History of Philosophy in Poland - Renaissance

Renaissance

The spirit of Humanism, which had reached Poland by the middle of the fifteenth century, was not very "philosophical." Rather, it lent its stimulus to linguistic studies, political thought, and scientific research. But these manifested a philosophical attitude different from that of the previous period.

Empirical natural science had flourished at Kraków as early as the fifteenth century, side by side with speculative philosophy. The most perfect product of this blossoming was Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543, Polish: Mikołaj Kopernik). He was not only a scientist but a philosopher. According to Tatarkiewicz, he may have been the greatest—in any case, the most renowned—philosopher that Poland ever produced. He drew the inspiration for his cardinal discovery from philosophy; he had become acquainted through Marsilio Ficino with the philosophies of Plato and the Pythagoreans; and through the writings of the philosophers Cicero and Plutarch he had learned about the ancients who had declared themselves in favor of the Earth's movement.

Copernicus may also have been influenced by Kraków philosophy: during his studies there, Terminist physics had been taught, with special emphasis on "impetus." His own thinking was guided by philosophical considerations. He arrived at the heliocentric thesis (as he was to write in a youthful treatise) "ratione postea equidem sensu": it was not observation but the discovery of a logical contradiction in Ptolemy's system, that served him as a point of departure that led to the new astronomy. In his dedication to Pope Paul III, he submitted his work for judgment by "philosophers."

In its turn, Copernicus' theory transformed man's view of the structure of the universe, and of the place held in it by the earth and by man, and thus attained a far-reaching philosophical importance.

Copernicus was involved not only in natural science and natural philosophy but also—by his studies in the theory of value and money (see "Gresham's Law")—in the philosophy of man.

In the early sixteenth century, Plato, who had become a model for philosophy in Italy, especially in Medicean Florence, was represented in Poland in some ways by Adam of Łowicz, author of Conversations about Immortality.

Generally speaking, though, Poland remained Aristotelian. Sebastian Petrycy of Pilzno (1554–1626) laid stress, in the theory of knowledge, on experiment and induction; and in psychology, on feeling and will; while in politics he preached democratic ideas. Petrycy's central feature was his linking of philosophical theory with the requirements of practical national life. In 1601-18, a period when translations into modern languages were still rarities, he accomplished Polish translations of Aristotle's practical works. With Petrycy, vernacular Polish philosophical terminology began to develop not much later than did the French and German.

Yet another Renaissance current, the new Stoicism, was represented in Poland by Jakub Górski (ca. 1525–1585), author of a famous Dialectic (1563) and of many works in grammar, rhetoric, theology and sociology. He tended toward eclecticism, attempting to reconcile the Stoics with Aristotle.

A later, purer representative of Stoicism in Poland was Adam Burski (ca. 1560–1611), author of a Dialectica Ciceronis (1604) boldly proclaiming Stoic sensualism and empiricism and—before Francis Bacon—urging the use of inductive method.

A star among the pleiade of progressive political philosophers during the Polish Renaissance was Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (1503–72), who advocated on behalf of equality for all before the law, the accountability of monarch and government to the nation, and social assistance for the weak and disadvantaged. His chief work was De Republica emendanda (On Reform of the Republic, 1551–54).

Another notable political thinker was Wawrzyniec Grzymała Goślicki (1530–1607), best known in Poland and abroad for his book De optimo senatore (The Accomplished Senator, 1568). It propounded the view—which for long got the book banned in England, as subversive of monarchy—that a ruler may legitimately govern only with the sufferance of the people.

After the first decades of the 17th century, the wars, invasions and internal dissensions that beset the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, brought a decline in philosophy. If in the ensuing period there was independent philosophical thought, it was among the religious dissenters, particularly the Polish Arians, also known variously as Antitrinitarians, Socinians, and Polish Brethren—forerunners of the British and American Socinians, Unitarians and Deists who were to figure prominently in the intellectual and political currents of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

The Polish dissenters created an original ethical theory radically condemning evil and violence. Centers of intellectual life such as that at Leszno hosted notable thinkers such as the Czech pedagogue, Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), and the Pole, Jan Jonston. Jonston was tutor and physician to the Leszczyński family, a devotee of Bacon and experimental knowledge, and author of Naturae constantia, published in Amsterdam in 1632, whose geometrical method and naturalistic, almost pantheistic concept of the world may have influenced Benedict Spinoza.

The Leszczyński family itself would produce an 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian king, Stanisław Leszczyński (1677–1766; reigned in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1704-11 and again 1733-36), "le philosophe bienfaisant" ("the beneficent philosopher")—in fact, an independent thinker whose views on culture were in advance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's, and who was the first to introduce into Polish intellectual life on a large scale the French influences that were later to become so strong.