Bogusław Wolniewicz (September 22, 1927 – August 4, 2017) was a Polish philosopher. He was a professor at University of Warsaw from 1963 to 1998. In scholarly circles, he is known as a translator and commentator of Ludwig Wittgenstein. From the 1990s, he became a publicist mostly affiliated with the Radio Maryja community. His controversial views were often regarded as anti-Semitic and Islamophobic.https://wiadomosci.com/zmarl-prof-boguslaw-wolniewicz-mial-90/ Zmarł prof. Bogusław Wolniewicz. Miał 90 lat
Education and career
Biography He started his education in 1934 in a Polish primary school. The war didn't interrupt his education, as no later than November 1939 he was already a student at a German primary school for Poles with a significantly lowered level of education. In 1941 he started working at Hermann Klechowitz's construction company while also attending a Berufsschule (trade school) affiliated with that company. From 1945 he studied at Queen Jadwiga High School, passing his final exams in 1947. In the years 1947–1951 he studied at the Nicolaus Copernicus University. Among his teachers were Tadeusz Czeżowski, Henryk Elzenberg, Tadeusz Szczurkiewicz and Kazimierz Sośnicki. In 1951 he got his master's degree in philosophy, his thesis "Criticism of subjective idealism" in V. I. Lenin’s "Materialism and Empirio-criticism" supervised by Czeżowski. Then he worked as a deputy assistant, and later as an assistant at the Department of Logic at the Nicolaus Copernicus University. In 1953 (the height of Stalinism), due to having his freedom of doing philosophical research limited, Wolniewicz quit his academic career, getting a job at the W-8 department of the Labor Union Association (Poznań), the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Gdańsk), the Voivodeship Council of Trade Unions and at one of the State Agricultural Farms.
In 1956 he started working at the Department of Philosophy at the Pedagogical University in Gdańsk. In 1962 he became a doctor of humanities, his dissertation "Semantics of plain language in Wittgenstein’s new philosophy" written under supervision of prof. Czeżowski and reviewed by Izydora Dąmbska and Henryk Elzenberg. In 1963, on the initiative of Adam Schaff, he was transferred to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In 1967 he became a docent of humanities with specialization in philosophy, his dissertation "Study of Wittgenstein’s philosophy", reviewed by Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Adam Schaff, Roman Suszko and Peter Geach. From 1968, he worked as a full-time docent at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. From 1969, he was a supervisor of the Subdivision of Philosophy, quitting two years later. Since the late 1960s, he started becoming famous abroad. In 1967, at the University of Chicago (as a visiting associate professor) he gave a trimester lecture on ontology of objects and facts. The same year, he gave a talk at the University of Boston and Cornell University. In 1968 he was one of the four lecturer at the Colloquium of the International Wittgenstein Congress in Vienna. In 1970 he gave a talk at the University of Moscow. In 1972 at the Temple University in Philadelphia, as a visiting professor, he gave a semester lecture on social philosophy and a seminar on Wittgenstein's philosophy. In 1975 he gave talks at the University of Cambridge and the University of Leeds on language and codes as well as the Hume's law, at the invitation of the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
In 1989 he switched from the Institute of Philosophy to the Institute of Philosophy of Religion, becoming a supervisor two years later and running the institution until 1998.
Wolniewicz retired in 1997, but continued giving lectures – however, in 1998 The Scientific Council of the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw didn't extend his job contract. Wolniewicz cited the reason behind it to be a disapproval of a decision to lower teaching standards. He devoted himself to scientific research ever since. During the first semester of the 2008/2009 academic year Wolniewicz returned to the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw and gave a guest monograph lecture, as a former professor of the University.
Thought He specialized in philosophy of religion and modern philosophy. He distanced himself from the main philosophical trends of the 20th century and accepted theses by "great thinkers", like: Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and especially Wittgenstein. Critical towards Freudianism, phenomenology, post-modernism and religious fundamentalism, and partially towards Marxism, he represented an analytical and metaphysical approach. The main assumptions of his beliefs were axiological absolutism in the rationalist version and metaphysical pessimism in looking at man and society. His entire philosophical system was based on his ontology of situation, which Wolniewicz treated mainly as a philosophical tool.
Metaphilosophical views He believed that philosophy was not science, but it wasn't cognitively idle either and did have characteristics of a knowledge – that's because not every type of knowledge is of scientific nature, just like history or a legal case are not science either. Philosophy is an attempt to rationally capture those issues where the knowledge of scientific type does not apply. It fills the gaps in knowledge for the branches that science hadn't covered in a particular period of history, but also due to the changes to conditions of social life its goals will never become exhausted. Quite the opposite, the role of philosophy keeps growing in the commotion of modern social life.
Philosophy has a nature of common-sense cognition: it articulates that every person could get to use common sense while also pondering deep enough in the process. Therefore, there is nothing exploratory about it, there are only obvious things, but they're also subjected to a logical order. Logic brings philosophy closer to science, but it's not just about providing philosophy with formal tools, but about giving philosophy with tools for creating clear thoughts, which in turn makes it possible to tell the truth from lie in the entire cognition of non-scientific nature.
Although the need for philosophy keeps rising in today's world, the modern state of philosophical culture is bad. There's a characteristic contrast between the opulence of philosophical literature and scarcity of ideas – Wolniewicz referred to this philosophical literature that is devoid of substantial ideas as "philosophical wastepaper". He put it apart from "philosophical literature", which included "antiquarian philosophy", which examines the evolution of ideas and relations between them, combined with a lack of interest in the actual value of the discussed views, and the "substantive philosophy", which attempts to cast light upon actual problems of the era in its aim for the truth. However, the academic philosophy isn't the only possible "substantive philosophy", the essayistic and literary creativity is equally important here, as it helps overcome the antiquarism that dominates the academic philosophy.
The substantive philosophy also divides here into two opposing trends: hermeneutical philosophy and analytical philosophy. According to hermeneutical philosophy, the goal of philosophy is to reveal the purpose of existence. Of all things, the mean of which is the ability to deeply immerse oneself in the old-time philosophy and eloquence that makes it possible to bring out the same feelings in people – Wolniewicz was critical towards the "hermeneutic philosophy", considering it to be a type of new gnosis, a form of extreme irrationalism. In opposition to the hermeneutic philosophy stands analytical philosophy, which recognized the existence of objective truth and the human mind's ability to discover it. Wolniewicz crossed the division between rationalism (today represented by the analytical philosophy) and irrationalism (today represented by the hermeneutic philosophy) with the division of philosophy into naturalism, which sees a part of nature in the man, and the whole of existence in nature, and anti-naturalism (transcendentalism), which proposes the existence of supernatural reality. One example of naturalistic rationalism could be positivism, of antinaturalistic rationalism - the early Wittgenstein's philosophy (from "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"), of the naturalistic irrationalism - the New Age, Freudianism and late Wittgenstein's philosophy (from "Philosophical Investigations"), of the antinaturalistic irrationalism – phenomenology and existentialism. Wolniewicz himself considered himself to be a rationalist and antinaturalist. The division is presented in the table below (it is worth noting that the largest oppositions are marked by diagonals): +Wolniewicz's division of philosophical viewsrationalismirrationalismnaturalismpositivism Tadeusz KotarbińskiFreudianism New Age
late Wittgenstein's philosophyantinaturalismearly Wittgenstein's philosophy Bogusław Wolniewiczphenomenology existentialism
Theology The theological ideas in Wolniewicz's thinking are mostly contained in his article "Criticism of theodicy in Bayle". This article contains dissent with Pierre Bayle's views on the topic of theodicy. The classical theodicy said that God's goodness and omnipotence are possible to coexist since evil is not God's invention but man's – the man on the other hand, in order to do good, has to be free, and since he's free, he has to be able to do evil as well. Bayle reasoned against the classic theodicy by saying that although freedom implies the ability to do evil, it doesn't imply its necessity, therefore evil can be avoided even when assuming human freedom.
When searching for arguments that could refute the legitimacy of Bayle's argumentation, Wolniewicz referred himself to non-standard modal concepts borrowed from Megarian logic. Its representative, Diodorus Cronus presented a prospective understanding of abilities, defining what's possible as what is or will be. Such understanding of ability is still not enough to oppose Bayle's argumentation against theodicy in line with theology, as it accepts the concept that those who are saved will sin in future, too – therefore Wolniewicz constructed a slightly different definition of ability that he calls "pseudo-Diodoric". According to that definition, because something can happen it means that something similar has already happened or will happen in the future. With such a definition of ability, the classic theodicy is logically sound and not subject to the criticism submitted by Bayle.
Anthropology Wolniewicz’s anthropological views can be described by the following concepts: anti-naturalism, rationalism, nativism, Manichaeism (this is, recognizing the existence of irrational evil in humans) and voluntarism. The human soul strives after truth and is irreducible to nature. Language is the carrier of truth, and man is its vessel. Truth is knowable due to the fact that the logical structure of language reflects somehow the metaphysical structure of the world. The ability to use language, in turn, is innate.
A human being is considered by Wolniewicz primarily as the totality of possibilities written in a DNA chain, of which not all are being realized. Moreover, in human genetic code there are potencies both for evil and for good. According to Wolniewicz, the former are stronger than the latter. Wolniewicz argues that there are two kinds of people: those whose tendencies towards evil are enormous and those whose tendencies are moderate. The task of community is to fight the former ones and support the latter ones. Communities are natural and necessary, but they cannot exist without some level of xenophobia.