Leszek Kołakowski

Born	(1927-10-23)October 23, 1927 Radom, Poland
Died	July 17, 2009(2009-07-17) (aged 81) Oxford, England
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
Influenced by Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
Influenced Christopher Hitchens, Solidarity

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Leszek Kołakowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈlɛʂɛk kɔwaˈkɔfskʲi]; October 23, 1927 – July 17, 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism, which is "considered by some to be one of the most important books on political theory of the 20th century.

"The three volumes progress chronologically from Karl Marx's lifetime to the years after Stalin's death. The third volume looks at what happened to Marxism in the twentieth century and makes a particular example of the career of Georg Lukacs - "Kolakowski does an even better job than Isaiah Berlin of showing how Marxism affected everything at the mental level." ^{[1] [2]}

Biography[link]

Kołakowski was born in Radom, Poland. Owing to the German occupation of Poland in World War II, he did not go to school but read books and took occasional private lessons, passing his school-leaving examinations as an external student in the underground school system. After the war, he studied philosophy at Łódź University and in 1953 earned a doctorate from Warsaw University, with a thesis on Spinoza. He was a professor and chairman of Warsaw University's department of the history of philosophy from 1959 to 1968.

In his youth, Kołakowski was a precocious intellect, and became a devout communist. In the period 1947-1966, he was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party. His intellectual promise earned him a trip to Moscow, where he saw the future and found it repulsive. He broke with Stalinism, becoming a "revisionist Marxist" advocating a humanist interpretation of Marx. One year after the 1956 Polish October, Kołakowski published a four-part critique of Soviet-Marxist dogmas, including historical determinism, in the Polish periodical Nowa Kultura.^[3] He lost his job at Warsaw University, was expelled from the Polish United Workers' Party, and was prevented from obtaining any other academic post.^[4]

Kołakowski came to believe that the totalitarian cruelty of Stalinism was not an aberration, but instead a logical end product of Marxism, whose genealogy he examined in his monumental Main Currents of Marxism, his major work published in 1976-1978, which won him international renown.^[5]

Kolakowski became increasingly fascinated by the contribution which theological assumptions make to Western, and, in particular, modern thought, and defended the role which freedom plays in the human quest for the transcendent. His The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia asserts that, for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it. Nevertheless, while human fallibility implies that we ought to treat claims to infallibility with scepticism, our pursuit of the higher (such as truth and goodness) is ennobling.

In 1968, Kołakowski became a visiting professor in the department of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal and in 1969 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970, he became a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He remained mostly at Oxford, although he spent part of 1974 at Yale University, and from 1981 to 1994 was a part-time professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Although his works were officially banned in Poland, underground copies of them influenced the opinions of the Polish intellectual opposition. His 1971 essay Theses on Hope and Hopelessness, which suggested that self-organized social groups could gradually expand the spheres of civil society in a totalitarian state, helped to inspire the dissident movements of the 1970s that led to Solidarity and, eventually, to the collapse of Communism in Europe in 1989. In the 1980s, Kołakowski supported Solidarity by giving interviews, writing and fund-raising.

In Poland, Kołakowski is not only revered as a philosopher and historian of ideas, but also as an icon for opponents of communism. Adam Michnik has called Kołakowski "one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture".^[6][7]

Kołakowski died in July 2009, aged 81, in Oxford, England.

Awards[link]

In 1986, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Kołakowski for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Kołakowski's lecture, "The Idolatry of Politics",^[8] includes Kołakowski's much quoted aphorism, "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are".^[9]

In 2003, the Library of Congress named Kołakowski the first winner of the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities.^[10][11]

Other awards: the German Booksellers Peace Prize, 1977; Erasmus Prize, 1980; Veillon Foundation European Prize for the Essay, 1980; MacArthur Award, 1982; University of Chicago Press Gordon J. Laing Award, 1991; Tocqueville Prize, 1994.

Bibliography[link]

• Klucz niebieski, albo opowieści budujące z historii świętej zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze (The Key to Heaven), 1957
• 13 bajek z królestwa Lailonii dla dużych i małych (Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia and the Key to Heaven), 1963
• Rozmowy z diablem (US title: Conversations with the Devil / UK title: Talk of the Devil; reissued with The Key to Heaven under the title The Devil and Scripture, 1973), 1965
• Świadomość religijna i więź kościelna, 1965
• Od Hume'a do Koła Wiedeńskiego (the 1st edition:The Alienation of Reason, translated by Norbert Guterman, 1966/ later as Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle),
• Kultura i fetysze (Toward a Marxist Humanism, translated by Jane Zielonko Peel, and Marxism and Beyond), 1967
• A Leszek Kołakowski Reader, 1971
• Positivist Philosophy, 1971
• TriQuartely 22, 1971
• Obecność mitu (The Presence of Myth), 1972
• ed. The Socialist Idea, 1974 (with Stuart Hampshire)
• Husserl and the Search for Certitude, 1975
• Główne nurty marksizmu (Main Currents of Marxism), 1976 (3 vols.)
• Czy diabeł może być zbawiony i 27 innych kazań, 1982
• Religion: If There Is No God, 1982
• Bergson, 1985
• Le Village introuvable, 1986
• Metaphysical Horror, 1988 (revised edition, 2001)
• Pochwała niekonsekwencji, 1989 (ed. by Zbigniew Menzel)
• Cywilizacja na ławie oskarżonych, 1990 (ed. by Paweł Kłoczowski)
• Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press), 1990
• God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, 1995
• Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life, 1999
• The Two Eyes of Spinoza and Other Essays on Philosophers, 2004
• My Correct Views on Everything, 2005
• Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?, 2007

Awards[link]

• Jurzykowski Prize (1969)
• Veillon Foundation European Prize for the Essay (1980) (for all his work)
• Erasmus Prize (1983)
• MacArthur Fellowship (1983)
• Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986)
• Award of the Polish Pen Club (1988)
• Gordon J. Laing Award (1991)
• Kluge Prize of the Library of Congress (2004)
• St. George Medal (2006)
• Jerusalem Prize (2007)
• Democracy Service Medal (2009)

See also[link]

• Law of the Infinite Cornucopia
• Adam Schaff
• History of philosophy in Poland
• List of Poles
• Polish British

References[link]

External links[link]

• Leszek Kołakowski in the Information Processing Centre database (Polish)
• Leszek Kołakowski - Daily Telegraph obituary
• - The Times (London) Obituary
• Polish Philosophy Page: Bibliography, at the Internet Archive
• Leszek Kołakowski notebook, by Cosma Shalizi
• Kołakowski, Leszek (1974). "My correct views on everything: A rejoinder to Edward Thompson's 'Open letter to Leszek Kołakowski'". Socialist Register. http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5323. 
• How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist
• The Alienation of Reason (Extract)
• The Death of Utopia Reconsidered
• The Complete and Brief Metaphysics
• Judt, Tony. "Goodbye to All That?" in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 53, No. 14, September 21, 2006 (review-essay on Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown by Leszek Kołakowski, translated from the Polish by P.S. Falla. Norton, 2005, ISBN 0-393-06054-3; My Correct Views on Everything by Leszek Kołakowski, edited by Zbigniew Janowski. St. Augustine's, 2004, ISBN 1-58731-525-4; Karl Marx ou l'esprit du monde by Jacques Attali. Paris: Fayard, 2005, ISBN 2-213-62491-7)
• Roger Kimball, Leszek Kołakowski and the Anatomy of Totalitarianism

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Barbara Skarga

Barbara Skarga, May 17, 2000
Born	October 25, 1919 Warsaw, Poland
Died	September 19, 2009 Olsztyn, Poland
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Philosophy of dialogue
Main interests	Epistemology, Humanity, Ontology, Ethics
Influenced by Józef Tischner

Barbara Skarga (October 25, 1919- September 18, 2009) was a Polish philosophy historian and philosopher who worked mainly in ethics and epistemology. Member of Polish Academy of Sciences.

Biography[link]

Born in Warsaw in Reformed tradition family with gentry roots. Her sister was actress Hanna Skarżanka and brother was Edward Skarga. Barbara Skarga studied philosophy at Vilnius University. During World War II she was a member of resistant movement Armia Krajowa. In 1944 she was arrested by soviets and sentenced to 10 years of katorga. After that, she was forced to live in Kolhoz. She came back to Poland in 1955 and graduated in 1957 at Warsaw University where she also finished postgraduate studies and received the PhD title. Became Philosophy Professor in 1988.
Skarga was an editor-in-chief of philosophy magazine "Etyka". In 1995 awarded Order of the White Eagle.
She died on September 18, 2009 and was buried on September 25 in Warsaw.

Bibliography[link]

• Narodziny pozytywizmu polskiego 1831-1864 (1964)
• Kłopoty intelektu. Między Comte'em a Bergsonem (1975)
• Czas i trwanie. Studia nad Bergsonem (1982)
• Po wyzwoleniu 1944-1956 (1985)
• Przeszłość i interpretacje (1987)
• Granice historyczności (1989)
• Tożsamość i różnica. Eseje metafizyczne (1997)
• Ślad i obecność (2002)
• Kwintet metafizyczny (2005)
• Człowiek to nie jest piękne zwierzę (2007)
• Tercet metafizyczny (2009)