Research Specialities & Main Interests

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• Philosophy in Central Europe (Bolzano , Brentano and his school, Twardowski and the Lvov-Warsaw School)
• History and Philosophy of Logic
• Analytic Metaphysics

Personal Information

Birth: August 4, 1970, in Chianciano Terme (SI), Italy

Office Phone: +31-(0)20-4446681
Fax: +39-06-23313877 (will be received as e-mail attachment) or +31-(0)20-4446635 (normal fax gear)

A.Betti@ph.vu.nl

Education

Laurea, 1994/95 (cum laude): University of Florence, Department of Philosophy . Master dissertation: Logica ed esistenza in Stanislaw Lesniewski , Prof. Ettore Casari supervisor.

Logic as Universal Medium? On the Conceptions of Logic, Language and Truth in Lesniewski and Tarski Three-year Individual Postdoc (Vernieuwingsinmpuls, VENI) funded by the Dutch National Research Council (NWO)

1. "The Road from Vienna to Lvov - Twardowski's Theory of Judgement between 1894 and 1897" (with Maria van der Schaar), Grazer Philosophische Studien 67, 2004, forthcoming.

   This paper discusses Twardowski's theory of judgement on the basis of the unpublished manuscript Logik 1894/5. Topics are time, relations, states of affairs.

2. "Lesniewski's Early Liar, Tarski and Natural Language" forthcoming on a special issue of Pure and Applied Logic (Elsevier, Amsterdam) devoted to Alfred Tarski, ed. by D. Niwinski, J. Wolenski et al.

   Main thesis: Lesniewski - and not his pupil Tarski - was the first to show that natural language is incurably affected by contradictions, and only by sanitizing it do we get an acceptable means of scientific investigation.

3. "Lukasiewicz and Lesniewski on Contradiction", (html with Polish fonts ) [pdf] in M. Baghramian& P. M. Simons (eds.), Lukasiewicz and Modern Logic, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming.

4. "Sempiternal Truth. The Bolzano-Lesniewski-Twardowski Axis", [pdf] The Lvov-Warsaw School. The Second Generation, in J. J. Jadacki, J. Pasniczek&A. Rojszczak (eds.), Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Rodopi, forthcoming.

5. "The Incomplete Story of Lukasiewicz and Bivalence" [pdf], in T. Childers & O. Majer (eds.), The Logica Yearbook 2001, Praha, Filosofia, 2002, pp. 21-36.

   This article deals with Lukasiewicz's rejection of the principle of the excluded middle in his early phase (up to 1917). The claim is that his early rejection of the excluded middle has nothing to do with his later rejection of bivalence (1917). Topics include nominal (predicate, term) negation and incomplete objects.

6. "Le donne nella filosofia analitica austriaca", in Donne e filosofia, a cura di M. Marsonet, Genova, Erga, 2000, pp. 98-118.

   A survey of women philosophers in the Vienna Circle (Rose Rand, Olga Taussky-Todd, Olga Neurath) and in the Lvov-Warsaw School (Izydora Dambska, Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, Maria Kokoszynska-Lutmanowa and others).

Roberto Poli (ed.) The Brentano Puzzle, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998, Polish Philosophy Page, December 2003

Truth, Time and Logic - An Historico-systematic Investigation into the Austro-Polish Tradition

A comparative analysis of truth, time and logic with relevance both to historical and systematic debates. Its core will be a study of the metaphysics of truth in Austro-Polish philosophy in the light of modern theories. It will be based in part on a major revision of my doctoral dissertation in Italian. Monograph in English of approximately 300 pages for a wide audience of philosophers.

[Get the table of contents ]

1. "A Plea for Presentism" (Univ. Utrecht, The Netherlands, February 2004). Scheduled.
   
   Abstract. Presentism plays an important role in the contemporary debate on truth and time. It is, as it were, the common- sense view. For some present-day thinkers, however, it is plainly "absurd". Is it worth defending? I think it is. Roughly put, presentism is the thesis that only present objects exist. In this talk my aim is to defend this thesis against two of the five fundamental objections commonly raised against it: the not-so threatening Argument from Other Times and the much more insidious Argument from Relations. My rebuttal of the Argument from Other Times is based on an analysis of the interrelation between Presentism and the Aristotelianism-vs.-Platonism debate on the ontological status of time. My counterargument to the Argument from Relations will be twofold. The first bit is based on the rejection of the fundamental assumption in the argument, i. e., a variant of the correspondence theory of truth; the second bit consists in arguing that causal interactions are simultaneous.
   
   
2. "Een wereld zonder standen van zaken" (VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 2003). In Dutch. A much shorter - but much improved - version of the paper following just after this one. Here's the
   
   Samenvatting. De wereld, zegt Wittgenstein in de Tractatus, is de totaliteit van de feiten, niet van de dingen. Of, zoals Armstrong zegt, de wereld is een wereld van standen van zaken. Dat de zon in de hemel boven ons schijnt, dat het kopje tegenover me koffie bevat, in het algemeen dat zo en zo (het geval) is, zijn allemaal (beschrijvingen van) standen van zaken, die onze wereld 'constitueren'. Waarom hebben wij standen van zaken nodig? Om waarheid ontologisch te gronden, volgens Armstrong, want proposities zijn waar krachtens iets in de wereld. Niet krachtens dingen, eigenschappen of relaties los van elkaar, maar krachtens verbindingen ervan: standen van zaken, die dingen, eigenschappen en relaties 'samenlijmen'. Deze positie lijkt aantrekkelijk. Toch zal ik een poging doen om aan te tonen dat standen van zaken niet nodig zijn, en dat de wereld dus een wereld zonder standen van zaken is.
   
   The audience reacted vehemently against the 'dus' and claimed: if you show that some entities are superfluous you have not yet showed that such entities are not there. How can this hold for assumed metaphysical entities like states of affairs?
   
3. "A World without States of Affairs" (Univ. Nijmegen, The Netherlands, March 2003). The title I took from an article of Peter Simons' in Italian, "Un mondo senza stati di cose" which strongly inspired this and which I extensively used here. I also used an excellent paper by William Vallicella.
   
   
4. "Twardowski's Misunderstandings of Bolzano and its Polish Consequences" (Bolzano Atelier, Geneva, Switzerland, Fall 2002)- This paper is available for comments on request. )As of October 2003 I submitted a part of it as a separate short paper of about 3000 words.
   
   Abstract - When Twardowski came to Lvov, he had to establish a philosophical trend, which was almost entirely Brentanian, although peppered with Bolzanian ideas. The overall trend was even more Brentanian than Twardowski himself was when he left Vienna, and his choice impeded a rapid and global reception of Bolzano's most modern logical discoveries. Although Twardowski played definitely a major role in disseminating some of Bolzano's ideas in Poland, the most important being sempiternal truth, Bolzano was still too much a logician among many. It was only thanks to platonistic inputs from the outside, namely Husserl and Twardowski's student Lukasiewicz, and to the change in the conception of logic which took Polish logic from Sigwart to Tarski, that Bolzano's star could, slowly, begin to rise in Poland. Or, at least, that the fundamental achievements of his logic could be known. This paper will not, for the most part, discuss Bolzanian elements in the Polish tradition, some of which have already been discussed elsewhere. In the first part it will mainly challenge the standard picture of the all-Brentanian origins of the Polish school, due to a one-sided perspective caused by a specific reading of the ideas of Twardowski and of his role as a founding father of the Polish School; this part will also contribute to set a background for Bolzano's reception in Poland; in the second part it will discuss, for the first time, two Bolzanian elements in Twardowski, and in the early writings of Lesniewski, Lukasiewicz and Kotarbinski, linked to the form of truth-bearers and to truth-makers. Special attention is here given to an important manuscript by Twardowski in German, Logik 1894/5.
   
   

• Kazimierz Twardowski, Logik1894/5 (Logic - Vienna Lecture Notes 1894/5) edition of the German manuscript, introduction and footnotes with Venanzio Raspa, in preparation.
  
• Kazimierz Twardowski, Logika - Wyklady Lwowskie 1895/6 (Logic - Lvov Lecture Notes 1895/6) edition of the Polish manuscript and footnotes, introduction, in progress.
• Stanislaw Lesniewski, Trzy zapomniane recenzje (1913-1916), foreword, edition and footnotes.
  
• Jan Lukasiewicz, On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle, transl. from Polish by Audoenus O. V. LeBlanc (proofreading only).

Il tempo come soggetto - il soggetto come tempo. La temporalita nell'orizzonte fenomenologico

Co-editor, Polish Philosophy Page

• Contributions as author:
  
  • Stanislaw Lesniewski
    
  • Documentation on Lesniewski
    
  • Documentation on Twardowski
    
    • PPP Catalogue of Twardowski's Unpublished Papers in Warsaw
      
    • PPP Catalogue of Twardowski's Unpublished Papers in Lvov
      
    • Kazimierz Twardowski's Private Correspondence
      
    • Transcriptions from Kazimierz Twardowski's Private Correspondence
      
  • Documentation on Chwistek
    
  • Publications by Ryszard Jadczak
    

Editor, Rudolf Carnap 1928. La Costruzione Logica del Mondo A didactical electronic web resource in Italian on Rudolf Carnap's Logischer Aufbau der Welt. Author of all materials & webmaster.

(Only last 5 years. The complete list is here )

• 2003-2006 NWO Vernieuwingsimpuls VENI-grant Individual Postdoc Project
• 2002 (Sep to Sep) Faculteit der Wijsbegeerte, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1-year Postdoc Project Missing Link
• 2001 (Jun) Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, to take part in the 15th International Symposium LOGICA 2001, Zahradky Castle, Central Bohemia, Czech Republic.
• 2000/01 (Nov to Aug) Nuffic, 10-month HUYGENS grant awarded for postdoctoral research at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Leiden (Prof. Göran Sundholm supervisor)
• 1999 University of Rome, Perfectioning Fellowship Abroad, Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Leiden (Prof. Göran Sundholm supervisor).
• 1999 (Dec) Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, short-term grant at the Logic Department of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague (Dr. Petr Kolar supervisor)

Italian (mother tongue), fluent English, Dutch, Polish, German (verbal and written); as a native speaker of Italian, familiarity with French and Spanish. Latin and Ancient Greek (read-only).

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