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In this country philosophy had been cultivated for a long time as an explication and very rarely as a process of fructification of the ideas that had already been expressed or written, as a repeated journey along the path traveled by other, better educated and undoubtedly wiser men. Nobody could object to that practice, as long as we try to find the limits, pitfalls and possible improvements of those journeys or other, more perfect and suitable paths and trends; as long as we also try to find new goals, procedures, devices and methods. Among the first stimulating contacts with the subject that can be comprehensively described as methodological themes figured my working and personal meetings with the colleagues of a group established at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Charles University in the early 1950s under the name "Cabinet of General Natural Science" and headed by the then associate professor O. Zich. There were others who were involved in its activities, namely A. Dratvová, M. Katětov and some other researchers. I myself was impressed by the work of M. Katětov on the logical construction of mathematics in which he singled out the works of R. Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle. Shortly after my habilitation at the Faculty of Philosophy (1953) I was sent to a conference on what were called Lenin's philosophical notes, a gathering organized in Warsaw by the Polish Academy of Sciences. The conference was also addressed by the then Chairman of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Professor T. Kotarbiński. His lecture focused on Lenin's example of what was then billed as a "wonderful demonstration of dialectic", notably the sentence "Zhuchka iest sobaka" (in Czech translation "Alík je pes' which, loosely translated into English, reads "Bingo is a dog"). Kotarbiński agreed with Lenin's characteristic claiming that the singular is also universal and that, on the contrary, the universal is the singular too. He followed his affirmative and appreciative comment by adding that he would like to supplement and extend Lenin's note by referring to the fact that what is also involved is the connection of the nominal and verbal components, the connection of a proper noun and a common noun, the concatenation of an element and a set, a part and a whole, and that, therefore, syntactic connection or concatenation does and can have a number of different functions. I went to speak to Professor Kotarbiński during a conference break and conveyed to him my thanks; I mainly thanked him because I now did understand the meaning and purpose of his supplementary notes. From that first meeting on I was regularly invited to seminars and minor conferences also attended by leading lights, adherents and supporters of analytical philosophy in Europe. These included A. J. Ayer, who later sent me his book Language, Truth and Logic, R. Aron who gave me, already in Warsaw, his book L"Opium des intellectuels, a critique of the fundamentalist ideologies.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-36383-3_10

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