Formal and Informal Methods in Philosophy

This book examines the tension between formal and informal methods in philosophy. The rise of analytic philosophy was accompanied by the development of formal logic and many successful applications of formal methods. But analytical philosophy does not rely on formal methods alone. Elements of broadly understood informal logic and logical semiotics, procedures used in natural sciences and humanities, and various kinds of intuition also belong to the philosopher’s toolkit. Papers gathered in the book concern the opposition formality-informality as well as other pairs, such as methodology versus metaphilosophy, interdisciplinarity versus intradisciplinarity, and methodological uniformity versus diversity of sciences. Problems of the nature of logic and the explanatory role of mathematical theories are also discussed.

Marcin Będkowski, Ph.D. (2016) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warsaw and an expert at the Educational Research Institute. His areas of interest include the methodology of philosophy and humanities and the history of analytic philosophy, the Lvov-Warsaw School in particular.

Anna Brożek, Ph.D. (2006), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, has authored over a dozen books, including Theory of Questions (Rodopi/Brill 2011), and several dozens of articles from the domain of logical semiotics, methodology, and philosophy of music.

Alicja Chybińka, MA in Philosophy (2016), is employed at the University of Warsaw. Her main areas of interest are the methodology of philosophy and the history of analytic philosophy, in particular in the field of the Lvov-Warsaw School.

Stepan Ivanyk, Ph.D. (2012) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warsaw and the President of the Kazimierz Twardowski Philosophical Society of Lviv. His research fields include the history of philosophy in Lviv, the interrelations of Ukrainian and Polish philosophy, and the theory of judgments.

Dominik Traczykowski, MA in philosophy at the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz (2013), is a researcher at the University of Warsaw. His areas of interest include the methodology of philosophy and humanities as well as the theory and philosophy of education.