Husserl’s Early Phenomenology and the Ontology of Truth in the Lvov-Warsaw School

Abstract

The paper addresses the question of how Kazimierz Twardowski’s metaphilosphy influenced the reception of Husserl’s early phenomenology and the development of the ontology of truth in the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS). To account for these problems, three types of relations between Husserl’s ideas and the philosophy of truth in the LWS are suggested: (a) Husserl’s unilateral influence on the LWS; (b) interactions and mutual dependencies between Husserl and the LWS; (c) parallel development of ideas concerning the ontology of truth, present both in Husserl’s philosophy and in the writings of the most prominent representatives of the LWS. Particular problems addressed in the paper are discussed within this tripartite framework. The key ideas of Twardowski’s metaphilosophy, based on the postulate that philosophy should have a scientific character, are outlined in Sect. 2. Next, Sect. 3 discusses Husserl’s unilateral influences on the LWS; special attention is paid to the ideas which contributed to the emergence of semantics as the theory of relations between meaningful linguistics systems of expressions and the world. The focus on the semantic nature of language allowed for speaking about the truth itself and about its relational nature. In Sect. 4, mutual interactions between Husserl’s philosophy and the LWS are analysed with the focus on the problem of anti-psychologism and the impact which Husserl’s anti-psychologism (the first volume of the Logical Investigations) had upon the most prominent representatives of the LWS. It is argued that there may have been an important but somewhat overlooked influence exerted by Twardowski’s work On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894) upon Husserl’s own anti-psychologism. Finally, Sect. 5 is dedicated to the two most significant parallels between Husserl’s early phenomenology and the ontology of truth in the LWS: the ontology of truth-makers (resorting to the notion of state of affairs, Sachverhalt) and the defense of the absoluteness of truth, where truth is understood as a timeless relational property.