Twardowski On Truth

Abstract

Of those students of Franz Brentano who went on to become professional philo­sophers, Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938) is much less well-known than his older contemporaries Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong. Yet in terms of the importance of his contribution to the history of philosophy, he ranks among Brentano’s students behind at most those two, possibly only behind Husserl. The chief contribution of Twardowski to global philosophy came indirectly, through the influence of his theory of truth on his students, and they on their students, and so on. The most important of these grandstudents is one whom Twardowski presumably knew but never taught, and whose adopted name is obtained by deleting four letters from his own: Tarski.