Background
Kolakowski, Leszek was born on October 23, 1927 in Radom.
Kolakowski, Leszek was born on October 23, 1927 in Radom.
1945-1950, University of Lodz. Poland; 1953. PhD, University of Warsaw.
1947-1949, Assistant in Logic, University of Lodz. 1950-1959, University of Warsaw, Assistant and then Docent. 1959— 1968, Chairman and then Professor, History of Philosophy, University of Warsaw.
Professor, Yale University. 1968-1969, Visiting Professor. McGill University, Montreal.
1969-1970, University of California. Berkeley; from 1970, Senior Research Fellow, All Souls, Oxford. 1980, Fellow of the British Academy.
1983, awarded Erasmus Prize and McArthur Fellowship. 1984, Jefferson Award.
Kolakowski was a member of the Polish Comntunist Party in the 1950s and was closely involved m the movement towards liberation that led, in 1956, to the Polish ‘spring’. Subsequently, his vigorous criticisms of Communist doctrine provoked his dismissal from the Party in 1966 and from his professorial Chair at Warsaw in 1968. He moved to the West and began to develop a sustained critique of Communism, working out a coherent form of Marxist humanism. His later work moves away from Marxism and is concerned with issues in ethics and metaphysics. The three volumes of Kolakowski’s Ma‘n Currents in Marxism (1978) provide a compre' hensive overview of the movement and examine not only the origins and development of dialects but also how ‘the original idea came to serve as a rallying-point for so many different and mutually hostile forces’. The chronology of the work runs from Plotinus, regarded as foundational in the account of dialectic, to the Marxistn of the 1970s and Mao Zedong. Towards the end o the Epilogue of the third volume Kolakowski writes: ‘At present Marxism neither interprets the world nor changes it: it is merely a repertoire of slogans serving to organize various interests, most of them completely remote from those with which Marxism originally identified itself’. In Religion (1982) Kolakowski treats of‘God. the Devil, Sin and other Worries of the so-called Philosophy of Religion’. He critically analyses a W'ide range of arguments for religious belief, as W’ell as a range of proposals that seek an understanding of them through their historical, anthropological and cultural contexts. He maintains that a rationalistic epistemology alone can neither settle the question of the existence of God nor Provide a satisfactory foundation for morality. Sources: Philosophical Investigations; personal communication.