Location
Age
Area of FocusAbout Leszek's Work
Leszek Kolakowski was an historian of philosophy and religion.
His philosophical investigations focused on culture, religion, epistemology, and political theory. As a historian of ideas, he studied seventeenth-century Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation. Kolakowski was a professor at the University of Warsaw until 1968, when he was expelled from the University for political reasons. He was best known for his three-volume work, Main Currents of Marxism (1978). His other works included Chrétiens sans église. La conscience religieuse et le lieu confessional au XVIIème siècle (1964), Husserl and the Search for Certitude (1975), Religion (1982), Bergson (1985), Modernity on Endless Trial (1990), and God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (1995). He also wrote fiction and drama.
Biography
Kolakowski was a professor in the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (retired in 1994), and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, the University of Oxford.
Kolakowski received a B.A. (1949) and an M.A. (1950) from the University of Lodz and received a Ph.D. (1953) from the University of Warsaw.
Last updated January 1, 2005.
Published on February 1, 1983
