While working on the oeuvre of P.F. Strawson (1919–2006), and especially on his metaphysics, I had a unique opportunity to exchange ideas with this eminent exponent of Oxford philosophy. Those exchanges, of which some have been reflected in private correspondence and in a published reply to one of my papers, were focussed on various interpretative questions. Three threads of those discussions seem especially pertinent for grasping the gist of Strawson’s philosophy and its general orientation. The first one concerned the nature of philosophical analysis, or to be more precise, the connective model of it, favoured by Strawson, and its relationship with the idea of concept presupposition. The second thread had to do with the position taken by the Oxford philosopher in the realism debate on three levels: semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical. Strawson made every effort to take a realist stand in this debate and avoid antirealism in any of its forms; however, his realism is in many respects very moderate and not so distant from antirealism. Similarly moderate was his stand in the traditional debate about universals, constituting the topic of the third thread of the exchanges with Strawson. He claimed that universals exist, but at the same time emphasized that they are objects of pure thought alone and as such do not form a part of the spatiotemporal world in which we live. One cannot also say much about the relation of exemplification in virtue of which universals manifest themselves in the world as particular instances. Presentation and elaboration of these three threads has led to the conclusion that although Strawson was a deeply systematic thinker, he avoided wide-ranging and ambitious statements and radical views. In characteristically minimalist way he dispelled some questions, and the ultimate resolution of many crucial and fundamental issues were for him choice and taking a particular attitude or stance.

In the extensive oeuvre of the eminent Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden there are very few passages and hints which would enable one to determine his attitude towards analytic philosophy and its achievements. A brief sketch of an assessment of this philosophical movement is included in a letter to Henryk Skolimowski, which contains Ingarden’s response to a succinct account of his philosophy in Skolimowski’s book Polish Analytical Philosophy (1967). Ingarden emphasizes there that it is completely inaccurate to describe his contribution to philosophy as a fusion of German phenomenology and the so‑called Polish analytic philosophy. According to Ingarden he did learn nothing from analytic philosophy in its Polish version. His attitude towards analytic philosophy in its entirety is critical and hostile, since it has a general tendency to move all substantial issues on the linguistic level, and that pernicious tendency has led to a terrible impoverishment of philosophy.

StreszczenieW swoich pracach Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz niejednokrotnie podejmował zagad-nienia oplatające się wokól tego, co przyjęło się w literaturze określać mianem sporu o realizm. W standardowy sposób zwięźle opisywał uczestników tego sporu. Jego program epistemologii semantycznej sprawił, że stał się on prekur-sorem wyodrębnienia semantycznej płaszczyzny sporu o realizm i przypisania centralnej roli w tym sporze zasadzie dwuwartościowości, wyprzedzając pod tym wzgłdem brytyjskiego filozofa Michaela Dummetta o ponad dwadzieścia piex lat. Należy jednak pamiętać, że Ajdukiewicza i Dummetta wiele laczyło w metodologii prowadzenia sporu, natomiast wiele dzieliło, jeśli idzie o jego rozwiązanie. Pierwszy bronił realizmu, a drugi skłaniał się w strong antyreali-zmu semantycznego, który można interpretować jako formę idealizmu trans-cendentalnego.

Seldom did Bertrand Russell discuss the movement or the trend that he himself contributed in a large measure to establish. He did not make frequent use of the term ‘analytic philosophy’, which was entering circulation in the first half of the twentieth century. However, he was fully aware of the distinctiveness of this movement that he described, using the lenses of his own philosophical preferences, referring to it as new realistic philosophy or scientific philosophy. In his later works Russell vehemently and inadequately attacked the linguistic version of analytic philosophy that originated with and was developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, to be later continued by Oxford ordinary language philosophers. The juxtaposition and consideration of various Russell’s statements on analytic philosophy from the successive stages of the development of his philosophical views help the reader to better understand Russellian metaphilosophy and follow the evolution of the philosophical tradition that he exemplified.