The Relevance of Models. Idealization and Concretization in Leszek Nowak

Scientific Study from the year 2021 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), University of Catania (Department of Sciences of Formation), language: English, abstract: This work, which is the result of a series of studies dating back to my first Polish stay at the "Adam Mickiewicz" University in Poznan in 2008 and which is the most updated version of the edition published for the first time in Italian in 2016, would never have been completed without the vital human and material support of Professor Francesco Coniglione of the University of Catania. Polish philosophy of the twentieth century provided original and fundamental contributions to the development of the most important questions of logic, epistemology, and philosophy that for a long time have kept occupied the most acute minds of Western culture. However, due to a series of barriers that are very difficult to break down, few people know that many of the most important philosophical and logical-epistemological themes provided to us by the authors mentioned above have been widely and simultaneously dealt with by the leading exponents of twentieth-century Polish philosophy, who have anticipated and developed some of the most important logical-epistemological reflections of the twentieth century; moreover, some of them have become promoters and creators of the so-called idealizational conception of science. The idealizational conception of science was developed and elaborated with greater awareness and systematicity by the Polish philosopher Leszek Nowak (object of study of this work) and by the other methodologists of the Poznan School. So, in this work I will consider Nowak's idealizational approach to science, the distinction between abstraction and idealization and the relationship of Nowak's approach with contemporary epistemology.