## 1. Life



Kazimierz (or Kasimir) Jerzy Skrzypna-Twardowski, Ritter von
Ogonczyk was born to Polish parents on October 20, 1866 in
Vienna, which was then the capital of the Habsburg Empire. From 1877
to 1885 he attended the Theresian Academy (Theresianum), the secondary
school of Vienna's bourgeoise elite. Like many other high-school
students at the time, his philosophy textbook was the
*Philosophische Propedaeutik* by Robert Zimmermann, Bolzano's
'favorite pupil' (*Herzensjunge*). The book covered
empirical psychology, logic, and the introduction to philosophy.



In 1885 Twardowski enrolled at the University of Vienna. The year
after he became a student of Franz Brentano, for whom he felt
"the most sincere awe and veneration" and whom he
remembered as "uncompromising and relentless in his quest for
rigor in formulation, consistency in expression, and precision in the
working out of proofs" (Twardowski 1926, 20). In addition to
philosophy, Twardowski also studied history, mathematics, physics, and
physiology (with Sigmund Exner, the son of Bolzano's correspondent
Franz Exner; ibid., 21). While a student, Twardowski was a close
friend of Alois Hofler, Christian von Ehrenfels, Josef Klemens
Kreibig, and Hans Schmidkunz--the latter initiated regular
meetings between younger and older students of Brentano and founded
the Vienna Philosophical Society in 1888. Twardowski defended his
doctoral dissertation, *Idea and Perception--An Epistemological
Investigation of Descartes* (published in 1892), in the Fall of
1891. Since Brentano had resigned from his chair in 1880, Twardowski's
official PhD supervisor was Robert Zimmermann. In 1891-1892
Twardowski spent time as a researcher both in Leipzig, where he
followed courses by Wilhelm Wundt and Oswald Kulpe, and in
Munich, where he attended the lectures of Carl Stumpf, another pupil
of Brentano. Between 1892 and 1895 Twardowski earned a living working
for an insurance company and writing for German-language and
Polish-language newspapers about philosophy, literature, and music
while working on his Habilitation thesis, *On the Content and Object
of Presentations--A Psychological Investigation* (1894), and
teaching as Privatdozent at the University of Vienna, where he gave
courses in logic, on the immortality of the soul and a
*practicum* on Hume's *Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding*.



In 1895 Twardowski, then 29, was appointed as *extraordinarius*
at the University of Lvov (then Lemberg, now Lviv, in Polish
Lwow), one of the two Polish-speaking Universities of the
Empire. He saw it as his duty to export Brentano's style of
philosophizing to Poland and spent most of his time organizing Lvov's
philosophical life. He reanimated the Lvov Philosophical Circle and
gave lectures aimed at a broader public. He organized his teaching in
general 'core courses' in logic, psychology, ethics, and
the history of philosophy (given and updated every four years), and
placed less emphasis on specialized courses. Further, he inaugurated a
philosophical seminar and reading room, where he made his private
library available to students, with whom he always maintained close
and frequent personal contacts. Relatively many of Twardowski's
students were women (among others, Izydora Dambska, Maria
Lutman-Kokoszynska, and Seweryna Luszczewska-Romahnowa, all
of whom held philosophy chairs later). At a certain point, Twardowski
had managed to create three concentric circles of philosophical
influence: there was the Philosophical Circle, open to all university
departments, the Polish Philosophical Society (1904), open to
professional philosophers, and the journal *Ruch Filozoficzny*,
conceived as an organ of promotion of philosophy at large and open to
everyone (1911). Twardowski also established a laboratory of
psychology in 1907. As he writes, he was waging "a most
aggressive propaganda campaign on behalf of philosophy"
(Twardowski 1926, 20). The campaign soon resulted in his lectures
being moved to the Great Concert Hall of the Lvov Musical Society when
the number of students reached two thousand (in the mid-Twenties he
lectured in the Apollo movie theater, at 7 a.m. in the summer and 8
a.m. in the winter, without academic quarter). All this amounted to
the establishment of a philosophical movement that soon became known
as a proper school: first, until the First World War, it was known as
the Lvov School; then, when the Russian-speaking University of Warsaw
again became Polish-speaking, and Twardowski's students starting
getting positions and having their own students there, it was known as
the Lvov-Warsaw School (see
 Lvov-Warsaw School).
 The name is somewhat inaccurate, for Twardowski's students occupied
philosophy chairs in all post-war Polish universities, not only in
Lvov and Warsaw. As has often been pointed out, what all students of
Twardowski had in common was not a particular set of views, but a
rather distinctive attitude to philosophical problems informed by
precision and clarity that they inherited from Twardowski's general
conception of methodology, and which he valued most highly. According
to Jordan, Twardowski led his students



> 
> to undertake painstaking analysis of specific problems which were rich
> in conceptual and terminological distinctions, and directed rather to
> the clarification than to the solution of the problems involved.
> (Jordan 1963,
>  7f)[2]
> 



In this, Twardowski's students learned what he had learned from
Brentano, namely 



> 
> how to strive relentlessly after matter-of-factness, and how to pursue
> a method of analysis and investigation that, insofar as that is
> possible, guarantees that matter-of-factness. He proved to me by
> example that the most difficult problems can be clearly formulated,
> and the attempts at their solution no less clearly presented, provided
> one is clear within oneself. The emphasis he placed on sharp
> conceptual distinctions that did not lapse into fruitless nit-picking
> was an important guideline for my own writings. (Twardowski 1926, 20)
> 



Twardowski was convinced that the philosophical way of thinking he
advocated, namely precision in thought and writing and rigor in
argumentation, was directly beneficial to practical life. It was with
the idea of proving exactly this point--by way of his personal
example--that he accepted to head various kinds of committees
(among others, the University Lectures Series, the Society for Women
in Higher Education, the Society for Teachers in High Education, the
Federation of Austrian Middle-School Teacher Candidates) and to be
Dean twice and Rector three times in a row (though he repeatedly
refused to be Minister of Education). All these activities cost him a
lot of time: in fact, Twardowski's choice to be most of all an
educator and an organizer left him very little time for academic
writing. Besides, as he reports, Twardowski wasn't much interested in
the publication of his ideas. Thus, since he placed high demands on
the clarity and the logical cogency of philosophical work, he set out
to publish only when it was required by external circumstances
(Twardowski 1926, 30). As a consequence, in his Lvov years, Twardowski
published little. He officially retired in 1930.



Twardowski died on February 11, 1938.



On Twardowski's life and education in Vienna up to 1895 (as well as
Twardowski's early activity in Lvov and Vienna's 'war
parenthesis' in 1914-1915) see Brozek 2012; Twardowski's
heritage and his achievements as an educator and organizer in Lvov,
see Czezowski 1948, Ingarden 1948; Ajdukiewicz 1959,
Kotarbinski 1959 (in Polish: excerpts in English are to be found
in Brozek 2014), Dambska 1978, Wolenski 1989, 1997 and
1998. With special reference to psychology, see Rzepa and Stachowski
1993.

 
## 2. The Vienna Years: 1891-1895



Twardowski's main publication in the Vienna period is, next to his
doctoral dissertation *Idea and Perception* (1891), his
*Habilitationsschrift*, *On the Content and Object of
Presentations* (1894), Twardowski's most influential work.
According to J. N. Findlay, *Content and Object* is
"unquestionably one of the most interesting treatises in the
whole range of modern philosophy; it is clear, concentrated, and
amazingly rich in ideas" (1963, 8).


### 2.1 On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894): Context, Influence and Historical Background



In *Content and Object*, Twardowski shares a number of Brentano's
fundamental theses. Five of them are particularly relevant here.
According to the first and most important thesis, the essential
characteristic of mental phenomena, and what demarcates them from
physical phenomena, is intentionality. We can sum it up as
follows:



> 
> **Brentano's Thesis**:
>   
> 
> Every mental phenomenon has an object towards which it is directed.
> 



Mental phenomena, also called *mental acts*, fall into three
separate classes (second thesis): presentations
(*Vorstellungen*), judgments, and phenomena of love and hate. In
the mental act of presentation, an object is presented; in a judgment,
judged; in love and hate, loved or
 hated.[3]
 Next (third thesis), mental phenomena are either presentations or are
based on presentations. We need to present an object in order to judge
it or appreciate it (though we do not need to judge or appreciate an
object that we might just present). Importantly, however (fourth
thesis), a judgment is not a combination of presentations, but a
mental act *sui generis* that accepts or rejects the object given
by the presentation at its basis (see
 Brentano's Theory of Judgment).
 In keeping with this idea, all judgments (fifth thesis) can be aptly
expressed in the existential form '*A* is' (positive
judgment) or '*A* is not' (negative judgment)
(alternatively, '*A* exists' or '*A* does
not exist'). In both cases, the judgment has a so-called
'immanent' object, given by the presentation, which is
simply *A*.



Both the notion of an object 'immanent' in a mental act,
as well as, in all generality, the term 'object' in
Brentano's Thesis, have an ambiguous character. Are the objects of
mental acts fully inside us or not? To correctly judge that the aether
does not exist means, in Brentanian terms, rejecting the aether which
is given to one's consciousness by a presentation. But if the aether
is an object immanent in me, fully inside my consciousness, what does
it mean, then, that I reject *it*? Is it some mental entity
inside my consciousness that I reject? But how could that possibly be
correct? In this case I most certainly have something in my head, and
that something exists. So it cannot be correct that I reject
*it*--for, if *that* is the aether I reject, the
judgment that the aether does not exist cannot be true. The aether
should be a physical space-filling substance, *outside* my
consciousness: that is what I am rejecting. But if that is what I
reject, it seems something must be there for me to be able to affirm
that it is not there. This is very puzzling. It was fundamentally due
to difficulties of this kind that Brentano's theory of judgment was
subjected, from 1889 onwards, to continuous objections by philosophers
such as Sigwart and Windelband. Brentano engaged in the debate in his
defense, as did his pupils Marty and Hillebrand. It is in this context
that Twardowski's *Habilitationsschrift* was conceived.
Twardowski saw that notions such as 'the object of a
presentation' and 'immanent object' were ambiguous
because in Brentano's writings the object of a presentation was
identified with that of content of a presentation (Twardowski 1926,
10). In *Content and Object*, Twardowski set out to clarify
exactly the relationship between the two, with far-reaching
implications for Brentano's original position.



The distinction between content and object of a presentation was not
new in Twardowski's time. It was the most fundamental element of
Bolzano 1837; it was later present in works of Bolzanian inspiration
(Zimmermann 1853, Kerry 1885-1891; on Zimmermann see Winter
1975, Morscher 1997, Raspa 1999); and it was also mentioned in works
of Brentanian inspiration (Hofler and Meinong 1890, Hillebrand
1891, Marty 1884-1895: article 5, 1894). Nevertheless, the
distinction was by no means common lore. In particular, before
Twardowski, no Brentanian had endorsed the distinction between content
and object in a way that offered a basis for solving the problems of
Brentano's theory, nor had anyone among the Brentanians devoted any
in-depth study to the issue, although the differences between
Bolzano's and Brentano's theories are such that reworking the
distinction in a Brentanian framework raises philosophical problems
that are by no means trivial. A major difference concerns the role of
the content of a presentation and its ontological status, since for a
Brentanian the content of a presentation can only be something
actually existing in one's mind. No Brentanian had thus realised in
full the implications that reinterpreting the Bolzanian distinction in
a Brentanian key would have. Carrying out this task, and thus helping
Brentano's theory out of its most pressing troubles, was Twardowski's
original contribution. He drew inspiration from arguments in favor of
the content-object distinction present in Bolzano, but he
reinterpreted them in a Brentanian framework to sustain conclusions
that were opposite to Bolzano's and that were new for the Brentanians.
One such conclusion, and a major implication of Twardowski's theory of
intentionality, is that there are no objectless presentations,
presentations without an object, no matter how strange and improbable
that object
 is[4].
 Even presentations of contradictory objects have both content and
object. It is this thesis and the conclusions that Twardowski drew
from it that have had a major impact on the development of Brentanian
theories of intentionality and that opened the way to ontologies as
rich as that of Alexius Meinong. On the other hand, this position,
together with Twardowski's identification of meaning with
psychological content, prompted Husserl's critical reactions and led
Husserl to the theory of intentionality set out in the *Logical
Investigations* (1900/01) where Twardowski's distinction between
content and object is taken up (on this, see Schuhmann 1993; on
Twardowski's influence and 'triggering effect' on Husserl,
see Cavallin 1990, especially 28f). Twardowski's ideas were not only
influential on the continent. Via G. F. Stout, who published an
anonymous review of *Content and Object,* in *Mind*,
Twardowski's ideas had an influence on Moore and Russell's transition
from idealism to analytic philosophy (van der Schaar 1996).

 
### 2.2 'The Presented'



The aim of *Content and Object* is to distinguish "the
presented, in one sense, where it means the content, from the
presented in the other sense, where it is used to designate the
object" (Twardowski 1894, 4). Its main thesis is that in every
mental act a content (*Inhalt*) and an object (*Gegenstand*)
must be distinguished. This distinction enables Twardowski to clarify
that 



> 
> **Twardowski's Thesis**:
>   
> 
> Every mental phenomenon has a content and an object, and it is
> directed towards its object, not towards its content.
> 



On the basis of the distinction between content and object, Twardowski
is in turn able to clarify Brentano's notion of 'object immanent
(*immanentes Objekt*) in a presentation' by identifying it
with the notion of content, and to clarify Brentano's notion of
'object of a presentation' by identifying it with the
notion of object.



The distinction between the content and the object of a presentation
rests on a psychological or epistemic difference which is, roughly
speaking, the mental counterpart of Frege's distinction between sense
and reference. The object of a presentation, says Twardowski using
Zimmermann's terminology, is *that which* is presented in a
presentation; the content is *that through which* the object is
presented. An important argument Twardowski gives in favor of this
distinction--and which strengthens the analogy with Frege's
distinction--is that we can present the same object in two
different ways by having two presentations with the same object but
with different content. Twardowski calls such presentations
*interchangeable presentations* (*Wechselvorstellungen*).
The presentation of the Roman Juvavum and the presentation of the
birthplace of Mozart have the same object, Salzburg; however, their
content differs. To offer a rough analogy, think of an arrow pointing
at an object: the object is what the arrow is pointing at, the content
is what in the arrow makes it the arrow it is, that is, its being
directed to that object and not to another. The act is just the
'being directed towards' of the arrow. Interchangeable
presentations are like two arrows pointing at the same object.



Twardowski thinks of the difference between act, content, and object
in the following way. An act of presentation is a mental event which
takes place in our mind at a certain time. The content is literally
inside the mind, and exists dependently on the act, as long as the act
does. The object is instead independent of the mental act (1894, 1, 4;
SS7, 36), and, generally speaking, not inside one's mind, although
in some special cases the object of a presentation might be a mental
item. This special case is the case in which the content of some
presentation plays the role of the object of another presentation.
This is not infrequent, because any time we discuss the content of a
presentation, describing its characteristics and its relations to
other things, we are presenting it. And for this to be possible, the
content must play the role of object in the presentation(s) we are
having (what we would call second-order presentations). To use the
arrow metaphor once again, second-order presentations, then, are like
an arrow directed towards another arrow. 



The way in which Twardowski relates mind and language makes the
distinction between content and object fairly easy to understand.
Names are the linguistic counterpart of presentations. By
'names' Twardowski means the categorematic terms of
traditional logic ('Barack Obama,' 'The President of
the United States,' 'black,'
'man,''he'). A name has three functions:
first, a name makes known that in the mind of the person using the
name an act of presentation is taking place; secondly, a name means
something; thirdly, it names an object. Twardowski takes the meaning
of a name to be the content of the presentation that, as the name
makes known, is taking place in the speaker (SS3), that is,
Twardowski takes meaning to be something mental and individual. This
holds, *mutatis mutandis*, also for judgments. In this sense, in
*Content and Object* the semantic sphere is dependent on the
mental sphere. This trait qualifies Twardowski's position as
psychologistic (see
 Psychologism:
 PA3). Although his position on meaning underwent a development,
Twardowski never adhered to a platonistic conception of meaning like
Bolzano or Frege did.



If all this is intuitive, why are the object and the content of a
presentation conflated? Twardowski maintains that the reason why
content and object are often identified comes, among others, from a
linguistic ambiguity: both the content and the object are said to be
'presented' in a presentation (SS4). Twardowski offers
an analysis of the ambiguity of the term 'presented' by
appealing to the linguistic distinction between *modifying* and
*attributive* (or determining) adjectives, and he illustrates it
with an analogy between the act of presenting an object and the act of
painting a landscape. When a painter paints a landscape, she also
paints a painting: so we can say that the painting and the landscape
are both painted. But in this situation 'painted
landscape' can have two very different meanings. In the first
meaning of 'painted', a painted landscape is a landscape;
in the second meaning of 'painted' a painted landscape is
not a landscape, but a painting (like in Magritte's *La trahison des
images* (1928-9): it is a painted pipe we are looking at, not
a pipe). In the first case, 'painted' is used in an
attributive sense (the landscape is a portion of nature that happens
to be painted by a painter in a painting); in the second case
'painted' is used in a modifying sense (that in which,
looking at the painting in a museum, someone may say: this is a
landscape!). The painted landscape in the modifying sense is a
painting, and thus identical with the painting painted in the
attributive sense. Analogously, in an act of presentation, the object
can be, like the painted landscape, said to be 'presented'
in two senses. The object presented in the modifying sense is
identical with the content presented in the attributive sense: it is
dependent on the act of presentation, and it is what we mean by
'the object immanent in the act'; the object presented in
the attributive sense is the object of the presentation, what happens
to be presented in a presentation, and what is independent of the act
of presentation.


### 2.3 Nonexistent Objects



According to a Brentanian conception of judgment, when we judge, the
object is given to us by an act of presentation. Given this fact,
Twardowski's analysis of 'presented' in terms of modifying
vs. attributive adjectives is fundamental to understand what is
exactly 'judged in a
 judgment.'[5]
 For it is not only in presentations that we can distinguish act,
content and object, but also in judgments. When we pass a judgment, we
either accept or reject an object through a content. All judgments
have a form which can be linguistically expressed as 'The object
A exists' or 'The object A does not exist.' The
object of judgment (A) is what is judged in a judgment. This object is
the object of the presentation at the basis of the judgment, it is not
the content of the presentation; it is the object presented in the
attributive sense, not in the modifying sense. The content of a
judgment is the existence or non-existence of the object presented. It
might seem strange at first to hear Twardowski say that the content of
a judgment is the (non-)existence of the object, but Twardowski has
something like the following in mind: we judge about the object A
*that it exists* (or *that it does not exist*). Twardowski's
analysis clarifies what is going on when we judge, in a Brentanian
theory of judgment, that the aether does not exist. Judging that the
aether does not exist means rejecting a physical space-filling
substance outside my consciousness. The object of this judgment is not
mental. However, this does not mean that there is nothing inside my
consciousness: there is a mental content, through which the aether is
presented and judged *as non-existing*. That content, present in
me, however, exists; it is the aether itself that does not exist.



For a theory of judgment like the one sketched above to work, the
object we judge must be the very object we present. Therefore,
Twardowski's thesis must be understood in the strong sense that there
are no presentations which do not have an object: if a presentation
did not have an object, we would not have an object to judge as
existing or non-existing. It is for this reason that a crucial part of
*Content and Object* is devoted to defending this claim, and to
showing that, despite appearances, every presentation has an object
(SS5). This is like saying, coming back to our arrow metaphor,
that every arrow points at something. Twardowski's strategy is to show
that presentations which are normally deemed by others to be
objectless--i.e., arrows that do not point to anything--are
not such. There exist no presentations without an object: there are
presentations whose object does not exist. Twardowski gives a number
of arguments for his position. Of all these arguments, the key one is
an argument based on the three functions of names in language.



> 
> If someone uses the expression: 'oblique square,' then he
> makes known that there occurs in him an act of presentation. The
> content, which belongs to this act, constitutes the meaning of this
> name. But this name does not only mean something, it also designates
> something, namely, something which combines in itself contradictory
> properties and whose existence one denies as soon as one feels
> inclined to make a judgment about it. Something is undoubtedly
> designated by the name, even though this something does not exist.
> (SS5, 23)
> 



On the basis of this reasoning and a linguistic analysis of how
'nothing' functions in language Twardowski rejects
Bolzano's claim that 'nothing' is an objectless
presentation by showing that 'nothing' is a
syncategorematic expression (like 'and,' 'or,'
and 'the') not a categorematic one. If an expression is
not a categorematic expression, it is not a name; but if an expression
is not a name, it does not need to have three functions. To every name
there corresponds a presentation and vice versa; if an expression is
not a name, then there is no presentation corresponding to it. If
there is no presentation corresponding to 'nothing'
because 'nothing' is not a name, the question of its
object does not arise. This argument has been said to anticipate by 37
years Carnap's analysis of Heidegger's 'The nothing itself
nothings.' (Wolenski 1998, 11). The comparison should
however not make one think that Twardowski shared Carnap's attitude
towards metaphysics (see 2.4 below.)



Another argument given by Twardowski for the thesis that every
presentation has an object is based on the different ontological
status of act, content, and object of a presentation. The act and the
content always exist; and, in fact, they always exist *together*,
forming a whole in the mind, a unified mental reality, though the
content has a dependent existence on the
 act.[6]
 The object may or may not exist. Suppose you have the following
presentations: the presentation of Barack Obama, that of a possible
object such as the aether, and that of an impossible object, such as a
dodecahedron with thirteen sides or a round square. The objects of
these presentations (namely Barack Obama, the aether, and the round
square) differ greatly, but they are still all objects. Barack Obama
is an existing object; the aether and the dodecahedron with thirteen
sides are non-existing objects. When we present an object such as a
dodecahedron with thirteen sides or a round square, the object, that
which is named, is different from the content because the content
exists and the object does not. It is the object, not the content,
that is rejected in the negative existential judgment 'the round
square does not exist,' for it is the object that does not
exist; the content 'exists in the truest sense of the
word' (SS5, 24).



A third argument rests on the difference between being presented and
existing (SS5, 24). Those who claim that there are objectless
presentations, says Twardowski, confuse 'being presented'
with 'existing.' To reinforce his point, Twardowski offers
several observations, among others, one resting on the claim that it
is the object which is the bearer of contradictory properties, not the
content. This claim will be described later by Meinong and Mally as
the principle of the independence of Being (existence) from Being-So
(bearing properties). When we present an object which does not exist
because it is contradictory, i.e. impossible, we need not
*immediately* notice that that object has contradictory
qualities: it is possible that we discover this successively by
further reasoning. Suppose now that only presentations with possible
objects are accepted. Then, Twardowski continues, the presentation of
something contradictory would have an object for as long as we did not
notice the contradiction; the moment we discovered it, the
presentation would cease to have an object. What would then bear the
contradictory qualities? Since the content can't be what bears the
contradictory qualities, it is the object itself that bears them; but
then, this object has to be what is presented.
 [7]




The arguments above ultimately rest on the idea that every name has
three functions. This assumption can also be seen, in turn, as resting
on an even more basic idea, namely that in all generality
'object' equals 'being capable to take up the role
of object in a presentation,' thus an object is anything that
can be presented; and anything that can be named by a name (SS3,
12; SS5, 23; SS7, 37). Yet, saying that an object is anything
that can be named by a name and that a name always has the function of
naming are two sides of the same coin, as are the claim that an object
is anything that can be presented by a presentation and the claim that
a presentation always has an object. This cluster of correlative
assumptions is the core of the theory. Only when this core is accepted
can the other claims put forward by Twardowski (namely (1) that
'being presented' is not the same as
'existing' and (2) that objects can possess properties
even though they do not exist) become convincing parts of a cogent
theory of intentionality. One might note, however, that it is a theory
for which there are no non-circular arguments, for the theory is
acceptable only to those who are already convinced that there are no
empty names, that all categorematic terms, including 'round
square,' 'aether,', 'Pegasus,' etc. have
the function of naming something, not only the function of being
meaningful.

 

As is known, the theory, in Meinong's version, will be the critical
target of Russell's 'On Denoting' (1905).


### 2.4 Mereology: Parts of the Content and Parts of the Object



Metaphysics is importantly present in *Content and Object*, and
particularly important are the mereological considerations Twardowski
offers. According to Ingarden, *Content and Object* offered
"the first consistently constructed theory of objects
manifesting a certain theoretical unity since the times of
scholasticism and of the 'ontology' of Christian
Wolff" (1948, 258). One cannot literally agree with Ingarden
considering the Leibnizian metaphysics in Bolzano's *Athanasia*
(1827)--hidden in the two-thousand pages of the
*Wissenschaftslehre*--and Brentano's work in mereology.
Nevertheless, if the impact of *Content and Object* is compared
with that of Bolzano's or Brentano's metaphysics, things are
different. *Content and Object* was a fundamental contribution to
the *renaissance* of Aristotelian metaphysics--metaphysics
in the sense of a general theory of objects--which led to both
Meinong's theory of objects and to Husserl's formal ontology of parts
and wholes in the Third Logical Investigation. The story continues,
later, with Lesniewski's mereology and Ingarden's ontology. The
heritage of *Content and Object* also includes the fact that
Twardowski's pupils had a relation to metaphysics which was vastly
different from the approach that was typical, for instance, of the
Vienna circle (see Lukasiewicz 1936). In Poland, metaphysics was
not rejected as nonsense, but accepted as a respectable area of
investigation to be explored using rigorous methods, including
axiomatics (see Smith 1988, 315-6; on Twardowski and
metaphysics, see Kleszcz 2016)



Like anyone in pre-set theoretical times, Twardowski has a very broad
notion of (proper) part, covering much more than just the pieces of an
object. Twardowski distinguishes material and formal parts of an
object. The material parts of an object comprise not only the pieces
of an object, but also anything that can be said to be a component of
it, such as the series 1, 3, 5 is composed of three numbers (namely,
1, 3, and 5). Among the material parts of an object are also its
qualities (*Beschaffenheiten*) such as extension, weight, color,
etc. (1894, SS10, 58). The formal parts of an object are the
relations (*Beziehungen*) obtaining between the object and its
material parts (primary formal parts) as well as the relations
obtaining among the material parts themselves (secondary formal parts)
(1894, SS9, 48 and ff.; SS10, 51 and ff.). 



In keeping with the tradition, Twardowski calls the *matter* of
an object the sum of its material parts and the *form* of an
object the sum of its formal parts. A special kind of primary formal
parts are (relations of) properties (*Eigenschaften*): these are
relations between an object as a whole and one of its material parts,
consisting in the whole's having the part at issue (1894, SS10,
56). Since Twardowski accepts that among the parts of an object there
are the relations in which that object is in, Twardowski's mereology
is, strictly speaking, an atomless mereology: there are no simples
(1894, SS12, 74). However, we can speak of atoms if we restrict
ourselves to material parts only (for instance, in the case of the
number one, we can say it is a simple object only if we consider the
(proper) material parts it has, namely zero).



The distinction between content and object enables Twardowski to
clearly distinguish conceptualizations regarding parts of the object
from conceptualizations regarding the parts of the content (as special
cases of objects). This, in turn, enables Twardowski to offer
sophisticated considerations, leading him among others to fix clearly
the notion of the characteristic mark (*Merkmal*, *nota*) of
an object. Twardowski calls *elements* the parts of the content
of a presentation; he calls *characteristic marks* the parts of
the object of a presentation (SS8, 46-7); the characteristic
marks of the object are presented through the elements of the content.
The content of a presentation is the collection of the presentations
of the characteristic marks of the object of the presentation. The
notion of characteristic mark is a relative one because only the parts
of an object that happen to be actually presented in the content of a
presentation in someone's mind qualify as its characteristics.



> 
> 
> For example, one can be presented with a table without thinking of the
> shape of its legs; in this case, the shape of the table legs is a
> (material, metaphysical) constituent (of second order), but not a
> characteristic of the table. But if one thinks, while being presented
> with the table, of the shape of its legs, then the shape had to be
> considered a characteristic of the table. (SS13, 86; Eng. transl.
> 81).
> 
> 
> 



According to Twardowski, it is not possible to present all the parts
of an object in a presentation. Given that the number of parts of an
object is boundless, and that we can only present a finite amount of
characteristics, the number of the elements of the content is
therefore lower than that of the parts of the object (SS12,
78-9; on this point Twardowski is again indebted to Bolzano
(*Wissenschaftslehre*, SS64). It follows that no adequate
presentation is possible of any object (SS13, 83).



Like Brentano had done, Twardowski distinguishes, with respect to
material parts, metaphysical from physical and logical parts on the
basis of a notion of dependence and
 separability.[8]
 However, differently from Brentano, Twardowski does not construe the
notion of dependence in terms of existence of the objects involved.
His notion of dependence needs also to be applicable to non-existing
objects. Consequently, Twardowski construes the notion of dependence
of the parts of an object in terms of modes of *presentability*
of the parts of an object, i.e. as existence of the parts of the
content of a presentation (which always exists). The inseparability of
a part *p*1 from a part *p*2 of an
object *O* is not construed in the sense that it is not possible
for *p*1 to exist without *p*2
existing, but in the sense that in the content of the presentation of
an object *O* the part that represents *p*1
cannot exist without the part that represents *p*2
existing, that is, both must be elements of the content of the
presentation of the object *O*.



Two material parts of the content of a presentation of *A* and
of *B* are mutually separable iff *A* can be presented
without presenting *B* and vice versa. Mutually separable parts
are physical parts. For instance, the parts of the content of the
presentations of the pages and the cover of a book are mutually
separable. 



Two material parts of the content of a presentation of *A* and
of *B* are one-sidedly separable iff *A* can be
presented without *B*, but not vice versa. Logical parts are
one-sidedly separable: for instance, we can have a presentation of
color without the presentation of red, but not vice versa. 



Two material parts of the content of a presentation of *A* and
of *B* are mutually inseparable (but yet distinguishable) iff
they are neither mutually nor one-sidedly separable. Metaphysical
parts are mutually inseparable, e.g. you cannot present separately the
being colored and the being extended of something colored and
extended, although those parts are *in abstracto* distinguishable
in the object.



On Twardowski's mereology see Cavallin (1990), Rosiak (1998) and
Schaar (2015, 68 and ff.)


### 2.5 The Position of *Content and Object* in Twardowski's *Oeuvre*



*Content and Object* should be seen as part of a bigger research
aim that Twardowski had set for himself. This included developing a
theory of concepts and a theory of judgment.



In *Content and Object*, Twardowski had given a coherent account
of how judgments such as 'The aether does not exist' work
on the basis of the systematization of the notion of 'object of
a presentation.' That systematization however had implications
for the theory of judgment which went far beyond the account of
judgments such as 'The aether does not exist.' Although
*Content and Object* contains little on the theory of judgment,
Twardowski was well aware of those implications. A letter to Meinong
is evidence that Twardowski was developing a theory of judgment which
continued the work initiated by *Content and Object*, whose first
main outline can be found in Twardowski's manuscripts *Logik
1894/5* and *Logika 1895/6* (Betti & van der Schaar 2004,
Betti 2005).



In his 'Self-Portrait' Twardowski also remarks that it was
the question of the nature of concepts that brought him to *Content
and Object*. The issue ensued from Twardowski's research on a
particular concept in his doctoral dissertation, Descartes' concept of
clear and distinct perception. Since concepts are a species of
presentations, Twardowski saw that he had first to investigate
presentations in general, and thus to dispel the ambiguities that the
notion of 'the presented' carried with itself (Twardowski
1926, 10). Work on concepts is to be found in the manuscript *Logik
1894/5*, where concepts are defined as presentations with
well-defined content, in *Images and Concepts* (1898) and in
*The Essence of Concepts* (1924), where presentations with
well-defined content (i.e. fixed by a definition) are called
'logical concepts.' An important role in Twardowski's
theory of concepts and definitions is played by the notion of
presented judgment, i.e. judgments not really passed, but merely
presented (in the modified sense). Twardowski's investigation of the
notion of (logical) concept is important to understand his attitude
towards objectivity and unicity of meaning, i.e. his relationship to
psychologism on the one hand, and the role of the theorizations in
*Content and Object* of two notions: that of the object of a
general presentation (which disappears for instance in *Logik
1894/5*) and that of indirect presentations on the other hand.


## 3. The Lvov Years: 1895-1938



Among the issues that Twardowski only sketched or left open in his
Vienna years and investigated later are, next to theories of truth and
knowledge (*Theory of Knowledge*, 1925; see Schaar 2015, Chapter
5.3), the relationship between time and truth ('On the So-called
Relative Truths,' 1900) and that between linguistic meaning and
the content of mental acts ('Actions and Products,' 1912).
Particularly important themes to mention are the relationship between
*a priori* or deductive sciences, *a posteriori* or
inductive sciences and the notion of grounding ('A Priori and A
Posteriori Sciences,' 1923), and the relation between
philosophy, psychology and physiology ('Psychology vs.
Physiology and Philosophy', 1897b). Well worth mentioning are
Twardowski's writings on issues of philosophical methodology
('On Clear and Obscure Philosophical Style,' 1919/20;
'Symbolomania and Pragmatophobia,' 1921). He also left a
relatively substantial corpus of writings in ethics ('On Ethical
Skepticism', 1905-24).



Twardowski's publications during his Lvov years are in Polish, but of
those writings that Twardowski considered as important academic
publications we normally also have German versions. Especially
important and influential among these are 'On the So-Called
Relative Truths' (1900) and 'Actions and Products'
(1912). 


### 3.1 On the so-called relative truths (1900)



'On the So-Called Relative Truths' (henceforth:
*Relative Truths*) is a work of fundamental importance for the
development of the idea of absolute truth in Poland. Scholars have
deemed its impact to have reached as far as Tarski's work on truth
(Wolenski & Simons 1989). It certainly influenced the
1910-1913 discussion on future contingents which involved
Kotarbinski, Lesniewski, and Lukasiewicz, which served
later as metaphysical foundation for Lukasiewicz's three-valued
logic (Wolenski 1990). Twardowski's position is distinctive and
interesting because it is a non-platonistic theory of absolute truth,
though it is difficult to say exactly what place it occupies with
respect to Lesniewski's nominalistic or to Tarski's platonistic
approach (for these labels see Simons 2003: section 2.) One of the
reasons why it was important for Twardowski to defend an
anti-relativistic notion of truth was that relativism jeopardizes the
possibility of constructing ethics as a science based on principles
(on Twardowski's ethics, see Paczkowska-Lagowska 1977). 
This aspect is important because Twardowski is usually characterized
not as a builder of systems, but as championing 'small
philosophy.' This is correct, in some sense, but it should not
make one mistakenly think that there is no unity sought in
Twardowski's thought, or that his works are separate small occasional
contributions without overarching ideas in the background governing
their development.



In *Relative Truths*, Twardowski opposes Brentano's ideas on the
relationship between time and truth, and sides instead with Bolzano's
 views.[9]
 By 'truth,' Twardowski means a true judgment and by
'absolute truth' he means a judgment true independently of
any circumstance, time, and place.



The main claim of *Relative Truths* is that every truth (falsity)
is absolute, i.e. no judgment changes its truth-value relatively to
circumstance, time, or place. Although Twardowski's treatment is
general, and is not confined to the relation between truth and time,
it is his ideas on the latter that were particularly important for
later discussions. We can characterize Twardowski's view in this
respect as the view that a judgment is true *for* ever and
*since* ever, that is: 



> 
> **Omnitemporal truth**:
>   
> 
> For any judgment *g*, if *g* is true at a time
> *t*, then it is true also at an arbitrary time
> *t*' past or future with respect to *t* (the same
> applies, *mutatis mutandis*, to falsity).
> 



Twardowski's aim is to defend this claim against those who argue that
truth is relative on the basis of examples of elliptical sentences
(such as 'I don't'), sentences with indexicals ('my
father is called Vincent'), sentences of general form
('radioactivity is good for you'), and sentences about
ethical principles ('it is wrong to speak against one's own
convictions'). Those who argue that truth is relative on this
basis, says Twardowski, make a mistake. They confuse judgments, which
are the real truth-bearers, with the (type) sentences expressing them.
But sentences are merely the external expression of judgments, and
often they do not express everything one has in mind when judging. For
human speech has a purely practical task; it can perfectly serve its
communicative purposes and yet be strictly speaking ambiguous or
elliptic.



Twardowski's main point is that we can disambiguate ambiguous
sentences or integrate elliptic ones in such a way that they become
the appropriate means of expression of the judgment that they actually
and strictly speaking express (Twardowski 1900, 156)--we can make
sentences eternal, as we would say in our Post-Quinean age. Once we
show that eternalization is possible, the confusion on which
relativists rely is dispelled. For instance, if standing in Lvov on
the High Castle Hill, I assert that it is raining, 



> 
> I do not have in mind just any rain, falling at any place and time,
> but I voice a judgment about the rain falling *here and now*
> (Twardowski 1900, 151).
> 



One could object that the true sentence 'it is raining here and
now' is relative because it may become false, i.e. be true when
uttered in Amsterdam and become false when uttered in the Dry Valley
in Antarctica. Twardowski observes that this impression is, again,
only due to the ambiguity of the indexicals 'here and now'
in the sentence. Take thus the sentence



> 
> (i) It is raining here and now,
> 



when uttered in Lvov, on 1 March 1900, in accordance with the
Gregorian calendar, at noon, Central European Time, on the High Castle
Hill. That sentence expresses the same judgment as



> 
> (i\*) On 1 March 1900, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, at
> noon, Central European Time, it is raining in Lvov, on the High Castle
> Hill and in its vicinity.
> 



According to Twardowski, the difference between the two sentences is
only in their brevity and their practical use. Take now the
sentence



> 
> (ii) It is raining here and now,
> 



when uttered in Krakow on 2 March 1900, in accordance with the
Gregorian calendar, at noon, Central European Time, on the Castle
Hill. That sentence expresses the same judgment as



> 
> (ii\*) On 2 March 1900, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, at
> noon, Central European Time, it is raining in Krakow, on the Castle
> Hill and in its vicinity.
> 



It's not that we have in (i) and (ii) one and the same judgment; we
have *the same sentence*, which expresses two *different
judgments*, (i\*) and (ii\*). Therefore, one cannot argue that the
*same judgment* can turn from true to false.



> 
> 
> It is apparent that [the judgment expressed by (i) and (i\*)], which
> [...] asserts that it is raining, is true not only at a particular
> time and place, but is always true. (Twardowski 1900, 153)
> 
> 
> 
> [...] Only sentences can be said to be relatively true; yet the truth
> of a sentence depends on the truth of the judgment expressed by that
> sentence; usually a given sentence can express various judgments, some
> true, some false, and it is thus relatively true because it expresses
> a true judgment only under certain conditions, i.e. if we consider it
> as an expression of a judgment which is true (Twardowski 1900, 169).
> 
> 
> 
> 



Notice that Twardowski is not saying that judgments can be integrated
or *completed*: the judgments we formulate in our head, and which
are true or false, are *complete* and fully unambiguous. It is
for this reason that he can think that the procedure of completing
sentences as expressions of judgments can be carried out. 



An important thing to notice in *Relative Truths* is that
Twardowski, differently from what Meinong and Lukasiewicz were to
do, did not question the principle of contradiction or the principle
of the excluded middle. 



Twardowski's idea that one can have absolute truth in an all-changing
world has been recently taken up by Simons (2003). 


### 3.2 Actions and Products (1912)



For quite some time Twardowski thought that logic was dependent on
psychology
 [10],
 and continued to hold the psychologistic idea of meaning as mental
content from *Content and Object*. In his
'Self-Portrait,' Twardowski says that he changed his mind
in an anti-psychologistic sense because of Husserl's *Logical
Investigations*
 (1900/01).[11]
 'Actions and Products' (1912) is the first printed work
where Twardowski favors an 'Aristotelian' view of ideal
meaning, i.e. of meaning *in specie*, which he associates with
that of Husserl's in the *Logical Investigations*. 



In marking the line of demarcation between logic and psychology on the
basis of the distinction act/product which underlies his theory of
meaning, Twardowski writes:



> 
> Indeed, a rigorous demarcation of products from actions has already
> contributed enormously to liberating logic from psychological
> accretions. (Twardowski 1912, SS45, 132)
> 



Twardowski's mature theory of meaning is connected with the rigorous
definition of the distinction between *actions* and
*products* of actions (while in *Relative Truths* he speaks
of judgments as actions or products). On the basis of grammatical
analyses, purporting however to show logically salient differences,
Twardowski establishes a basic distinction between *physical*,
psychical (i.e. *mental*), and *psychophysical* actions and
their products. The analysis is reminiscent in philosophical style of
that of 'the presented' in *Content and Object*,
though more general, and a nice example of the method which has become
now strongly associated with analytic philosophy.



The relationship between an action and what results from it, its
product, is exemplified linguistically in the relationship between a
verb and the corresponding noun as internal complement (Twardowski
1912, SS1, 10; SS8, 107): 



> 
> 
> 
> |  |  |  |
> | --- | --- | --- |
> |  | Act | Product |
> | Physical | running | run |
> | Mental | judging | judgment |
> | Psychophysical | speaking | speech |
> 
> 
> 



A psychophysical product (e.g., a speech) differs from a mental
product (e.g., a judgment) because it is perceptible to senses; it
differs from a physical product (e.g., a run) because in the
psychophysical action which produces it (speaking) a mental action is
also involved, which has bearing on the physical action, and thus on
its product (SS10). In some cases, a psychophysical product
expresses a mental product; for instance, a sentence is a
psychophysical product which expresses a mental product, a
judgment.



Twardowski points out that the meaning of the noun
'judgment,' like other nouns ('mistake'), is
ambiguous between action and product. A judgment in the sense of the
action (a judging) is a *judgment in the psychological sense*,
while a judgment in the sense of the product is a *judgment in the
logical sense* (SS14) (a third meaning of
'judgment' is that of 'disposition, aptitude to make
correct judgments,' SS15).



Twardowski points out that he uses 'judgment' in the sense
of 'judgment in the logical sense,' i.e. the product of
the action of judging, and he clarifies that what he means now by
'judgment-product' is the content of judgment in
*Content and Object* (SS24, n. 37, 117). Exactly as it was
the case there, the judgment exists as long as someone performs the
corresponding action of judging; for this reason, it is called a
*non-enduring* product (SS23, 116).



Non-enduring products do not exist in actuality separately from the
corresponding actions, but only in conjunction with them; we can only
analyze them abstractly apart from these actions. On the other hand,
enduring products can and do exist in actuality apart from the actions
owing to which they arise (Twardowski 1912, n. 41, 116).



*Enduring* products last longer than the action which produces
them; they originate from a transformation or a rearrangement of
pre-existing physical material in the course of the action: footprints
in the sand are enduring products arising from the change of
configuration of grains of sand (the material) as a product of the
action of walking applied to that material (Twardowski points out that
the product is not the grains of sand arranged in some way, but the
arrangement itself, SS26). If actions are processes, non-enduring
products are *events* whereas enduring products present
themselves as *things* (SS 27). Among enduring products, we
find physical products (such as footprints in the sand) and
psychophysical products (such as paintings). A mental product, such as
a judgment, is never enduring (SS29), but it can have its
*expression* in an enduring psychophysical product, such as a
written sentence. 



The process of preserving non-enduring products such as judgments in
enduring products such as written sentences is a complex one
(SS37), and goes in two steps. 



In step one a spoken sentence is produced which expresses a judgment,
in such a way that the judgment is the meaning of the sentence and the
sentence is the sign of the judgment. The process goes as follows. A
non-enduring mental product, a judgment (together with the action of
judging), which is non-perceptible, gives rise--by being its
(partial) cause--to a non-enduring psychophysical product, a
spoken sentence, which is perceptible. In this case, the spoken
sentence is the expression of the judgment (SS30). Now, *if*
the spoken sentence becomes itself a partial cause of *another*
judgment, which (we would say) is a token of the same type of the
initial judgment (by partially causing an action of judging which
produces that other judgment in another person or at a different time
in the same person), *then* the spoken sentence can also count as
the *sign* of the judgment, and the judgment as the
*meaning* of the expression (SS32, SS34). The condition
just sketched in the antecedent is fundamental: without it, a sentence
*p* might very well have been an expression of a judgment
*j* once (*j* was a partial cause of *p*), but no
meaning is linked with *p*: for, if *p* is incomprehensible,
namely it is not a partial cause of another judgment *j*',
then nothing can be said to be its meaning (SS31).



Step two is to *preserve* the spoken sentence (a non-enduring
psychophysical product) in an enduring psychophysical product
*s*, a written
 sentence.[12]
 When a judgment is preserved in this way, it has in the sign an
existence called *potential*. This is because the sign may at any
moment cause the formation of an identical or similar judgment
(Twardowski 1912, SS34), and it will be able to (partially) cause
judgments as long as it lasts. In consequence of this,
'meaning' can therefore also mean 



> 
> the capacity to evoke a mental product in the individual on whom a
> psychophysical product acts as a sign of that mental product, or, more
> briefly, the capacity to bring the corresponding mental product to
> awareness. (Twardowski 1912, n. 51, 125.)
> 



Once they are preserved in this two-step way, non-enduring products
assume not only the illusory appearance of enduring products, but also
of products which are somehow *independent* from the actions
which produce them. The appearance of independence is made stronger by
the fact that we do as if one and the same judgment-product existed in
all individuals, although *many* judgment-products are elicited
by the written sentence-product. All these many judgments are
different from each other, but, insofar as we consider a judgment to
be *the* meaning of a sentence which is its sign



> 
> there must be a group of common attributes in these individual mental
> products. And it is precisely these common attributes (in which these
> individual products accord) that we ordinarily regard as the meaning
> of the psychophysical product, as the content inherent in it, provided
> of course that these common attributes correspond to the intent with
> which that psychophysical product was utilized as a sign. [...] Thus,
> we speak of only a single meaning of a sign--barring cases of
> ambiguity--and not of as many meanings as there are mental
> products that are aroused or capable of being aroused, by that sign in
> the persons on whom it acts. Now, a meaning conceived in this matter
> is no longer a concrete mental product, but something at which we
> arrive by way of an abstraction performed on concrete products.
> (Twardowski 1912, SS39, 128)
> 



To this passage, Twardowski appends a note referring to Husserl's
notion of ideal meaning. The relationship between Husserl's and
Twardowski's notion of meaning as well as the status of Twardowski's
unique meaning has been and remains object of discussion (see
Paczkowska-Lagowska 1979, Buczynska-Garewicz 1980, Placek
1996, Brandl 1998, Schaar 2015, 108). These matters should be
considered as yet unsettled.

 

The introduction of the notion of the unique meaning of a sentence
leads Twardowski to make a further distinction between substitutive
(artefacta) and non-substitutive judgments. Substitutive judgments
aren't real judgments, but fictitious ones. The latter are in fact the
presented judgments of *Content and Object*; the difference is
that in *Actions and Products*, Twardowski applies the concept of
substitutive judgments explicitly to logic: the sentences uttered or
written by logicians-at-work are not sentences which express or have
as meanings judgments which are really passed by them, but only
presented judgments, produced thus by actions of
presenting--which are different actions from actual judging acts.
This happens for instance when a logician constructs a valid syllogism
made up of materially false sentences to give examples of formally
valid inferences (SS44, 130). In this case, the logician does not
actually judge that all triangles are square, that all squares are
round, and that all triangles are round, but she merely
*presents* the corresponding judgments. The sentences 'all
triangles are square,' 'all squares are round,' and
'all triangles are round' are not real sentences, but
artificial ones, because they are "expressions of artificial
products that substitute for actual judgments, namely merely
represented judgments" (Ibid.). The meanings of these artificial
sentences are artificial judgments, because they are merely presented,
not passed. These artificial judgments are the subject-matter of logic
(on this point, Twardowski is again indebted to Bolzano). Operating
with surrogate sentences such as 'all triangles are
square' constitutes the most extreme example of "making
mental products independent of the actions owing to which alone they
can truly (actually) exist" (SS44, 131). 



Twardowski's distinction between acts and products is presently being
re-discovered in act-based theories of semantic content, within which
Twardowski's notion of product is considered an interesting
alternative to the notion of proposition (as the mind-independent and
language-independent content of assertions, meaning of sentences,
primary truthbearer, and object of propositional attitudes). See
Moltmann 2014.