Background
Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw was born in 1886 in Warsaw.
Value theorist: historian of philosophy
Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw was born in 1886 in Warsaw.
Sent down from Warsaw University after involvement in nationalist student politics, Tatarkiewicz studied in Switzerland, France and Germany (doctoral studies on Aristotle at Marburg, concluded in 1910).
First major appointment was as Professor at Lvov. Then moved (1915) to Warsaw University, where he was Professor until his death, creating an international reputation as an aesthetician and historian of philosophy. A member of many international and national learned societies.
One of the most important Polish philosophers ot this period, Tatarkiewicz derived from his doctoral work on Aristotle a lifelong interest in value theory, initially focused on moral value, but later expanded to the area of the aesthetic. In his ethical studies, Tatarkiewicz addresses the issues of the mode of being of values, their hierarchy and the possibility of their reduction. His conclusions include the thesis that good and evil are designations for features which are objective or, as he puts it, ‘intransigent’ properties. After the Second World War Tatarkiewicz produced a number of works of international stature on the history of Western aesthetics and the analysis of aesthetic concepts. These concepts, he argues, exhibit a number of properties which make study of them especially demanding: the initial concepts from the ancient world have been overlaid by notions from later periods, producing a blurring of sense akin to that generated by successive exposures on a single photographic plate: the concepts in aesthetic discourse have entered the field from an unusually varied set of backgrounds—e.g. philosophy, criticism, artists, and common speech—and this has produced a high number of different meanings for a given term: and many aesthetic concepts are concerned with emotional matters, and are unusually resistant to scholarly treatment. The area of aesthetics, he concludes, is densely tangled, and moreover exhibits a considerable degree of conceptual instability—there is no key concept in the field of discourse which has survived without real change. Tatarkiewicz’s other main area of significant achievement is in the history of philosophy. including that of his native country. He discerns two major tendencies in philosophical thought: a maximalist approach, within which philosophers attempt systematic accounts of the whole rerum natura; and a minimalist approach, in which the task of the philosopher is to scrutinize the foundations of knowledge. Underlying all Tatarkiewicz's work in the history of thought is the bedrock conviction that the subject is irreducibly untidy, complex and tangled: the world of human achievement is hardly less various than the world of nature, and attempts to impose tidy schemata on either will result in simplistic falsification.