The article is focused on the Lublin Philosophical School; it explains its name, presents its founders, reveals the causes of its rise, and introduce the specific character of the School’s philosophy. It starts with stating the fact that in the proper sense, the term “Lublin Philosophical School” describes a way of cultivating realistic (classical) philosophy developed in the 1950s by a group of philosophers at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. The Lublin Philosophical School is characterized by cognitive realism (the object of cognition is really existing being), maximalism (taking up all existentially important questions), methodological autonomy (in relation to the natural-mathematical sciences and theology), transcendentalism in its assertions (its assertions refer to all reality), methodological-epistemological unity (the same method applied in objectively cultivated philosophical disciplines), coherence (which guarantees the objective unity of the object), and objectivity (achieved by the verifiability of assertions on their own terms, which is achieved by relating them in each instance to objective evidence). The term is the name of the Polish school of realistic (classical) philosophy that arose as a response to the Marxism that was imposed administratively on Polish institutions of learning, and also as a response to other philosophical currents dominant at the time such as phenomenology, existentialism, and logical positivism.
The article is concentrated on the Lublin Philosophical School which came into being in the institutional framework of the Department of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland; it describes its achievements, which took place at different stages of the School’s development, as well as the School’s new initiatives and challenges. The development of the School was connected with the involvement of new people and successive generations of new students who joined in the cultivation of realistic philosophy. One can regard the years 1950–1966 as the first stage of the School’s development, in which the School’s program was formulated. The following stages are the years 1967–1980, and 1981–2004, and the years that follow, in which new generations of students who take up inquiries in the spirit of the School’s program arrive. The article also explains the reasons why today the Lublin Philosophical School cannot be identified with the Department of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Lublin, but rather with a special style of cultivating philosophy.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.