DESCRIPTION: Jan Franciszek Drewnowski (1896-1978) was a logician and a Catholic thinker. He studied in Warsaw and Petrograd, and obtained his doctorate under Tadeusz Kotarbiński. He was also a student of Jan Łukasiewicz and Stanisław Leśniewski. After completing an engineering course, he served in the Russian army as an officer. Later, when he returned from Russia to Warsaw, he also served in the Polish army. During the Defence of Warsaw in 1939, he was an adjutant to the commander of the sappers. After the capitulation, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp until 1945. After the war, he served in the army in Rome and England, returning to Poland in 1947. Together with Father Józef Maria Bocheński, Bolesław Sobociński and Father Jan Salamucha, he co-founded the so-called Krakow Circle. Together with Father Jan Salamucha, he proposed an analysis of the scholastic concept of analogy. Under his influence, he converted to Catholicism. Drewnowski, like Jan Łukasiewicz, was a proponent of the view that philosophy could be axiomatised. He sought to clarify philosophical and theological concepts using formal logic. He was a pioneer in the application of semiotics to philosophical issues. He preached the need to assimilate the achievements of modern logic into Catholic thought. In the article mentioned above, Drewnowski postulates that the application of symbolic logic to scientific theory should be based on the symbolic equipment of classical logical calculus. New fixed function symbols and new axioms should be added to the symbols of this calculus. These new symbols must express the characteristic meanings of a given scientific theory, while the new axioms define the characteristic premises of that theory. The author notes that, according to existential Thomists, symbolic logic is unsuitable for use in classical metaphysics. However, he finds their objections unconvincing, as they equate classical logical calculus with strongly extensional calculi. Furthermore, the proper application of classical logical calculus to metaphysics does not consist in a metaphysical interpretation of the symbols of this calculus, nor in translating metaphysics into its symbolic language. The objection that metaphysics requires reference to ‘objective intellectual proofs’ is not incompatible with the possibility of applying symbolic logic to metaphysics. As in the natural sciences, the necessity of referring to empirical evidence is not incompatible with the application of symbolic logic. The application of symbolic logic to metaphysics does not limit its scope to formal and spatio-temporal concepts. The symbolic formulation of concepts such as ‘the internal structure of being’ has never been considered impossible. Similarly, there is no proof that an axiomatic theory of metaphysics must consist of several dozen axioms and only a few theorems. "(...) no satisfactory attempt at axiomatising metaphysics has yet been published. But here, too, no proof has been given anywhere that it is impossible to create an axiomatic system as efficient as that found in mathematics and some other sciences. (...) However, this possibility would be supported by the unlimited formal possibilities opened up by the introduction of new constant symbols into classical logic. For there are no restrictions here either on their content, on the content of their arguments, or on the number of these arguments" (p. 63).
TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. The use of symbolic logic in science. 2. Criticism of the use of symbolic logic. 3. Extensional equivalence, identity equivalence and scope equivalence. 4. Metaphysical interpretation of logical symbols and translation of metaphysics into symbolic language. 5. The uniqueness of the Mover in St. Thomas's proof. 6. Intellectual objectivity. 7. St. Thomas's misplacement of emphasis. 8. The impoverishment and distortion of metaphysics. 9. The axiomatisation of metaphysics. 10. The undecidability of mathematical theories.
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