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.
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.