Ebook: Zygmunt Zawirski: His Life and Work: With Selected Writings on Time, Logic and the Methodology of Science

Among the extraordinary Polish philosophers of the past one hundred years, Zygmunt Zawirski deserves to be given particular attention for his fusion of analytic and historical scholarship. Strikingly versatile, and con­ tributing original work in all his fields of competence, Zawirski thought through issues in the philosophical aspects of relativity theory, on the claims of intuitionalistic foundations of mathematics, on the nature and usefulness of many-value Logics, and on the calculus of probability, on the axiomatic method in science and in the philosophy of science, on the genesis and development of scientific and philosophical concepts, and in his crowning achievement, the conceptual history of notions of time. His work has been too little known in English despite the respect which has been so clearly shown by his Polish COlleagues and students. In this generous selection from his papers and from his great critical study L' Evolution de la Notion du Temps, Dr. Irena Szumilewicz-Lachman has provided a clear account of Zawirski's achievement; and she has written a fine comprehensive introductory essay which provides both the personal and historical context of his work and a systematic survey of his principal publications.

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Zygmunt Zawirski (1882--1948) -- one of the most eminent and original Polish philosophers -- belonged to the Lwow--Warsaw School (LWS) which left an indelible trace in logic, semiotics and philosophy of science. LSW was founded in 1895 by K. Twardowski, a disciple of Brentano, in the spirit of clarity, realism and analytic philosophy. LWS was more than 25 years older than the Vienna Circle (VC). This belies, inter alia, the not infrequently repeated statement that LWS was one of the many centers initiated by VC. The achievements of LWS in logic are well recognized, while those relating to philosophy of science are almost unknown. It is in order to fill this gap that some fragments of Zawirski's papers are presented, dealing mainly with causality, determinism, indeterminism and philosophical implications of relativity and quantum mechanics. His magnum opus `L'Evolution de la notion du temps' (Eugenio Rignano Prize, 1933) is devoted to time. It is one of the best books written on this subject, and by no means an obsolescent one. Zawirski took into account all the issues which are at present widely discussed. The real value of these achievements can be understood better today than by his contemporaries.
For all those interested in philosophy of science and philosophy, and history of ideas.