Philosophy traditions in Poland

[aadam]

For all interested in philosophy - Polish way, a link to a very good and concise essay by Jacek Jadacki of Uniwersytet Warszawski (University of Warsaw) about Warsaw-Lvów school of philosophy. I cite the initial paragraph re: Polish philosophy tradition in extenso.

"Philosophy has been cultivated in Poland for eight centuries and always in close connection with the general European tradition. This connection is manifold, even if we ignore the normal interchange of ideas by the medium of publications (for a long time written in Latin) and if we limit ourselves to the period when Poland was integral and independent, excepting the post-partition years, when (for a century) Polish provinces found themselves the possession of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Firstly, the majority of outstanding Polish philosophers studied or completed their studies outside Poland. The oldest scientific contacts of this kind concern Italy (and France). Two XIIIth century Polish philosophers studied (i.a.) in Italy Piotr (the elder) from Cracow (at Bologna and Padua) and Witelo from Legnica (at Padua). And this situation did not change up to the end of the XVIIIth century. Let us mention, for example, the most distinguished Polish philosophers who studied in Italy: in the XVth century: Grzegorz from Sanok (at Rome) and Jan Ostrorog (at Bologna); in the XVIth century: Sebastian Petrycy (at Padua) and Marcin Smiglecki (at Rome); in the XVIIth century: Jan Brozek (at Padua) and Adam Kochanski(at Florence); in the XVIIIth century: Kazimierz Narbutt (at Rome) and Hugo Kollataj (also at Rome). In the XIVth-XVth centuries Polish philosophy (and science in general) was bound by the strongest ties to Bohemia. Twenty Polish philosophers of that period from Jan Isner to Marcin Król studied at Prague. Later this contact lessened, but in the XVIth century Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, and in the XVIIth century Jan Makowski were students of Prague University. In the XVth century Poles began to go to German-speaking countries: to Austria for example, Andrzej from Malbork (to Vienna) in the XVth century, Stanislaw Orzechowski (also to Vienna) in the XVIth century, Aron Aleksander Olizarowski (to Graz) in the XVIIth century, and Stefan Luskina (to Vienna) in the XVIIIth century; or to Germany for example, Pawel from Worczyn (to Leipzig) in the XVth century, Grzegorz Pawel from Brzeziny (to Wittenberg) in the XVIth century, Jan Schulz-Szulecki (to Frankfurt an der Oder) in the XVIIth century, and Marcin Swiatkowski (to Halle) in the XVIIIth century.
Secondly, many foreign philosophers lived and wrote for varying periods of time in Poland. The list opens with a Czech, Jan Stekna, a Thomist (XIVth century). Then Italians: Filippo Buonaccorsi called 'Callimachus', a humanist (XVth century), Fausto Sozzini, an Aryan (XVIth century), Valeriano Magni, an anti-Aristotelian (XVIIth century), and Giovanni Battista Albertrandi, an anti-sentimentalist (XVIIIth century). In the XVIIth century we have among others an Austrian, Baron Johannes Ludwig Wolzogen, and a German, Johannes Crell. The special feature of this intellectual import consisted in the opening of the Theatins College in Warsaw; two Italians, devotees of philosophia recentiorum Antonio Maria Portaluppi and Giuseppe Torri were professors at this college (the future Polish king, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, being their student). In Poland there were also active Jewish thinkers, including such completely different persons as Israel ben Elieser called 'Baal-Shem-Tov', the originator of Chassidism, and Salomon ben Jehoshua called 'Maimon', the representative of Haskalism. Finally, let us add two of the heroes of this paper: Henryk Struve, born in Germany, and Adam Mahrburg, who was descended from an Austrian family (living at first near Ljubljana): one part of this family emigrated to Poland, another to Italy..."

www.fmag.unict.it/~polphil/PolPhil/LvovWarsaw/Jada.html

[pieter]

Adam,

Interesting long list of the history of Polish philosophy, and the link.
Thank you Adam, this is the beginning of my journey into Polish
philosophy and the relation of that with Europe as a whole.

Pieter

[pieter]

Adam,

I found this text on the website of the Jagiellonian University Institute of Philosophy.

Philosophy has been cultivated at our university since the turn of the 14th century. In the 16th century it continued to enjoy international recognition.

Although in the next century its position weakened, there nevertheless appeared distinguished philosophers, such as Sebastian Petrycy of Pilsen (1554-1626), professor of medicine, or Jan BroHek (1585-1652), also known as Ioannes Broscius (the building presently occupied by the Institute of Philosophy, Collegium Broscianum , is named after him), an eminent theologian, mathematician, astronomer (propagator of Copernicus?s theory), historian of science, theoretician of music, teacher of philosophy, and author of the work Apologia pro Aristotele. In the very same century a significant role was played by Szymon Stanis?aw Makowski, follower of St. Thomas Aquinas, author of A Course of Philosophy According to the Genuine Doctrine of Aristotle, the Prince of Philosophers (Kurs filozofii wedle prawdziwej doktryny Arystotelesa, ksiecia filozofów).

New currents in philosophy and teaching methods are a result of the first reform of the university, carried out around the middle of the 18th century by the professor of mathematics and philosophy, Rev. Józef Alojzy Putanowicz. In the second half of the 18th century his disciple Marcin Swiatkowski, an advocate of the philosophy of Christian Wolff, represented, in his own original way, the trends of the Enlightenment. He was the author of Prodromus Polonus (The Polish Herald ). During the period of reforms introduced by Hugo Ko??ataj and the Education Commission, the teaching of philosophy was restricted and the philosophy of Wolff, Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke (Rev. Wincenty Smaczninski and Rev. Andrzej Cyankiewicz) was promoted. Two of the most eminent representatives of the philosophy of the Enlightenment in Poland, Hugo Ko??ataj (influenced by the French encyclopedists) and Jan Sniadecki (who, along with his brother Jedrzej, drew upon the philosophy of common sense), both alumni of the Jagiellonian University and its reformers, propagated a new vision of ethics and the philosophy of science (the beginnings of positivism). In the 19th century an important role in the history of philosophy was played by Rev. Feliks Jaronski, the author of the programmatic speech: What Kind of Philosophy Do Poles Need? ( Jakiej filozofii potrzebuja Polacy?), published in 1810. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant significantly influenced philosophy in Krakow; it had a fervent adherent in the person of Józef Emanuel Jankowski and equally passionate opponents in the persons of Feliks Jaronski and Jan Sniadecki.

Micha? Wiszniewski, an advocate of the philosophy of common sense and the methodology of Francis Bacon, played a significant role at the University in the first part of the 19th century. He is the author of Bacon?s Method of Explaining Nature (Bacona metoda t?umaczenia natury ; BKF, PWN 1976). In the same century Hegelianism was represented at our University by Józef Kremer (1806-1875).

A very original figure was Maurycy Straszewski (1848-1921), an advocate of empiricism and scientific philosophy, also well known as a historian of philosophy. Even more interesting was the erudite Rev. Stefan Pawlicki, a champion of philosophy as the art of life, the teacher of Leon Chwistek. For a short period of time Wincenty Lutos?awski (1863-1954), a representative of Messianism and the author of an important book, The Origin and Growth of Plato?s Logic (London, 1905), was a lecturer of philosophy. Later we had a number of important scholars: Witold Rubczynski (1864-1938), who dealt with ethics, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy; Joachim Metallmann (1889-1942), a methodologist, philosopher of the natural sciences, and an interpreter of the philosophy of Whitehead; Rev. Konstanty Michalski (1879-1947), an expert in the philosophy of Middle Ages; W?adys?aw Heinrich (1869-1957), a disciple of Avenarius, a critic al empiricist, experimental psychologist, and a historian of philosophy.

After World War II, in spite of the ideological control exercised by the communist party, independent philosophy was still cultivated. Eminent philosophical figures in Krakow included: Zygmunt Zawirski (1882-1948), a philosopher of nature; Janina Kiersnowska-Suchorzewska (1886-1967), a philosopher of nature, a historian of philosophy, and an expert in the philosophy of Kant and the neo-Kantians; W?adys?aw Tatarkiewicz (1886-1980), a historian of philosophy; Roman Ingarden (1893-1970), a disciple of Edmund Husserl, a phenomenologist, the creator of phenomenological aesthetics, and author of Dispute concerning the Existence of the World (Spór o istnienie swiata); Jan Leszczynski (1905-1990), an ontologist, epistemologist, and an expert in semiotics; Danuta Gierulanka (1909-1995), a phenomenologist, philosopher of mathematics, and psychologist; Izydora Dambska (1904-1983), an epistemologist, disciple of Kazimierz Twardowski, and a distinguished representative of the Lvov-Warsaw school; Daniela Gromska (1889-1973), an expert in classical philology, historian of philosophy, and translator of Aristotle and Theophrastus. In the mid-60's Roman Ingarden retired from university work and due to pressure exerted by the Communist Party Izydora Dambska was compelled to move to the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In the field of logic and its history Kazimierz Pasenkiewicz (1897-1995) played a significant role.

The Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University arose in 1967 when the Chairs of Philosophy, the History of Philosophy, Logic, and the Philosophy of Nature were merged.

www.iphils.uj.edu.pl/index.php?l=2

[pieter]

This Polish philosopher I also found this evening when I was searching for Polish schools of Philosophy.
Estelle will not like him, he is an ontologist!

Tadeusz Kotarbinski (1886-1981) is one of the most representative figures of the  Lvov-Warsaw School, not only on account of the doctrines he put forward but also because (like Ajdukiewicz ) he continued his activity in Poland after World War II, greatly influencing Polish philosophical culture, of which he became a sort of guardian spirit.

The philosophical doctrine to which he owes his fame is called "reism" (or "concretism"). It is based on the so-called system of "calculation of names" (or ontology) formulated by the great logician Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939), a great friend of his and a colleague at the University of Warsaw, a distinctive feature of whose thought was radical nominalism. Taking up Lesniewski’s classification of names, Kotarbinski viewed a name as meaning "all and only those terms and phrases that can constitute the subject or predicate of propositions concerning things or persons", of the type A is B, where "is" is taken in the fundamental, primary sense Lesniewski gave it in his Ontology.

As Lesniewski saw it, the meaning of "is" is different from the meaning it has in English and Italian, being better rendered by the Latin "est" or the Polish "jest"; this is due to the fact that in Polish, as in Latin, there are no articles, whereas in both English and Italian the use of a definite or indefinite article before a name specifies the meaning attributed to the verb "is".

Kotarbinski thus distinguishes between:

(a) singular names, which are used as grammatical subjects and refer to individuals or things ("Plato", "Rome");

(b) general names of people or things ("man", "city") that can only be subjects in universal propositions of the type "every A is B" or predicates (in universal and singular propositions); and finally

(c) empty names ("chimera", "centaur") that denote nothing and cannot be the subject of any true proposition, singular or general, but which by definition can be appropriately reduced to a combination of singular and/or universal terms that are the names of people or things, so as to obtain an expression that is synonymous with the empty name.

All these are genuine names, as opposed to apparent or fictitious names which comprise all names referring to properties, relations, or even states and which Kotarbinski calls pseudo-names or "onomatoids". From this point of view it is obvious that in the expression "the departure of the train was delayed", the term "departure" is an apparent name as it has no designatum: the "departure" does not exist, but only a train that is departing. The sentence should therefore be formulated more correctly as "the train departed later than scheduled". All genuine names (singular, general or empty) are concrete nouns, whereas abstract nouns are apparent names. The existence of these abstract names leads to the erroneous opinion that they correspond to something that really exists, i.e. that there exists an entity referred to by terms like "roundness", "equality", etc. The same applies to names indicating relationships. When we state, for instance, that "there is a relationship of friendship between Jan and Piotr", we really mean that Jan and Piotr are friends. Just as "roundness" does not exist, neither does the relationship of friendship (see the diagram which shows his theory of names).

Kotarbinski presented two versions of reism - an ontological and a semantic one. The ontological thesis consists of maintaining that only people and things exist, i.e. that every object is either a person or a thing. Following criticism by Ajdukiewicz, who accused him of tautology, Kotarbinski made a further statement of this ontological thesis, saying that "every object is either body or spirit" and that "every spiritual being is a body". The fundamental thesis of reism thus became "every object is a body": this phase was termed "somatism".

The semantic version of reism refers to the language we use to describe the world and briefly consists of maintaining that it is possible to translate every proposition containing fictitious names into one containing only genuine names. Each fictitious name we encounter in everyday language is therefore an onomatoid. This is in practice a drastic reduction of the categories of Aristotle to a single category of things, which corresponds to Aristotle’s primary substance (thus excluding secondary, or universal, substances). The semantic analysis of reism is undoubtedly very similar in certain respects to what was later to be the eliminativistic stand taken, on a nominalistic basis, by Ramsey and Craig and subsequently by Quine. In its more philosophical aspects, it is also similar to the radical "physicalism" supported by Carnap and Neurath.

Kotarbinski is also important for opening up another field of research to which he was deeply committed: praxiology, which he cultivated mostly after the Second World War. Already anticipated by other scholars (such as B.C. Dunoyer, W. Jastrzbowski, Meliton Martin, Louis Bourdeau, Alfred Espinas, Eugeniusz Spucki, L. von Mises and A. Bogdanov), praxiology has its roots in what Kotarbinski called "practical realism" and represents a common-sense attitude towards the world, respecting things that really exist, the limits and conditions affecting action, and full awareness of the importance of the factors contributing to the situation in which one is working. It was, in short, a resumption of the just means and practical rationality of Aristotle which, in the new reality that emerged after World War II, Kotarbinski must have seen as having an important social function in the construction of a new Socialist order, an effort he viewed in a constructive, co-operative spirit. Praxiology presents itself as the most general of practical sciences, one that can provide a methodology for the efficient performance of any action aiming at a specific goal.

Praxiology provides and explains practical directives, i.e. the commands, prohibitions and restrictions that are applied to actions in order to enhance their efficiency; it formulates a series of types and builds up its own conceptual and terminological apparatus to analyse the basic concepts of the new science and the modes of efficient action: agent, impulse, action, aim, product, result, as well as efficiency, economy, usefulness, effectiveness, exactness, appropriacy, etc. are the cornerstones of his thought. Praxiology thus contains both descriptive theses, whose aim is to explain and clarify its fundamental concepts and their reciprocal relationships (among which he distinguishes between simple and compound, external and internal actions, various modes of co-operation such as positive and negative, etc.), and theses of a normative nature, indicating the necessary and/or sufficient directives for a certain action to be efficient with respect to the goal to be achieved in given situations, and thus the prescriptions and prohibitions to be respected. Kotarbinski also delineated the characteristics of an even more general science than praxiology: the theory of complex systems, which in more recent times was independently proposed by L. von Bertalanffy as a general theory of systems and which Kotarbisnki saw as being outlined in the work of Bogdanov. Examples of the practical directives formulated by praxiology are those expressed by the concepts of activation, automation, instrumentalisation, anticipation, integration, potentialisation, temporisation, mechanisation and so on, with a whole series of further subdivisions (e.g. integration is subdivided into co-ordination, concentration, preparation, planning, etc.).

Praxiology developed in Poland from 1958 onwards, the year in which the Polish Academy of Sciences set up an autonomous Laboratory of Praxiology, which was transformed into a Department in 1967 and in 1974 became part of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology. In 1980 it took on the name of Department of Praxiology and the Science of Science. It currently edits the four-monthly "Prakseologia" and the English-language annual review "Praxiology", which publishes articles by both Polish and foreign authors. Praxiology has now assumed full autonomy as a scientific discipline, counting research institutes in Poland and abroad. Its main Polish representatives are M. Nowakowska, T. Pszczolowski and L. Lewandowski. The attempt has been made to apply the principles of praxiology to the field of economics by the famous economist Oskar Lange, who sees it as a science of rational action and thus interprets it from a methodological viewpoint. A new generation of scholars such as W. Gasparski, T. Wojcik and J. Zieliniewski have expressed the need for further formal refinement of the discipline and greater integration with similar disciplines that have in the meanwhile arisen in other fields and other countries.

Mention should finally be made of Kotarbinski’s ethical interests, which led him to support an "independent ethic", i.e. one that refuses to search for a foundation in sources other than emotional judgements formulated in the course of human relationships, and especially an ethic that is independent of both religion and any specific world view.

www.fmag.unict.it/~polphil/PolPhil/Kotar/Kotar.html

[pieter]

And:

Ajdukiewicz was one of Poland's most distinguished philosophers and logicians in the present century and he was among the most active members of the Lvov-Warsaw School, founded in 1895 by Kazimierz Twardowski in Lvov . The dominant theme of Ajdukiewicz's thought was the problem of the dependence of our knowledge and conception of knowledge on language. His main contributions are in the field of logical syntax (with the theory of semantical categories) and in epistemology, with the so-called "radical conventionalism", a doctrine elaborated in the '30s, where, contrary to Poincaré and with reference to Eduard Le Roy, he claimed that there exist conceptual apparatuses which are not intertranslatable and that scientific knowledge grows through the replacement of one such conceptual apparatus by another. For these reasons he was a forerunner of the contemporary thesis regarding the incommensurability of scientific theories, supported by Kuhn, Feyerabend and others.



Life



Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz was born in 1890 in Tarnopol (Galicia), in the territory of the Austrian Empire. Ajdukiewicz completed his secondary education in Lvov and enrolled at University to read Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics. In 1912 he was awarded a Ph. D. degree in Philosophy on the basis of a thesis on Kant's philosophy of space. Among his university teachers in Lvov were Kazimierz Twardowski in philosophy, Jan Lukasiewicz in logic and Waclaw Sierpinski in mathematics. Ajdukiewicz went to Göttingen University where David Hilbert was lecturing on the foundations of mathematics and Edmund Husserl on philosophy. A year later, however, he was conscripted into the Austrian army and served on the Italian front. Towards the end of World War I he joined the newly-formed Polish army, from which he was demobilized in 1920 with the rank of an artillery captain, to return to university life. He qualified as a university lecturer at Warsaw University in 1920 having submitted a dissertation entitled From the Methodology of Deductive Science (Lvov, 1921), a pioneer work with a deep influence on the development of logic in Poland: it contained formal (syntactical) definitions of such meta-logical concepts as "proof", "theorem", "consequence", "logical theorem", "logical consequence", thus introducing in Poland the structural method of defining these concepts. At that time he married Maria Twardowska, Kazimierz Twardowski's daughter; they subsequently had a son and a daughter.

Until the outbreak of World War II he was first lecturer and then professor of philosophy in the Universities of Lvov and Warsaw. In this period, roughly till 1936, he was concerned with the doctrine which he himself labeled Radical Conventionalism, resulting from an original pragmatic conception of language combined with a concept of intersubjective meaning, developed between 1929 and 1934. The retreat from this doctrine was accomplished in the second half of the thirties, but it seems that its fundamental ideas never ceased to fascinate Ajdukiewicz.

During World War II he continued to live with his family in Lvov. Forced under German occupation to earn his living as a clerk, he found time nevertheless to teach in clandestine Polish schools. After the war ended he accepted the Chair of the Methodology and Theory of Science (afterwards re-named the Chair of Logic) in the Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences of the University of Poznan. In the years 1948-52 he was Rector of Poznan University. He left Poznan for Warsaw in 1955. As professor of Logic in the University of Warsaw and head of the Division of Logic in the Institute of Philosophy of the Polish Academy of Science, he continued until retirement in 1961, retaining, however, the latter post after retirement. Ajdukiewicz died in his sleep quite unexpectedly one night in 1963 of heart failure.

During the last years of his life he produced some of the most original articles of his career, clarifying and defending - against his own arguments put forward during the radical conventionalism period - the thesis of Moderate Empiricism (Logic and Experience, 1947) and, at the end of his life, the position of Radical Empiricism, according to which all knowledge consists of empirically revisable sentences. Moreover, towards the end of his life, he developed the outlines of a new research programme in epistemology and in the philosophy of language (The Problem of Empiricism and the Concept of Meaning, 1964).

[pieter]

Florian Znaniecki
(1882-1958)

Znaniecki was a philosopher turned sociologist. In fact the roots of his sociological system were deeply in the domain of two philosophical sources: the neokantism, German historism (Dilthey, Rickert) and the American and British pragmatism (Dewey, Schiller, Mead). He almost completely ignore the heritage of Marx and marxism. It must be noted also a quite limited interest paid by Znaniecki to Weber even their sociological systems coincide in many points. In opposite to the idealism and the naturalism he proposed new culturalistic paradigm - ontological and methodological - as a basic philosophical orientation because the human world is a world of culture thus essentialy different from the world of nature. "The cultural world is a world of values, not of things". Values are fondamentaly different from the natural objects and from the subjective states of consciousness; they are objective as a things in the sense that the experience of a meaning, like the experience of a content, can be indefinitely repetead by an indefinitely number of people, and consequently tested. In this sense they found the cultural system. In other words, Znaniecki asserts that the data of cultural system are always "somebody's", never "nobody's" data, because such data already belong to somebody else's active experiences and are such as this active experience makes them. This philosophical culturalism become for Znaniecki the ontological basic conception to formulate the system of humanistic sociology as a science of the strict social reality, the social values, a particular type of values of the wider cultural reality. "Man as a social value is only an aspect of himself as he appears to somebody else who is actively interested in him". In this perspective Znaniecki indicated four systems of the social reality: social actions, social relations, social persons and social groups. Social actions are simple and fundamental components of social reality; it is a normatively regulated interaction between two or more individuals.

This four systems found together the social order defined as "axionormative order", "axionormative system" and "axionormative structure". In other words, the society is not a set of individual actions but the superindividual, axionormative and persistent entirety; both, outcome and regulations of those actions. Thus, Znaniecki in his social theory avoids two ontological extremes: atomistic individualism and metaphysical collectivism. In the methodological dimension, Znaniecki expressed the "new sociological paradigm" in the concept of the "humanistic coefficient" and in the principle of systematic and contextual interpretation. The first means that the facts must be above all taken in connection with the whole to which they belong. In other words, the humanistic coefficient is a methodological principle to analyse the data in the perception of their participants, as components of their active experience. Hence great interes of Znaniecki (firstly with Thomas) in the research-technique known as the analysis of human documents (letters, memoirs, life histories etc.) later defined as the autobiographical method in sociology. The second means that the interpretation of social behaviour must be contestual because of quite and spontaneous tendency of the people to express their actions, attitudes, relations, valuations etc. in relations to the same components in a large social scale. Together this two methodological elements are, according to Znaniecki, the best base for application of the principle of analytic induction, later named by him the method of eidetic cases. Eventually, the Znaniecki's sociology, like Weber's, is deeply humanistic because it is effect of theoretical tentative to propose the method of the analyse of the irreducible uniqueness of the human world with the scientic method. In today's perspective Znaniecki can be considered proto-functionalist, proto-structuralist and a forerunner of symbolic interactionism.

Life



Florian Witold Znaniecki was born in a noble family in Swiatniki near Wloclawek (Poland). From his earliest years he displayed an unusual interest in literature and philosophy. Some his poetic verses were published. His career as a student of the Warsaw University was short; after few months he was expeled because of his participation in a student's protest against Russian administration. From 1903 to 1909 Znaniecki was abroad. He studed literature, philosophy, theory of science, pedagogics and sociology in the universities of Geneva, of Zurich and of Paris where he became increasingly interested in sociology and attended lectures and seminars conductesd by such professors as Rauh, Durkheim, Lalande, Levy-Bruhl and Belot. He graduated in philosophy in Jagiellonian University in Cracow and after, in 1910, he received a Ph.D. on the basis of the dissertation entitled The problem of Values in Philosophy.

In Warsaw he took up an administrative job as a director of the Polish Emigrants' Protective Association and in this capacity Znaniecki met in 1913 with W. I. Thomas who had just started a wide empirical project concerning the european emigrants in the USA. In that period Znaniecki was the active member of the Polish Psychological Society and the Polish Philosophical Society; he published his main philosophical works and he translated the masterpiece Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson in to Polish.

Thomas arranged an apointment for Znaniecki at the University of Chicago, and there they worked together on the study of Polish emigrant, which came out in five volumes in 1918-1920 under the title The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, today the clasic work in sociology.

In 1920 Znaniecki returned in Poland and received a chair of sociology at the University of Poznan - first in Poland; he initiated systematic training of first group of students as "advance" academic staff of the sociology; he found the Polish Sciological Institut and the first Polish sociological journal -"Polski Przeglad Socjologiczny". In this way Poznan University became the center of sociology as an academic discipline in Poland which later would be denominated the "school of Znaniecki" identificated with notably sociologist like Jozef Chalasinski, Thedore Abel, Jan Szczepanski. In 1932-34 Znaniecki spent fruitful time as a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York. This appointment was repeated in 1939, just at the outbreak of the II World War, which kept him from returning to Poland.

In 1940 he accepted the posision of professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where he stayed till his death in 1958. After II World War he refused to return in homeland because he did not accept the comunist regime. To last days of his life he worked on his opus magnum, the syntetic volume on Systematic Sociology, which, uncomplete, was published posthumously by his dauther (Helen Lopata-Znaniecki) under the title Social Relations and Social Role: The Unfinished Sociology (1965).

His life and work spanned two cultures: Polish and American. In America 1954 Znaniecki acquired considerable status in the academic circle; in 1953 he was even elected the President of American Sociological Association. In Poland whereas, untill late years 50ths, his sociology was condamned by communist party as "bourgois", conservative thus emarginated. Now, in his homeland, Florian Znaniecki is largely reconsidered not only as an emminent figure of Polish sociology but also as a philosopher.

[pieter]

Since there are new members (Wojtek [Bujno]) and visitors I want to reactivate this topic, because this is a Philosophy, Religion, Art & Culture board, and I hope that some of the new members or visitors might have an interest in Polish philosophy, and could tell me and other visitors, about their view on life, Polish logica, Polish rhetorical debate, the development and implementation of Polish ideas, Polish thought and so Polish contemporary Philosophical practise, or Polish philosophical tradition.
I am especilially interested in the philosophical thoughts and ideas of people themselves (Subjective thought) and in their examples and philosophical roots(!?).

Please don't be afraid to react, it does not have to be complicated, and feel free to post simple, honest, daily thoughts and practical examples. I am interested in all ideas and thoughts that can lead to or provoke a debate, discussion, and communication between members and visitors (guests). I hope that in this topic people can be open too or put their own vision opposite to that of the other, so that maybe in an experiment, in the development of the debate interesting Philosophical questions can came into exsistance.

An example to me is Socrates, who asked questions all his life!

I don't know if this is possible in a Forum like this, but it would be nice if we (ourselves) could try to make or create an Open Collage for philosophical or cultural ideas here, and maybe a Scientific version in Sciwriter's Science, Health & Technology board, and Nancy and Jaga's Genealogy, Immigration, People & History board.

Maybe this is just a crazy idea, but it comes from my idealistic and personal motivation, it is the soul reason why I participate in this Forum. I want to meet other people with a cultural and historical interest in Poland, and other people who like debate on certain topics.

I am always glad when you; Jaga, Nancy, Wojtek (Bujno), Adam, Pawian, Forza, Zooba,Yanc, Rdywenur, Gardenmoma, Bescheid, Leslie, Jim, Bob, Pinkola, Franek (the Zoroman), Hollister post your personal comments, travel reports, insights in daily lives, and subjects they are interested in.

You are all welcome to put your personal ideas, subjective (and ofcourse Objective too) philosophical thoughts,cultural or a-cultural ideas down here in this part of the Polish Culture Site (jagahost.proboards79)!

Pieter