Jan Lukasiewicz

In Italian

Contents
Presentation
Life
Main Works
Selected Bibliography
Keywords
Documentation on Lukasiewicz
Papers on Lukasiewicz
V. Raspa, Lukasiewicz on the Principle of Contradiction [pdf]
O. LeBlanc, Lukasiewicz, Aristotle, and Contradiction
A. Betti, Lukasiewicz and Lesniewski on Contradiction [pdf] [RTF file ]
R. Pouivet, "Lukasiewicz: de l'aristotélisme autrichien à l'aristotélisme polonais" [RTF file ]
A. Betti, The Incomplete Story of Lukasiewicz and Bivalence	[pdf]
R.Pouivet, préface a "Du principe de contradiction chez Aristote", Traduit du polonais par Dorota Sikora, Editions de l'éclat, Paris
A. Becchi, Logic and Determinism in Jan Lukasiewicz's philosophy
Other Links in the World
Lukasiewicz Notation searchHP.com .
A short biography edited by the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Presentation

Jan Lukasiewicz is known all over the world as the founder of the first non-classical logical calculus, the so-called trivalent or polivalent logic, and as one of the most prominent and significative logicians of this century. But he was also very active in historical research on logic, giving a new and up-to-date interpretation of Aristotle's syllogism and of the Stoics' propositional calculus. His activity is strictly connected to the school founded by Kazimierz Twardowski, whose first pupil he was in Lvov . Maybe less known, but very significant, was his philosophical reflection about science and the role that creativity plays in the invention of theories, regarding which he followed an anti-inductive attitude in many aspects similar to Popper's conceptions.

Life

After reading Law at the University of Lvov , he directed his interest towards philosophy under the influence of the lectures of Twardowski, becoming the first of his numerous pupils and writing his doctorate thesis under Twardowski's guidance in 1902. After a few years in Berlin and Louvain, he returned to Lvov as a university lecturer in 1906, subsequently becoming a Professor in Logic and Philosophy. In Lvov he took an active part in the realisation of Twardowski's scientific-didactic project, holding the first Polish course of lectures in mathematical logic in 1907-1908. During the First World War, in 1915, he moved to Warsaw with Kotarbinski, where he was joined in 1919 by Lesniewski. Lukasiewicz occupied one of the two chairs of Philosophy at the new University of Warsaw, establishing fruitful relationships with the University's mathematicians and gathering round himself a group of young scholars, the most outstanding of whom was to be Alfred Tarski. At the end of the Second World War, in 1946, unable to accept the new political system set up in Poland after the Soviet occupation, he transferred to Dublin where he remained until his death.

Main Works

The two volumes

Logika i metafizyka, Wydzial Filozofii i Socjologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warsawa, 1998 (J. J. Jadacki ed.), including a precious collection of bio-bibliographical information, transcriptions of letters and an extended selection of photos;

Z zagadnien logiki i filozofii. Pisma wybrane, Warszawa, PWN, 1961 (J. Slupecki ed.)

form a complete set of Lukasiewicz's works with the exception of

O zasadzie sprzecznosci u Arystotelesa (On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle) (1910), PWN, Warszawa 1987. Germ. transl. Ueber den Satz des Widerspruchs bei Aristoteles, Olms, 1994 (J. Barski). Eng. transl. by Owen LeBlanc in progress.

Die logischen Grundlagen der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, Krakow, Wspolka Wydawnicza Polska, 1913

Elementy logiki matematycznej. Skrypt autoryzowany, Warszawa, 1929 (Elements of Mathematical Logic, Pergamon Press, Oxford 1966).

Aristotle's Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic , Clarendon Press, Oxford 1951. buy it

English translations are available in

Selected Works, North-Holland, Amsterdam 1970 (L. Borkowski, ed.).
Srzednicki, Jan and Malinowski, Grzegorz (eds.) Collected Works of Jan Lukasiewicz I: Mathematical Logic, Ashgate Publishing Limited [1-84014-182-4], to appear?
Srzednicki, Jan and Wolenski, Jan (eds.) Collected Works of Jan Lukasiewicz II: History of Logic, Ashgate Publishing Limited [1-84014-184-0], to appear?
Srzednicki, Jan and Wolenski, Jan (eds.) Collected Works of Jan Lukasiewicz III: Methodology of Science and General Philosophy, Ashgate Publishing Limited [1-84014-183-2], to appear?

Here is an extended bibliography

Selected Bibliography

Anonymous, "Obituary: Jan Lukasiewicz (1878-1956)" (Polish), Studia Logica 5 (1957), pp. 7-11.

Berka, K. "Lukasiewicz on Aristotle's Syllogistic", Ruch Filozoficzny, XXXVI, 1 (1978).

Boicescu, V. et al., Lukasiewicz-Moisil algebras, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1991.

Borkowski, L. Slupecki, J. "The Logical Works of J. Lukasiewicz", Studia Logica, 8 (1958), pp. 7-56.

Coniglione, F. "Filosofia e scienza in Jan Lukasiewicz",Epistemologia, 17, 1 (1994), pp. 73-100

Kotarbinski, "Jan Lukasiewicz's works on the history of logic", Studia Logica 8 (1958), pp. 57-62.

Kwiatkowski, T. "Jan Lukasiewicz - A historian of logic", Organon 16-17 (1980-1981), pp. 169-188.

Lukasiewicz, J. "Curriculum vitae of Jan Lukasiewicz", Metalogicon 7 (2) (1994), pp. 133-137.

Maccarrone, A. "Note sulla sillogistica di Lukasiewicz", Studi Urbinati, LII, 1-2 (1978), pp. 299-336.

Marshall, D. "Lukasiewicz, Leibniz and the arithmetization of the syllogism", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 18 (2) (1977), pp. 235-242.

Mostowski, A. "L'oeuvre scientifique de Jan Lukasiewicz dans le domaine de la logique mathématique", Fundamenta mathematicae 44 (1957), pp. 1-11.

Prior, A. N. "Lukasiewicz's contribution to logic", in AA.VV., Philosophy in the mid-century, a survey, ed. by R. Klibanski, vol. I, Logic and philosophy of science, La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1958, pp.53-5.

Schiaparelli, A. "Aspetti della critica di Jan Lukasiewicz al principio aristotelico di non contraddizione", Elenchos, 1 (1994), pp. 43-77.

Scholz, H. "In memoriam Jan Lukasiewicz", Arch. Math. Logik Grundlagenforsch. 3 (1957), pp. 3-18.

Seddon, F. Aristotle & Lukasiewicz on the Principle of Contradiction: On the Principle of Contradiction, Modern Logic Pub., 1996 buy it

Simons, P. "Lukasiewicz, Meinong, and Many-Valued Logic", in K. Szaniawski (ed.), The Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw School, Kluwer, Dordrecht 1989, pp. 249-9.

Slupecki, J. "Jan Lukasiewicz" (Polish), Wiadomosci matematyczne (2) 15 (1972), pp. 73-78.

Trzesicki, K. "Lukasiewiczian logic of tenses and the problem of determinism", in K. Szaniawski (ed.), op. cit., pp. 293-312.

Trzesicki, K. "Lukasiewicz on Philosophy and determinism", in F. Coniglione, R. Poli, J. Wolenski (eds.), Polish Scientific Philosophy, Rodopi, Amsterdam 1993, pp. 251-97.

Wolenski, J. "Jan Lukasiewicz on the Liar Paradox, Logical Consequence, Truth and Induction", Modern Logic 4 (1994), 394-400.

Wolenski, J. "Jan Lukasiewicz" (Polish), Mathematics at the turn of the twentieth century (Katowice, 1992), 35-38.

Wójcicki, R. (ed.), Selected papers on Lukasiewicz's sentential calculus, Ossolineum, Wroclaw 1977.

Keywords

The most important philosophical ideas of Lukasiewicz's thought, explained by quotations taken from his works. Follow the links!

Documentation on Lukasiewicz

Lukasiewicz's Letters to Twardowski

Last updated: December 12, 2002

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