Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz

As he describes in his 1979 Memoirs (Polish: Wspomnienia), it was a chance meeting with a relative at a Kraków railroad station upon the outbreak of World War I that led to Tatarkiewicz spending the war years in Warsaw. There he began his career as a lecturer in philosophy, teaching at a girls' school on ulica Mokotowska (Mokotowska Street: across the street from where Józef Piłsudski was to reside during his first days after World War I). When a Polish Warsaw University was opened under the sponsorship of the occupying Germans—who wanted to win Polish support for their war effort—Tatarkiewicz in 1915-1919 directed its philosophy department. In 1919-1921 he was a professor at Vilnius University; in 1921-1923, at Poznań University; and in 1923-1961, at Warsaw University. In 1930 he was inducted as a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

During World War II, at the risk of his life, he conducted underground lectures in German-occupied Warsaw (one of the auditors was Czesław Miłosz). After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising (August-October 1944), he again took his life into his hands by retrieving a book manuscript of his from the gutter, where a German soldier had hurled it.

Tatarkiewicz educated generations of Polish philosophers, estheticians and art historians, as well as interested laymen, and posthumously continues to do so through his famous three-volume History of Philosophy (Polish: Historia filozofii) and numerous other works. Some of these have been translated into English, including a three-volume History of Aesthetics, an Analysis of Happiness (Polish: O szczęściu), a monograph On Perfection, and A History of Six Ideas (in esthetics; Polish: Dzieje sześciu pojęć).

In his Memoirs, published shortly before his death—which came the day after his 94th birthday—Tatarkiewicz recalled having been ousted from his Warsaw University chair by a (politically-connected) former student. Characteristically, he saw even that indignity as a blessing in disguise, as it gave him—freed from academic duties—leisure to pursue research and writing. He reflected philosophically 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 good, since he couldn't have altered them anyway.