This paper seeks to define the main trends, arguments and problems regarding the question of method formulated by Twardowski and his students. In this regard, the aim of the paper is twofold. First, I situate Brentano’s project of descriptive psychology within the context of disputes in the school of Twardowski concerning the method of both psychology and phenomenology, arguing that descriptive-psychological analysis was dominant in this respect. Second, the study explores the notion of eidetic phenomenology, as founded on a methodological (...) procedure, which supposed to guarantee infallibility of its descriptions. To show this, I first reconstruct Brentano’s concept of descriptive psychology, its object, its method and aims. Second, I track the changes and reinterpretations provided by Twardowski in his view of descriptive-psychological analysis. Third, I explore Witwicki’s and Bandrowski’s—both early students of Twardowski—discussions of the descriptive approach. I try to show that the former accepted psychologism, while the latter overcame it by means of logical analysis. Fourth, I suggest that the only student of Twardowski who renounced the Brentanian method was Ingarden, who developed eidetic phenomenology. Finally, I present Blaustein’s—one of the last students of Twardowski—reappraisal of descriptive psychology and his critique of Ingarden’s method. This controversy over the method of descriptive psychology reveals how one can situate Twardowski’s legacy within early phenomenology in Poland. (shrink)

1. Phenomenology is first and foremost about intentionality. As Husserl puts it, “Intentionality is the name of the problem encompassed by the whole of phenomenology”.1 Broadly understood, the phen...

The article explores two phenomenologies of image consciousness that were formulated by Ingarden and Blaustein, both of whom were students of Husserl. Both philosophers analyze image consciousness in the context of the phenomenon of contemplating a painting. The article is divided into seven sections. Section 1 presents the historical background of Blaustein’s and Ingarden’s explorations. In Section 2, Ingarden’s description of a painting as different from an image is reconstructed. In Section 3, Ingarden’s analysis of Husserl’s image consciousness is discussed. (...) Section 4 concerns Blaustein’s theory of intentionality, which was formulated in a critical elaboration of Husserl’s philosophy. Section 5 discusses the detailed components of Blaustein’s theory of intentionality, i.e., his theory of psychic representations. This theory is then used in Section 6 in an analysis of Blaustein’s reading of § 111 of Husserl’s Ideas I. Section 7 summarizes both theories in order to draw parallels and differences between Ingarden and Blaustein. In this regard, it is argued that both philosophers refer to different theoretical contexts when discussing Husserl’s idea of image consciousness. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs the evolution of Hilary Putnam’s early, i.e. functionalist, views in the philosophy of mind. It distinguishes between the following two alternatives: weak functionalism, which asserts that traditional ontological questions about the mind are, in fact, pseudo-problems; and strong functionalism, the claim that the nature of mind can be discovered empirically if one acknowledges that mental states are defined relationally, without direct recourse to the properties of the brain. By analyzing Putnam’s reasons for rejecting weak functionalism and type (...) physicalism the author arrives at the conclusion that Putnam was wrong on both counts: weak functionalism was not an unstable position, and if one is willing to make some reasonable assumptions, strong functionalism is reducible to type physicalism. Finally, an attempt is made to isolate the causes of the premature success of strong functionalism. (shrink)

. The author discusses the conditions necessary to accept the one right answer theory. The argument is based on an analysis of the deep structure of the justified fractional decisions pertaining to the substantive decisional model of the judicial application of law within the statutory law system. The role of evaluative choices is needed to justify the decisions in question at least in hard cases. This makes the theory of one right answer unacceptable in a noncognitivist axiological framework.

In a small literary gem full of sardonic wit, brilliant insights, and provocative criticism Witold Gombrowicz discusses Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger in six "one-hour" essays—and addresses Marxism in a "fifteen-minute" piece. "Who hasn't wished for a painless way to find out what the big shots of philosophy—Hegel and Kant, Nietzsche and Sartre—thought of the human condition? It has never been easy reading such formidable thinkers, and most explainers and textbooks either get it wrong or massacre the (...) language. So imagine my pleasure in opening Witold Gombrowicz's _Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes_, an exceptional effort at summarizing concepts in bold, declarative sentences.... [This book] is like the course in philosophy you wish you had taken."—David Lehman, _Bloomberg News_ "A must for every reader of Gombrowicz."—Denis Hollier, New York University. (shrink)

Theories of discursive integration form a group of theories that see the principles responsible for the integration of experience data (apperception) in the practices and schemes of discourse. These theories indicate that the use of language unites and organizes experience data. Their main assumption can be expressed as follows: this integration does not inhere in objects and cannot be derived from them; hence this integration cannot be secondarily expressed in language, but results exclusively from the use of language (or discourse). (...) In this article, Witold Marzęda gives an overview of narrativist theories, script theories, Gazzaniga and Dennett’s models, which refer to evolutionary psychology, and the theories of Lakoff and Johnson – all these being theories of discursive integration. Marzęda’s main objective is to formulate a paradox, which consists in a trap of self-referentiality into which these theories fall: they postulate some general properties of discourse, which, firstly, do not have to become at once the properties of individual models and which, secondly, do not admit of falsification. (shrink)

This volume is written jointly by Witold Marciszewski, who contributed the introductory and the three subsequent chapters, and Roman Murawski who is the author of the next ones - those concerned with the 19th century and the modern inquiries into formalization, algebraization and mechanization of reasonings. Besides the authors there are other persons, as well as institutions, to whom the book owes its coming into being. The study which resulted in this volume was carried out in the Historical Section (...) of the research project _Logical Systems and Algorithms for Automatic Testing of Reasoning,_ 1986-1990, in which participated nine Polish universities; the project was coordinated by the Department of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science of the Bia??l??ystok Branch of the University of Warsaw, and supported by the Ministry of Education 1987). The major part of the project was focussed on the software for computer-aided theorem proving called Mizar MSE ) due to Dr. Andrzej Trybulec. He and other colleagues deserve a grateful mention for a hands-on experience and theoretical stimulants owed to their collaboration. (shrink)

Most discussions of the reproducibility crisis focus on its epistemic aspect: the fact that the scientific community fails to follow some norms of scientific investigation, which leads to high rates of irreproducibility via a high rate of false positive findings. The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is a heretofore underappreciated and understudied dimension to the reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience that may prove to be at least as important as the epistemic dimension. This is (...) the communication dimension. The link between communication and reproducibility is immediate: independent investigators would not be able to recreate an experiment whose design or implementation were inadequately described. I exploit evidence of a replicability and reproducibility crisis in computational science, as well as research into quality of reporting to support the claim that a widespread failure to adhere to reporting standards, especially the norm of descriptive completeness, is an important contributing factor in the current reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience. (shrink)

The main purpose of the article is to define the framework in which one can situate Leopold Blaustein’s philosophy. The author focuses on the question of the method which is used by Blaustein and he situates it in the historical-philosophical context. The article defends the thesis that Blaustein uses a method which can be labelled as a phenomenologically oriented descriptive psychology that is close to, though not identical with, Edmund Husserl’s project as formulated in the first edition of his Logical (...) Investigations and that is connected to Husserl’s 1925 lectures on the phenomenological psychology. The article is divided into four parts. In the first part, the author disputes the one-sided classifications of Blaustein’s philosophy either as a continuator of the analytical tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School, or as a mere repetition of Husserl’s achievements. In the next part, the author sketches an intellectual biography of Blaustein and on this basis he defines the context in which one has to situate this thought. In this regard, two further parts of the article are devoted to two sources of inspiration for Blaustein. In the third part, a selection of methods and concepts of descriptive psychology are examined, and in the last part of the article, references to Husserl’s phenomenology are explored. (shrink)

The paper is a short introduction to the article 'Affordances for robots' by Thomas E. Horton, Arpan Chakraborty and Robert St. Amant, in the context of applications of ecological psychology.