20th Century
Even before Poland regained independence at the end of World War I, her intellectual life continued to develop. This was the case particularly in Russian-ruled Warsaw, where in lieu of underground lectures and secret scholarly organizations a Wolna Wszechnica Polska(Free Polish University) was created in 1905 and the tireless Władysław Weryho(1868–1916) had in 1898 founded Poland's first philosophical journal, Przegląd Filozoficzny(The Philosophical Review), and in 1904 a Philosophical Society.In 1907 Weryho founded a Psychological Society, and subsequently Psychological and Philosophical Institutes. About 1910 the small number of professionally trained philosophers increased sharply, as individuals returned who had been inspired by Mahrburg's underground lectures to study philosophy in Austrian-ruled Lwówand Krakówor abroad.
Kraków as well, especially after 1910, saw a quickening of the philosophical movement, particularly at the Polish Academy of Learning, where at the prompting of Władysław Heinrich there came into being in 1911 a Committee for the History of Polish Philosophy and there was an immense growth in the number of philosophical papers and publications, no longer only of a historical character.
At Lwów, Kazimierz Twardowski from 1895 stimulated a lively philosophical movement, in 1904 founded the Polish Philosophical Society, and in 1911 began publication of Ruch Filozoficzny (The Philosophical Movement).
There was growing interest in western philosophical currents, and much discussion of Pragmatism and Bergsonism, psychoanalysis, Henri Poincaré's Conventionalism, Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology, the Marburg School, and the social-science methodologies of Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert. At the same time, original ideas developed on Polish soil.
Those who distinguished themselves in Polish philosophy in these pre-World War I years of the twentieth century, formed two groups.
One group developed apart from institutions of higher learning and learned societies, and appealed less to trained philosophers than to broader circles, which it (if but briefly) captured. It constituted a reaction against the preceding period of Positivism, and included Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911), Wincenty Lutosławski (1863–1954) and, to a degree, Edward Abramowski (1868–1918).
The second group of philosophers who started off Polish philosophy in the twentieth century had an academic character. They included Władysław Heinrich (1869–1957) in Kraków, Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938) in Lwów, and Leon Petrażycki (1867–1931) abroad—all three, active members of the Polish Academy of Learning. Despite the considerable differences among them, they shared some basic features: all three were empiricists concerned not with metaphysics but with the foundations of philosophy; they were interested in philosophy itself, not merely its history; they understood philosophy in positive terms, but none of them was a Positivist in the old style.
Following the restoration of Poland's independence in 1918, the two older universities (Kraków University, Lwów University) were joined by four new ones (Warsaw University, Poznań University, Wilno University, Lublin University). New philosophical journals appeared; all the university cities formed philosophical associations; conventions of Polish philosophers were held; philosophy became more professional, academic, scholarly.
A characteristic of the interbellum was that maximalist, metaphysical currents began to fade away. The dominant ambition in philosophical theory now was not breadth but precision. This was a period of specialization, consistent with the conviction that general philosophy would not yield precise results such as could be obtained in logic, psychology or the history of philosophy.
A few individuals did develop a general philosophical outlook: notably, Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886–1981), Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), and Roman Ingarden (1893–1970).
Otherwise, however, specialization was the rule. The Kraków school, true to tradition, showed an eminently historical character and produced a medievalist of world renown, Father Konstanty Michalski (1879–1947). The Lwów school concentrated on the analysis of concepts; and in doing so, it considered both their aspects, the subjective and objective—hence, the psychological and the logical. Twardowski himself continued working at the border of psychology and logic; his pupils, however, generally split in their interests, specializing in either psychology or logic.
The analytical program that Twardowski passed on to his pupils, and which they in turn spread throughout Poland, was affined to that of Franz Brentano's school (Twardowski's alma mater) in Austria and to that of the British analytic school, which likewise had arisen as a reaction against speculative systems.
The alumni of the Lwów school entered three distinct fields. Some devoted themselves to psychology: Stefan Błachowski (1889–1962), professor at Poznań, entirely; Władysław Witwicki (1878–1948), professor at Warsaw, partly. Others pursued the theory of knowledge: they included Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963), professor at Lwów, and after World War II at Poznań, whose views resembled Neopositivism and who developed an original theory of radical Conventionalism. The third group worked in mathematical, or symbolic, logic.
The most important center for mathematical logic was Warsaw. The Warsaw school of logic was headed by Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956) and Stanisław Leśniewski (1886–1939), professors at Warsaw University, and the first of their pupils to achieve eminence, even before World War II, was Alfred Tarski (1902–83), from 1939 in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; another pupil of Łukasiewicz, Bolesław Sobociński, became a professor at the University of Notre Dame. The Warsaw logic gained a worldwide importance similar to that of the Kraków medievalism.
Warsaw was not, however, the sole Polish venue for logic studies. These were initiated at Kraków by the mathematics professor, Jan Sleszyński. At Kraków, too, and later at Lwów, they were conducted by Leon Chwistek (1884–1944), a multi-faceted and somewhat eccentric thinker—mathematician, philosopher, esthetician, painter—whose name came to be associated popularly with his concept of "plural realities."
After Petrażycki's death, the outstanding legal philosopher was Czesław Znamierowski (1888–1967), professor of philosophy at Poznań. Another leading thinker of the period, active on the borderlines of sociology and philosophy, in both Poland and the United States, was Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958).
In the interbellum, the philosopher members of the Polish Academy of Learning included Heinrich (Kraków), Kazimierz Twardowski (Lwów), Leon Petrażycki (Warsaw), and, from the following generation: Konstanty Michalski, Jan Łukasiewicz and Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1886–1980). Michalski's historical works revolutionized prevailing views on via moderna in late medieval philosophy. Łukasiewicz gained world fame with his concept of many-valued logic and is known for his "Polish notation." Tatarkiewicz was the first to prepare in Polish a large-scale comprehensive history of western philosophy and a History of Aesthetics and worked at systematizing the concepts of esthetics and ethics.
After World War II, Roman Ingarden, Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Alfred Tarski became members of the Academy.
For some four decades following World War II, in Poland, a disproportionately prominent official role was given to Marxist philosophy. This, and contemporaneous sociopolitical currents, stimulated Leszek Kołakowski, writing in exile, to publish influential critiques of Marxist theory and communist practice. Kołakowski also wrote a remarkable history of Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle.
Similarly notable for his critiques of Soviet Marxism was Józef Maria Bocheński, O.P., a Catholic philosopher of the Dominican Order who lectured in Rome at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) and at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Bocheński also gained renown for his work in logic and ethics.
Other Polish philosophers of the postwar period included Andrzej Zabłudowski, who engaged in polemics with Nelson Goodman; and Marek Siemek, a historian of German Transcendental Philosophy and recipient of an honorary doctorate from Bonn University.
Read more about this topic: History Of Philosophy In Poland