Dispute Over Logistic Between Jan Łukasiewicz and Augustyn Jakubisiak. Why Was it Important?

Abstract Augustyn Jakubisiak (1884-1945), Polish priest, philosopher and theologian, undertook polemics with Jan Łukasiewicz, whom he knew personally. A dispute concerning the so-called logistics (mathematical logic) and its relationship with philosophy developed between the two. The most important arguments were laid out, primarily in the following works: in the case of Jakubisiak, in the book From Scope to Content and in the case of Łukasiewicz, in the texts Logistics and Philosophy and In the Defense of Logistics. Jakubisiak criticized logistics for its anti-metaphysical, anti-theological and anti-religious attitude, which was based on neo-positivist philosophy, and led, in consequence to atheism. He also claimed that one should focus on what is concrete, avoiding idealization and abstraction (meaning the content of concepts, not their scope). Łukasiewicz defended logistics claiming that it possesses its own methods based on intellect, and is also an area of independent knowledge (but not completely detached) from philosophy, due to the fact it can consider the most important philosophical problems such as finiteness and infinity. This dispute, as the researchers identified, basically concerned the reduction of philosophy to the study of language (analytic philosophy) and initiated one of the most important discussions concerning the relationship between philosophy and logic. This debate was crucial because it also concerned questions related to fundamental metaphysical issues (naturalism – supranaturalism, rationalism – irrationalism) and epistemological issues (realism – idealism, boundaries and structure of cognition).


Introduction
The importance of the Lviv-Warsaw School (LWS) for Polish philosophy and philosophy in general is undeniable and universally recognized [36]. The best-known achievements of the LWS are related to research and development of logic, 1 to mention only Józef M. Bocheński, Alfred Tarski and Jan Łukasiewicz. However, the polemics of the members and representatives of the LWS are less widely known, especially the disputes conducted in the circle of (international) Polish philosophical thought during the interwar period [37]. One of the most important discussions on the relationship and mutual relationship between philosophy and logic took place in 1936-1937, between Jan Łukasiewicz and Augustyn Jakubiskiak. 2 Their polemics also provoked reactions from other thinkers (e.g. Adam Żółtowski, Zygmunt Zawirski). Moreover, the question of the role of logic in philosophy was raised at the III Polish Philosophical Congress in Kraków in 1936 [22]. This dispute, however, being relatively unknown 3 , results firstly from: firstly, the hermetic character of the environment in which it was conducted and later commented on [37, pp. 134nn], [35, pp. 24-49] and secondly, from the fact that Jakubisiak was forgotten and omitted in current philosophical, historical and theological research. This situation is cleverly described by Bohdan Chudoba: Jakubisiak, the author of three learned and penetrating books on the subject of creative freedom, was one of the most lucid and also most truly Christian thinkers of our century. His struggle against the pseudo-myths was only equaled by his defense of the Christian tradition against the spread of the Aristotelian, Thomistic and Cartesian obscurantism. In his faithfulness to the Christian message he evidently incurred the wrath of the servants of the false myths as well as of those Christians who are ready to bend over backward in catering to these servants. As result, his very name has been omitted form even most comprehensive encyclopedias as well as from textbooks of the history of philosophy [8, p. 113].
While one can agree with the final statement, the dispute between Jakubisiak and Łukasiewicz is a good example of the fact that it is impossible to be both simultaneously a specialist anda visionary in every field of philosophical and scientific research. Nevertheless, as Jan Woleński indicates [37, p. 134], polemics en question initiated one of the most important discussions on the relationship between philosophy and logic. Łukasiewicz himself wrote the following in one of his letters to Bocheński: I would not like much to be written about my pre-logistic philosophical works; both the dissertation about causation and my book about the principle of contradiction in Aristotle I consider old and unsuccessful. I attach some importance to the work On science and probability, and to the polemics with Fr. Jakubisiak and the article In the defense of logistics, and besides, another two philosophical articles [21] 4 .
In short: if today's analytical philosophers and logicians can be grateful to Jakubisiak for anything, then certainly it must be for his contribution to the development and precision of the thoughts of Jan Łukasiewicz [24, p. 117], [35, p. 24]. 5

Virus Logisticus?
The basic accusation formulated by opponents of the LWS, including -probably most significantly -Jakubisiak himself, consisted firstly of absolutizing logic and its tools (contrary to the intentions of the representatives of the LWS themselves), and then of categorically rejecting it as another attempted attack on the truth and metaphysics. Virus logisticus is a term used by Jakubisiak and other Catholic thinkers who opposed 6 this accusation -and, as it emerged, did not fully understand the ideas and methods cultivated within the LWS [33]. This term has become so prominent that it has entered both the general circulation, as well as current literature [e.g. 39, p. 162].
Jacek Jadacki in the article Semiotics of the LWS: Main Concepts [12] gives two statements, the authors of which are Jakubisiak and Bolesław Gawecki. The first wrote: "The virus logisticus brought from abroad was bred perfectly on the broth of the LWS school of philosophy, and from there it spread through the universities of Poland" [12, p. 131]. The second one: "Their favorite weapon is what is commonly called 'grabbing for words.' Their exactness is their deity, a scientific cry of a battle; they crush, annihilate their opponents, moreover, the few and speaking shyly" [12, p. 131]. Jakubisiak, as we already know, belonged to a group of these opponents. He was one of the most important participants in discussions, because his polemics -however we know today, that it was not justified [28], [38, pp. 150-153], and in a slightly broader context [40, pp. 150-153], [10, p. 231] -allowed Łukasiewicz to clarify his views and give, not only to him, a proper understanding of contemporary logic and its relation to philosophy and science [3, p. 337], [32, p. 341].
Jakubisiak's merit was mainly that he began a discussion on logistics (as mathematical logic was called at that time) relations with philosophy, which allowed Łukasiewicz not only to overcome erroneous ideas about the proposals and postulates of the LWS, but also change his own style of speech to a much less emotional tone. This fact is emphasized by Wolak [35, pp. 42-43] and Woleński [37, p. 164]. The sources of Jakubisiak's accusations can be found in the opinions of Twardowski himself about the loss of contact with reality by the school and "vain formalism" [27, pp. 148-150], as well as in the Christian-theological background of Jakubisiak's thoughts and his own philosophical conception, which for the sake of simplicity let us call autodeterminism. 7 For Jakubisiak, the discontinuity existing in the world (including the cases of human choices and actions) is recognized by the intellect in an intuitive way. It is a manifestation of the existence of closed and autonomous entities, which, moreover, can be self-determinant, thus escaping determinism (overthrown by modern science, especially quantum mechanics) and indeterminism (which denies the stability and rationality of free will). By what beings (or people), thanks to their salvation (free will, intellect, self-awareness), are able to form the first principles of reality, which are the first three scholastic principles of reason (non-contradiction, identity, tertium non datur). 8 As for Łukasiewicz, let us give a short overview of his views in the context of his dispute with Jakubisiak, through the synthetic elaboration of Stanisław Borzym [5, pp. 517-518]. Thus, for Łukasiewicz, any philosophy without a scientific method that operates with ambiguous terms can have at most aesthetic or ethical value. Neglect of logic was the main factor in this state of affairs. The "new" logic gives a new criterion of accuracy and allows to formulate an outgoing programaccording to the words of Lukasiewicz -above the emptiness of the current philosophical speculations. This program can be summarized as follows: one should deal with comprehensible issues, i.e. those that can be formulated based on contemporary knowledge and scientific methods. The method itself is based on mathematical logic, i.e. be deductive and axiomatic. The axioms should be intuitively clear and simple sentences, and the original concepts should contain such expressions whose meaning can be easily grasped and given their understandable examples. The results of such research should be controlled by combining them with experience data and the results of sciences, especially natural sciences. 9

Dispute
The polemics itself was played out in three basic stages: 1936 -Jakubisiak's introduction to the book From the scope to the content which is a collection of his lectures and speeches [17]; 1936 -Lukasiewicz's answer in the pages of the "Philosophical Review" (article Logistics and Philosophy) [24]; 1937 -Jakubisiak's answer in the pages of the "Philosophical Review" (article On the book "From the scope to the content") [15]. An article by Łukasiewicz entitled In defense of logistics [23] can be regarded as a kind of epilogue, it was originally published in the book Catholic Thought Towards Contemporary Logic in 1937 being the fruit of the Third Polish Philosophical Congress in Krakow (September 1936) [22]. At this point, Łukasiewicz does not quote Jakubisiak anywhere, but he refers to his article from the "Philosophical Review" and clarifies some of his thoughts. 10 Before proceeding to delineate and describe the arguments of Jakubisiak and Łukasiewicz, it is necessary to emphasize once again the somewhat confessional and prejudiced nature of the attacks on the LWS, resulting largely from the misunderstanding of modern logical ideas, which in turn is rooted in the classic approach not only to logic, but primary to the basic problems of philosophy. 11 This is why Jakubisiak (and his supporters) could accuse Łukasiewicz and his disciples of the anti-theological, anti-religious and anti-metaphysical attitude (however, it is wellknown, for example, that the LWS had different views, and Łukasiewicz considered himself theist). According to Jakubisiak, logistics is just another name for neo-positivism, the direct consequence of which is atheism. Łukasiewicz showed that there is a difference between logistics and philosophy, and furthermore that there are priests who recognize logistics and apply it in theological provinces. Jakubisiak, on the other hand, answered that it is a natural affliction of Poles to sanctify everything, to seek sanctity where it does not exist, even in logistics [cf. 35, pp. 24-49]. 12 Symptomatic of this way of thinking is the discussion of Jakubisiak's book From the scope to the content [17], which in the "Homiletical Review" in 1936 was published by Fr. Aleksander Syski [33]. He wrote: The slogan of struggle against mysticism, or religion, raised by the head of logistic school Bertrand Russell, may have been the most painful, and the highest scientific criterion was taken especially by bred Polish logists of Lviv school of philosophy with Łukasiewicz, Kotarbiński and other "strong heads" at the head, and therefore if, where, in Poland, in the face of the command of university chairs by this foreign pseudoscientific logistic poison brought to us, it would be time for the reaction to be great. This reaction abroad, especially in France, is a great triumph -and its symptom is the book of Fr. Jakubisiak. He beats logisticians, and in general all pseudoscientists, or actually, philosophical determinists who refer to science, he beats them with science [33, pp. 376-377].
How was it really? 13 In the introduction to his book, Jakubisiak, at the very beginning, makes a program for his philosophy: "The individual is the end to which human cognition should go and de facto it do so. It is to make it to this end, because it has the source of everything that man knows about reality" [17, pp. 7-8]. In addition, according to the Polish philosopher, it is known from logic that the scope of the concept means the elements that make up its composition (e.g. the scope of the concept of "human" are all people), and its content are common features of elements falling under a given concept (e.g. common features of all people). The larger the scope, the more general the concept, the smaller the scope the more the concept is richer in content. The richest content has an individual -each time it belongs only to a given unit. For Jakubisiak, in the face of the crisis and the decline of determinism, the most important goal of science is to know the individual. This must be overcome by the thoughts of the ancient Greeks, as well as by Kant, who separated the being and thought and thus established the guiding principle of modern philosophical schools: being is unknowable. Jakubisiak calls this philosophical attitude criticism and also assigns it to logistics, which he calls logical empiricism and mathematical logic. He counts Russell, Whitehead, Kreis, Wittgenestein, Schlick and Carnap as one of these philosophical currents, besides of course the LWS. These thinkers "not only break radically with all metaphysics, but also speak inexorable to the philosophical struggle of the doctrines of the past" [17, p. 11]. Their main objection to the current philosophy is the lack of a method -says Jakubisiak citing the text of Łukasiewicz on the method in philosophy. According to Jakubisiak, although logistics also wants to break with Kant's criticism and the concept of the theory of cognition (according to Łukasiewicz, mathematics logic is a salutary solution to philosophy), yet its postulates coincide with the philosophy of thinker form Königsberg. According to Jakubisiak, these are: 1) the negation of metaphysics resulting from the negation of the relationship between the subject and the object of cognition, this time not in the creation of a priori categories, but in the closing of philosophy in the narrow frames of abstract formulas that impose on cognition a priori structure of assumptions that stop the spontaneity of the human mind (this what is not general is not scientific). This leads Jakubisiak to call logicians "new encyclopedists"; 2) a postulate of determinism, in essence opposed to indeterminism in quantum physics, which in turn manifests itself in the desire to "unify all sections of knowledge with the most general and all-binding binding law of causality" [17, p. 16]. They replace the necessary causal relationship of the former determinists with a functional relationship -and in this, according to Jakubisiak, they are wrong, because their efforts overthrow the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (functions cannot be one-determinant). In the next part of the introduction Jakubisiak discusses Tadeusz Kotarbiński, trying to show that the goal of modern logistics is the negation of faith and religion. "This is where the scientific philosophy ultimately leads. It begins with the negation of metaphysics and ends with the negation of God" [17, p. 23]. As Jakubisiak goes on: "The results of this philosophy do not bring anything fundamentally new to philosophical thought, they only restore old errors" [17, p. 23]. In the final analysis, Jakubisiak regrets that virus logisticus has been spreading in Poland and is calling for a reaction against it, and calling this virus "pseudophilosophy." Only at the very end, making a recapitulation of his argument, Jakubisiak writes: "Criticism has survived to this day in its most important postulates, namely: negation of metaphysics, denial of all transcendence and bringing a richer content of scientifically significant cognition to the a priori forms of the human mind" [17, p. 25]. According to him, criticism has reached its extreme form in logistics, the formalism of which is in turn "the extreme stage of the current of thought, going in the opposite direction to the progress of human knowledge, instead of going from scope to content, it goes backwards through the movement of cancer from content to scope" [17, p. 25].
It did not take long for Lukasiewicz to answer [24]. In fact, the Polish logician said that Jakubisiak's attacks might be silent, if only due to the lack of knowledge of the subject he so vehemently criticizes. Łukasiewicz's reply can be summarized as follows: 1) Logistics cares for contact with reality -here Lukasiewicz refers to the text about the method which Jakubisiak criticized, but which he did not read honestly: according to logic it is necessary to verify and control the results obtained in logistics through intuition, experience and natural sciences; 2) logistics does not defend the postulates of Kant's philosophy; 3) logistics is not logical empiricism; these two points result from the fact that it is not a philosophical or logical direction, but only science, such as psychology, and this is a science closer to mathematics than to philosophy; it can be considered "at most" as a branch of philosophy -as Wolak points out, although Łukasiewicz's view of logic and philosophy and their relations has changed, it can certainly be said that he did not want to replace philosophy with logic; 4) logic is non-philosophical and does not pretend to be a philosophy -in my opinion one of the most important arguments, because logistics has its own methods that may, but do not necessarily imply philosophical theorems. Łukasiewicz notes that Jakubisiak confuses concepts by identifying mathematical logic with philosophical logic, calling it a philosophical current (the second logician considers it the pre-scientific stage of the first); for Łukasiewicz, it is clear that the current task is to create a philosophy of logic that grows out of scientific logic; 5) Jakubisiak does not touch the main point of the problem, he does not speak a word about logistics, and his reflections on the relation of scope and content cannot be called strictly logical considerations; 6) logistics is not nominalism or the analysis of language (Carnap) -according to Wolak, such an argument could be followed by Jakubisiak's whole argument; it follows from this that the charge of neopositivism is therefore erroneously put forth by Jakubisiak; 7) logistics does not negate metaphysics -according to Łukasiewicz, Jakubisiak wrongly attributes the radical views of the Vienna Circle to the LWS, confusing, in addition, Kant with Hume; once again it is clear to the Polish logician that Jakubisiak has no idea what he is writing about; 8) Łukasiewicz does not want to limit philosophical issues, but wants to improve methods of practicing philosophy, like natural science (development of logic and mathematics clearly shows that their methods are effective and fruitful in researching philosophical problems, to mention only Salamucha's book about ontological evidence); here, too one sees Łukasiewicz's remark about the priests applying logistics in their research; 9) the LWS clearly and programically distinguishes philosophy from the outlook -it means that there are such matters that cannot be examined by methods of scientific philosophy (areas that are outside the boundaries of reason are a place of beliefs and religious feelings and can pervade, according to Łukasiewicz, activity of reason). Wolak observes that the polemic between Jakubisiak and Łukasiewicz should be regarded as a worldview rather than a philosophical clash [35, p. 24], [24, p. 117].
Jakubisiak's answer was rapidly forthcoming [15]. According to Wolak, it was not a discussioncontrary to what Jakubisiak himself wrote -but a declaration, because the Polish priest omitted some of the issues raised by Łukasiewicz, while in others he made further mistakes [35, p. 44]. Jakubisiak maintains his allegation of nominalism, not accepting that logistics as a formal science is philosophically neutral. Yes, it can give reflective methodological patterns, and even give premises for philosophical reasoning, but it is not a philosophy in the strictest sense. The formalization of issues, as practice demonstrates, can be very useful in considering philosophical problems. According to Wolak, Jakubisiak commits a serious mistake by calling logistics what is only his own interpretation of logistics and, furthermore, attributing it to the entire LWS [35, p. 45]. In the latter portion of his text, Jakubisiak again equates Łukasiewicz with Carnap, not recognizing that the neopositivists cannot be considered faithful followers of Kant's thoughts, and also that in the LWS there was epistemological pluralism. In the end, Jakubisiak strongly disagrees with Lukasiewicz's statement, who spoke and wrote that philosophical speculation should be removed. The Polish priest did not see, however, that Łukasiewicz spoke about speculations in the meaning of inaccurate and ambiguous reasoning, not about speculations conducted on the basis of the best methods of reasoning. According to Wolak [35, p. 47], Jakubisiak was in error here, but on the other hand, not knowing the details of the functioning of the different meanings of the concepts used by him, and not seeing the broader perspectives of the status of metaphysics, which the simpliciter was often refused. At the end of his answer, Jakubisiak states that modern philosophy speaks of what is on the basis of what should be, while equating Łukasiewicz and neo-positivist logicians who, however, have only seen sources of knowledge in experience. The final objection against Łukasiewicz is that he does not answer the question about the relation of logistics to philosophy at all, which results from ignorance not only of Łukasiewicz's other writings and significant omissions of fragments of his counterargument, but also the equating of multiple and diverse, and sometimes even alien views [35, pp. 48-49].
At the end of this paragraph is a brief mention, in a somewhat broader context, of the article by Łukasiewicz In defense of logistics [23], where he defends logistics against allegations of nominalism, positivism, pragmatism and relativism. He states that the publication of multi-valued logics in 1930 does not change the fact of the validity and ruthlessness of the principle of exclusive non-contradiction, as well as the validity of the rules of inference. It does not exclude the existence of other similar principles that may be discovered while continuing logistical and philosophical research. At the end, Łukasiewicz states that whenever he faces an issue, he has the impression of communing with a compact and resistant structure that acts on him as concrete and tangible objects: I can not change anything in this construction, I do not create anything myself, but in the hard work I DISCOVER in it only ever new details, gaining truths that are not touched and eternal. Where is and what is the ideal design? A believing philosopher would say that he is in God and is his thought [23, p. 26].

Closing Remarks
This laconic examination of the polemics between Łukasiewicz and Jakubisiak, especially in the context of today's knowledge and development of both philosophy and logic, allows us to obtain a broader understanding of the inaccuracies and shortcomings of Jakubisiak's arguments. 14 However, as Woleński notes, Jakubisiak's criticism and attacks occured in the 1930s, when the achievements of LWS were something new and not yet solidified, and many issues were not fully clarified or were only beginning to be understood [37, p. 164]. Jakubisiak's warnings about the logistic virus turned out to be unwarrented, as evidenced, among others, by the development of broadly understood analytical philosophy and logical tools in other models of practicing philosophy, but his attitude and attacks on the LWS significantly (implicite) contributed to the development of ideas cultivated within the sphere.
The example of this polemic demonstrates that in philosophy there is a need for theoretical clashes and discussions which, if they do not change views and positions, can significantly contribute to their clarification.