Michał Wiszniewski’s concept of national philosophy. Part 1: Sources and inspirations

Abstract

Polish national philosophy is usually associated with the phenomena and concepts prevalent in the first half of the 19th century, i.e. in the Romantic era. This philosophy is traditionally linked with the main representatives of Romanticism, although not all Romantic thinkers belonged to this current – there were also philosophers whose views were closer to the ideas propagated later by positivists. This group includes Michał Wiszniewski (1797–1865), a professor at the Jagiellonian University, and a representative of the Krakow’s philosophical milieu, who is considered one of the main Polish prepositivists. He also put forward the idea of a national philosophy project, a concept rarely mentioned in the literature on the history of Polish philosophy. Wiszniewski did not write a separate work solely dedicated to this issue, but included thoughts related to the concept of national philosophy in his various works. Therefore, the aim of the article is to extract these thoughts from his works, systematise them, and develop a holistic and coherent picture of this concept. It is divided into two parts, and the purpose the first part is to present sources of Wiszniewski’s concept, i.e. the historical and philosophical background against which he developed his idea of national philosophy, and to discuss the factors which led him to postulate that it was necessary to create Polish national philosophy. The article indicates the features shared by Wiszniewski’s project and the Romantic ideas, which makes it impossible to call it wholly prepositivistc, as well as the features that differentiate these two, which indicates that national philosophy is not the same as Romantic philosophy.