  Leśniewski’s early writings are all papers on topics in the philosophy of logic and language, concerned with such issues as truth, denotation and connotation, the status of the laws of logic, and Russell’s Antinomy. The primary influences in this period were John Stuart Mill, Anton Marty, and Edmund Husserl: he himself described the works as grammatical in nature. Although Leśniewski later repudiated his early works, they contain many seeds of his later interests, attitudes, and working practices. From the beginning there is an obsessive rigor in developing logical principles, including an instinctively clear and consistent marking of the use/mention distinction, that is, distinguishing talk in a language from talk about a language. Leśniewski’s early works are mainly reactions to work by others, whether Brentano and Cornelius on existential propositions, Łukasiewicz on the Principles of Contradiction and Excluded Middle, Twardowski on universals, or Kotarbiński on the timelessness of truth.