Izydora Dąmbska and Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Izydora Dąmbska (1904–1983) was an outstanding Polish philosopher of the 20^th century. She was a thinker with exceptionally wide interests. Her research areas included epistemology and methodology of philosophy, i.e. metaphilosophy in the strict sense of the word, as well as selected figures and trends in contemporary analytic philosophy. Dąmbska’s works in this field allows one to identify and describe her own metaphilosophical position and attitude towards the analytic philosophical tradition. She was an advocate of a moderate form of linguistic philosophy and of moderate reconstructionism, which she combined with the utmost importance of philosophy and its cognitive and existential role. From this point of view, she accurately criticized some of the metaphilosophical ideas of the Vienna Circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. As a knowledgeable researcher of categories of convention and conventionalism, she was able to appreciate and evaluate David Lewis’s philosophical conception of convention.