Polska

Prominent philosophers have drawn world-wide attention to the Polish school of philosophy. Among them are many of the pupils of Roman Ingarden. His great work Spór o istnienie świata (The Controversy about the Existence of the World, 2 vols.) was published in 1947. In it he formulated his ontological views on various modalities of being as well as his concepts of metaphysics.  A student of Edmund Husserl, Roman Ingarden addressed the problem of distinguishing between real objects and those which are purely intentional. His students include M. Fritzhand, D. Gierulanka, J. Tischner, and K. Wojtyła. His views have become the basis for phenomological aesthetics. Leszek Kołakowski is another important Polish philosopher, now at Oxford University. His specialisations include seventeenth-century mysticism, cultural issues, and particularly the relationship between faith and the materialistic worldview. Kołakowski polemicised with Marxism in his work The Main Currents of Marxism, and also posed a number of questions about the sense of human existence in his book Religion, if there is no God. Marxism also interested the Dominican Józef Maria Bocheński, who as of in 1950 worked at Freiburg University, where he was rector during the years 1964-1966. Father Bocheński was known above all for his passionate polemics with the Marxists, whose theses he consistently undermined. The East European Institute in Freiburg was founded on his initiative. In addition, a series titled Studies in Soviet Thought was founded, which examined the influence of the Communist worldview on human consciousness. Michał Kalecki, now of Oxford, did work on the theory of business cycles in capitalism, positing that production depends both on investments and capital consumption. In 1970, Kalecki was nominated for the Nobel Prize in economics. Interest in his work was so great that Oxford University Press decided in 1990 to publish his complete works. Kalecki was the third Pole to be honoured in this way by OUP, which has also published the complete works of Nicolaus Copernicus and Stefan Banach.