things exist; words for properties and relations are abbreviations.

• 1955Praxiology: An Introduction to the Sciences of Efficient Action

  A general theory of good work: concepts and rules for planning and acting efficiently in any field.

Position

Kotarbiński’s reism, developed from the late 1920s, holds that only things – concrete, spatially extended bodies – exist; there are no properties, relations, events or states of affairs as separate entities. Sentences with abstract nouns such as “wisdom” or “difference” are meaningful only as abbreviations of sentences about things, for instance about wise people. He extended this into “pansomatism”: persons too are bodies, and statements about the mental describe a body that experiences in a certain way. The view owes much to Leśniewski’s ontology and was discussed throughout the Lwów–Warsaw School. Kotarbiński also founded praxiology, a general theory of efficient action, and an “independent ethics”: morality needs neither religion nor a philosophical system but takes as its model the “reliable guardian” (spolegliwy opiekun), a person on whom others can rely in need. As a teacher he shaped Tarski, who dedicated “Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics” (1956) to him, Maria Ossowska and many others. In the early 1950s Marxist critics led by Adam Schaff attacked his philosophy as bourgeois. Critics within analytic philosophy have pointed out that reism has difficulty with mathematics and with talk about the content of beliefs and sentences, which resists paraphrase into talk about bodies.

Life & context

Tadeusz Kotarbiński was born on 31 March 1886 in Warsaw, then in the Russian partition, the son of the painter Miłosz Kotarbiński. After taking part in the school strike of 1905 against Russification, he studied architecture in Darmstadt and from 1907 philosophy and classical philology in Lwów, where he took his doctorate under Kazimierz Twardowski in 1912. He taught Latin and Greek at a Warsaw grammar school and from 1919 was professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In the 1930s he publicly opposed the “bench ghetto”, the segregated seating imposed on Jewish students. During the German occupation he taught at the underground university. After the war he was the first rector of the University of Łódź (1945–49), then returned to Warsaw and was president of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 1957 to 1962. His wife Janina Kotarbińska was herself a logician of the Lwów–Warsaw School. His students included Alfred Tarski and Maria Ossowska. He died in Warsaw on 3 October 1981.

Further main works

• Utilitarianism in the Ethics of Mill and Spencer (Utylitaryzm w etyce Milla i Spencera, 1915)
• Course in Logic for Lawyers (Kurs logiki dla prawników, 1951)
• Meditations on a Decent Life (Medytacje o życiu godziwym, 1966)