| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Władysław Tatarkiewicz | |
| Birth Date: | April 3, 1886 |
| Birth Place: | Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire |
| Death Date: | April 4, 1980 (aged 94) |
| Death Place: | Warsaw, Polish People's Republic |
| Alma Mater: | Warsaw University of Technology University of Warsaw |
| School Tradition: | Lwów–Warsaw school of logic |
| Main Interests: | aesthetics, ethics, history of art, history of philosophy |
Władysław Tatarkiewicz (pronounced as /pol/; 3 April 1886 - 4 April 1980) was a Polish philosopher, historian of philosophy, historian of art, esthetician, and ethicist.[1]
Tatarkiewicz began his higher education at Warsaw University. When it was closed by the Russian Imperial authorities in 1905, he was forced to continue his education abroad in Marburg, Germany, where he studied from 1907 to 1910.[2]
As he describes in his Memoirs, it was a chance encounter with a male relative, whose height made him stand out above the crowd at a Kraków railroad station, upon the outbreak of World War I that led Tatarkiewicz to spend the war years in Warsaw.[3] There he began his career as a lecturer in philosophy, teaching at a girls' school on Mokotowska Street, across the street from where Józef Piłsudski was to reside during his first days after World War I.During World War I, when the Polish University of Warsaw was opened under the sponsorship of the occupying Germans – who wanted to win Polish support for their war effort – Tatarkiewicz directed its philosophy department in 1915–19.
In 1919–21 he was professor at Stefan Batory University in Wilno, in 1921–23 at the University of Poznań, and in 1923–61 again at the University of Warsaw. In 1930 he became a member of the Polish Academy of Learning.[4]
During World War II, risking his life, he conducted underground lectures in German-occupied Warsaw[5] (one of the audience members was Czesław Miłosz).[6] After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising (August–October 1944) he again consciously risked his life when retrieving a manuscript from the gutter, where a German soldier had hurled it (this and other materials were later published as a book, in English translation titled Analysis of Happiness).[7]
After World War II, he taught at the University of Warsaw. In March 1950 Tatarkiewicz was demoted and banned from teaching after seven of his students (including Henryk Holland and Leszek Kołakowski), who were activists in the Polish United Workers' Party, presented a "Letter of 7" which denounced him for "privileging 'objective-bourgois' science instead of Marxist engagement" and opposing "the construction of socialism in Poland".[8]
Władysław Tatarkiewicz died the day after his 94th birthday. In his Memoirs, published shortly before, he recalled having been ousted from his University chair (by Henryk Holland, a politically connected former student[9]). Characteristically, he saw even that indignity as a blessing in disguise, as it gave him freedom from academic duties, and leisure to pursue research and writing.[10]
Tatarkiewicz reflected that at all crucial junctures of his life, he had failed to foresee events, many of them tragic, but that this had probably been for the better, since he could not have altered them anyway.[11]
Tatarkiewicz believed that "satisfaction with particular things... is only partial satisfaction; happiness requires total satisfaction, that is, satisfaction with life as a whole."[12]
Tatarkiewicz belonged to the interwar Lwów–Warsaw school of logic, created by Kazimierz Twardowski, which gave reborn Poland many scholars and scientists: philosophers, logicians, psychologists, sociologists, and organizers of academia.[13]
Tatarkiewicz educated generations of Polish philosophers, estheticians and art historians, as well as a multitude of interested laymen.[14] He posthumously continues to do so through his History of Philosophy and numerous other works.
In his final years, Tatarkiewicz devoted considerable attention to securing translations of his major works. Of the below incomplete listing of his works, his 1909 German-language doctoral thesis, and his History of Philosophy, Łazienki warszawskie, Parerga, and Memoirs have not been translated into English.