Leszek Ko?akowski

Leszek Ko?akowski (born 23 October, 1927 in Radom, Poland) is a the most notable living Polish philosopher.

Life

Due to the German occupation of Poland during World War II he did not attend school, but read books with occasional private lessons, and took his final exams as an external student in the underground school system. He eventually studied philosophy in ?ód? and earned his doctorate from Warsaw University in 1953, later becoming a professor and chairman of its section on the history of philosophy (1959-1968).

Related Topics:
German - World War II - ?ód? - Warsaw University - 1953 - 1959 - 1968

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An orthodox Marxist at first, he was sent by the party in 1950 to Moscow on a course for promising communist intellectuals. It was there that he initially became aware of, as he put it himself, "the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system."

Related Topics:
Marxist - 1950 - Moscow - Communist - Stalinist

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Stalin's death in 1953 had the effect of splitting the party ranks with some calling for democratization. Many deaths resulted from the June 1956 worker's riots in Pozna?. In October of that year, the communist party of Poland chose W?adys?aw Gomu?ka as its leader, despite Moscow's objections. By then, Ko?akowski had become one of Poland's leading revisionist Marxists. His publication of What Is Socialism? - a short, concisive critique of Stalinism - was banned in Poland, but circulated privately and translated into English the next year.

Related Topics:
1953 - June - 1956 - Pozna? - October - W?adys?aw Gomu?ka

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Disillusioned with the stagnation of communism, he became increasingly outspoken. He was expelled from the party in 1966, dismissed from his professorship two years later, and went into exile. But his works, appearing in underground editions, continued to shape the opinions of the Polish intellectual oppositionists. His essay Theses on Hope and Hopelessness, which appeared in 1971 the Polish-language journal published in Paris Kultura, proposed an evolutionary strategy designed to weaken the system. The concept of this work inspired the activities of the Committee for the Defense of Workers and the Flying University, of which Ko?akowski was a foreign member.

Related Topics:
1966 - Kultura - Committee for the Defense of Workers - Flying University

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Ko?akowski left Poland and became a visiting professor at the department of philosophy at McGill University in 1968. In 1969 he moved to the University of California at Berkeley. In 1970, he became a senior research fellow at All Souls College at the Oxford. He has remained at Oxford ever since, but did spend part of 1974 at Yale, and from 1981 to 1994 was a part-time professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Related Topics:
McGill University - 1968 - University of California at Berkeley - All Souls College - Oxford - Yale - Committee on Social Thought - University of Chicago

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