Józef Maria Bocheński

Joseph Maria Bocheński OP ( born August 30, 1902 in Czuszów, Poland, † February 8, 1995 in Fribourg, Switzerland), mostly short IM Bocheński, also Innocentius Marie, a Polish philosopher and logician was.

Life

The son of a landowner Bocheński studied law at the University of Lvov, then economics at the University of Poznan 1920-1926. The Order of the Dominicans, he joined in 1927. Then he took up the study of philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Fribourg ( Switzerland ) in 1928. With the work The doctrine of the thing in itself in Straszewski (1848-1921), he received his doctorate in 1931 for Dr. phil.

Then took Bocheński 1931, the study of theology at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome and ended it in 1934 with the degree of Dr. theol. In Rome he taught until 1940 logic. In those years, there was a close contact with the Polish analytical school. From 1940 to 1945 he served in the Polish armed forces in Scotland and Italy. Since 1945 he has held the chair of history of philosophy in the 20th century at the University of Freiburg, where he held from 1964 to 1966 was the rector of the university. Several times he held visiting professorships in the United States. He retired in 1972.

In addition to his academic career, he worked in various fields. He founded in 1948 the Union mondiale des sociétés Catholiques de philosophie. The Eastern Institute in Freiburg, he founded in 1957, in 1961 the journal Studies in Soviet Thought and magazine series Sovietica. Bocheński wrote a report for the German Federal Government to ban the KPD ( BVg August 17, 1956 ).

Philosophy

Bocheński felt drawn to analytic philosophy and regarded himself as a Platonist, Aristotelian cosmocentric embossing. The focus of his work lay in the field of the history of philosophy, the history of logic and logical investigation of important fundamental problems. The philosophy of religion he regarded as a logic of religion.

Bocheński represented epistemologically a hypothetical realism and in modern Universaliendiskussion a remarkable individualistic moderate realism, which he described as no less forced nominalists took in 1956 in the famous public debate with Alonzo Church as extreme Platonist and Nelson Goodman in a remarkable way. He was anxious to prove that knowledge and religious faith does not contradict as different forms of human knowledge today. Ultimately lead both the religion and philosophy to a divine idea.

However, in contrast to the theologians of the philosopher seeking after the divine idea for a rational explanation of the world 's sake. He goes, like I said, the reality of the outside world, which he held for recognizable. However, the knowledge 've got their limits, where they come across the ideal beings, such as the holy as a Urgegebenheit. The idea finally the Divine is so different than considered by all tangible reality is that conceptually that was comprehensible only to him what it was not.

Besides a number of works on questions of philosophy and the history of philosophy Bocheńskis work on logic have become quite important. His decades -powered historical research on logic -culminating in the publication of a comprehensive textbook of the history of logic. In accordance to Jan Lukasiewicz, he combined the classical syllogistic of Aristotle organically with the modern calculus of logic. The comparative analysis of the logic of Theophrastus and Aristotle led to fundamental insights into the modal logic and its history. He scored Consistent results in the representation of syntactic categories.

However, it should not be overlooked that he implicitly used the logic in the tradition of scholasticism as a justification and proof tool for the view taken by Thomism him. From the positions of the neo-scholastic philosophy starting, he grappled with the dialectical materialism, positivism and existentialism. Dialectical materialism he saw as particularly weighty opponents. He called him out of his theological position out not only a mistake but a sin.

Writings

• De cognitione Exist, 1936
• Elementa logicae Graecae, 1937
• Nove Lezioni di Logica Simbolica, 1938
• S. Thomae Aq. , 1940
• De modalibus, 1940
• La logique de Théophraste, 1947
• European Contemporary Philosophy, 1947
• On Analogy, 1948
• Précis de logique mathématique, 1949
• The Soviet Russian dialectical materialism ( dialectical materialism ), 1950
• Ancient Formal Logic, 1951
• The contemporary methods of thought, 1954 ( 10th edition 1993, UTB No. 6; ISBN 3-7720-1202-7 )
• The Problem of Universals: A Symposium. Bocheński, J. M.; Church, A.; Goodman, N., [ Aquinas Symposium, Department of Philosophy of the University of Notre Dame, March 9-10, 1956 ] Notre Dame Press 1956
• Formal Logic, publisher Karl Alber Freiburg / Munich 1956 ( = Orbis Academicus 3, 2), 6th Edition 2002, ISBN 3-495-48071-4 - overall presentation of the history of logic in source texts
• The Logic of Religion, 1965 ( German translation of Albert Menne 1968 under the title " The Logic of Religion " )
• The dogmatic foundations of Soviet Philosophy, 1958
• Handbook of Weltkommunsimus, 1958 as co-editor
• Ways to philosophical thinking, 1959
• Publisher: Logical and philosophical studies. With essays by P. Banks, A. Menne, I.Thomas and himself, including the two from him self-assessed as important treatises "On analogy " and " To the problem of universals " ( Notable representation of its position between the extreme Platonic Churchs and the Goodman's nominalist ). publisher Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1959
• Bibliography of Soviet Philosophy, 1959
• Plan logistics, 1954 ( German edition of Précis de logique mathématique, translated, revised and expanded by Albert Menne )
• Philosophy. An Introduction, 1962
• Why studies in Soviet Philosophy 1963
• Logic of Religion, 1968
• Science and Faith, 1969, in: eds L. Reinisch, limits of knowledge
• Marxism -Leninism, 1973
• What is authority? Introduction to the logic of authority, 1974
• Self-expression. In: Louis J. Pongratz ( Eds.): Philosophy in self-presentations. Volume I. Meiner, Hamburg 1975
• Authority, Freedom, Faith. Social Studies and Humanities, 1988
• God's existence and nature, logic studies on the Summa Theologiae I, qq.2 -11, Opus posthumum and apparently of B. intended as a legacy. Philosophia Verlag, series Analytica, 2003. ( Contains in-depth critical logical analyzes of Quinque Viae and the proof passages of Thomas about the nature of God, and a logical analysis of a story concerned the proofs of God from Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason .")