Kazimierz Twardowski

Academic career Twardowski's family belonged to the Ogończyk coat of arms.

Twardowski studied philosophy at the University of Vienna with Franz Brentano and Robert von Zimmermann. In 1891 he received his doctorate with his dissertation, Idee und Perzeption (Idea and Perception).

In 1894 Twardowski published a book, entitled Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, Eine psychologische Untersuchung (On the Doctrine of the Content and Object of Presentations). The book was written between 1891 and 1893, although excerpts of the book were republished under the title On the Content and Object of Representations, which is an early text on semiotics.

Twardowski originated many novel ideas related to metaphilosophy. Among his students were the logicians Stanisław Leśniewski, Jan Łukasiewicz and Tadeusz Czeżowski, the psychologist Władysław Witwicki, the historian of philosophy Władysław Tatarkiewicz, the phenomenologist and aesthetician Roman Ingarden, as well as philosophers close to the Vienna Circle such as Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz.

Twardowski also established the Polish Philosophical Society in 1904, the first laboratory of experimental psychology in Poland in 1907, and the journal Ruch Filozoficzny in 1911.

Twardowski offers a solution for this problem and proposes to make a distinction between the content of a presentation and the object of a presentation.

In his book Twardowski offers an analogy to clarify this distinction. He uses the example of a painting. People say of a landscape that it is painted, but also of a painting that it is painted. In the first case the word ‘painting’ is used in a modifying way (a painted landscape is not a landscape at all), while in the latter case the word painting is used in a qualitative or attributive way. Twardowski argues that presentations are similar. The content is the painted painting and the object is the painted landscape. The content resembles the present ‘picture’ in one's mind, and the object the landscape.