Modern philosophy has benefited immensely from the intelligence and
sensitivity, the creative and critical energies, and the lucidity of
Polish scholars. Their investigations into the logical and
methodological founda- tions of mathematics, the physical and biological
sciences, ethics and esthetics, psychology, linguistics, economics and
jurisprudence, and the social sciences - all are marked by profound and
imaginative work. To the centers of empiricist philosophy of science in
Vienna, Berlin and Cambridge during the first half of this century, one
always added the great school of analytic and methodological studies in
Warsaw and Lw6w. To the world centers of Marxist theoretical practice in
Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Rome and elsewhere, one must add the Poland of
the same era, from Ludwig Krzywicki (1859-1941) onward. (From our
preface to Wiatr [1979p. Other movements also have been distinctive in
Poland. Phenomenology was developed in the impressive school of Roman
Ingarden at Cracow, semiotics from the early work of the philosopher and
psychologist Kazimierz Twardowski at Lw6w in the 1890's, with masterful
develop- ment by his disciples Kotarbinski and Ajdukiewicz onward,
conceptual foundations of physics in the incisive methodological
reflections of Marian Smoluchowski, and mathematical logic from Jan I:
.ukasiewicz and Stanislaw Lesniewski to Tarski, Mostowski, and many
others.