Contemporary Polish Ontology

Bartłomiej Skowron

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783110669329
• eBook ISBN: 9783110669510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

This book is a collection of articles authored by renowed Polish ontologists living and working in the early part of the 21st century. Harking back to the well-known Polish Lvov-Warsaw School, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski, we try to make our ontological considerations as systematically rigorous and clear as possible – i.e. to the greatest extent feasible, but also no more than the subject under consideration itself allows for. Hence, the papers presented here do not seek to steer clear of methods of inquiry typical of either the formal or the natural sciences: on the contrary, they use such methods wherever possible. At the same time, despite their adherence to rigorous methods, the Polish ontologists included here do not avoid traditional ontological issues, being inspired as they most certainly are by the great masters of Western philosophy – from Plato and Aristotle, through St. Thomas and Leibniz, to Husserl, to name arguably just the most important.

Marek Magdziak

The Ontologic of Actions

Marek Magdziak, Faculty of Social Sciences, Wrocław University, Poland.

Abstract: The term ontologic was suggested by the Polish logician Jerzy Perzanowski, as a name for the theoretical or formal parts of ontology. The expression ontologic of actions refers to the formal logical study of ontological concepts that pertain to the domain of actions. Action is the intentional causing of change in the world. Such changes occur when certain states of affairs appear or disappear. The ontologic of actions should therefore be based on the ontologic of states of affairs. This paper provides a tentative formal logical study of ontological concepts pertaining to action, as these relate to the concept of a state of affairs and of the production or destruction of states of affairs through acting. It provides an axiomatic characterization of these concepts within the framework of a multi-modal propositional logic, and then presents a semantic analysis of them. The resulting deductive system also takes into account the concepts of the performance and the omission of an action. It thus aims to furnish a basic logical framework for addressing foundational ethical issues. The semantics amounts to a slight modification of the standard relational semantics for normal modal propositional logic.

Keywords: ontologic, action, state of affairs, performance, omission.

Introduction

From an ethical point of view, actions can be treated as the contents of evaluative concepts, the point being that we all sometimes describe certain actions as good or bad or right or wrong. However, states of affairs can also be regarded as good or bad. So not just actions, but also states of affairs, can make up the contents of evaluative concepts. This leads us to ask: how are evaluations of states of affairs related to evaluations of actions? This question concerns the relation between the rightness (or wrongness) of an action and the goodness or badness of the state of affairs produced or destroyed by that action. Moreover, an action can be evaluated in two different ways: on the one hand, it can be regarded as a good or bad action per se, but on the other, any particular performance or omission of that action can also as such be regarded as good or bad. The problem connects up with such matters as the relation between prima facie duties or obligations and the actual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Some Introductory Thoughts on Contemporary Polish Ontology
• On Essential Structures and Symmetries
• Prospects for an Animalistically Oriented Simple View
• How Long Does the Present Last? The Problem of Fissuration in Roman Ingarden’s Ontology
• The Subject’s Forms of Knowledge and the Question of Being
• The World as an Object of Formal Philosophy
• Logic and the Ontology of Language
• Benedict Bornstein’s Ontological Elements of Reality
• On the Topological Modelling of Ontological Objects: Substance in the Monadology
• Does Mathematical Possibility Imply Existence?
• Neologicism for Real(s) – Are We There Yet?
• Possible Worlds and Situations: How Can They Meet Up?
• The Ontologic of Actions
• “Physical Intentionality” and the Thomistic Theory of Formal Objects
• An Assessment of Contemporary Polish Ontology
• Author Index