Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz's Lviv lectures on ethics

Abstract

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890-1963) is known primarily as an outstanding logician and as one of the main representatives of the Lviv-Warsaw school. His achievements in the field of ethics are practically unknown. In the light of the preserved archival materials, it turns out that ethical problems were also the object of his interests. An expression of this was his speech at the Warsaw Public University, which probably took place in 1927, in which he pointed out the reasons for his interest in philosophical issues. For the most important of them, he recognized the need to find a life compass pointing to the right ways to achieve certain goals. The turning point for Ajdukiewicz became the academic year 1931-1932, in which he took over lectures on ethics after Kazimierz Twardowski retired. He conducted his lectures in an innovative way, implementing the program of analytical ethics. The starting point for these considerations was the attempt to analyze the concept of “good” in the ordinary and logical language. He came to the conclusion that this concept is applied on the basis of linguistic custom/usage and in fact does not have any referent. As a result, he had to assume that it was unanalyzable. The essence of Ajdukiewicz's ethical reflections was his lecture “On Justice” presented in 1939 at the celebration devoted to the first anniversary of the death of Kazimierz Twardowski. He then formulated a formula of justice also embedded in the linguistic custom, which he called the “principle of an equal measure”. Ajdukiewicz was thus the first analytical ethicist in Poland, and his achievements in this area deserve to be widely disseminated.