On Feb. 27th, 2023, Oral History and the Classics project team enjoyed the honour to visit Professor Bogdan Dembiński in the Library of The University of Silesia (Uniwersytet Śląski, UŚ) in Katowice. Profesor Dembiński is another Polish specialist in Greek philosophy who has agreed to give an interview which will be included in the Oral History and the Classics collection on the website of the University of Hradec Králové. In December 2023, as we have already announced, a similar interview was shot with prof. Andrzej Wesoły in Poznań.

Bogdan Dembiński is currently a professor at UŚ, where he has taught and done his research work on Greek philosophy for almost four decades. Tomasz Mróz, who carried out the interview, in the last decade of the 20th century had been a participant in his lectures on ancient thought. The University of Silesia is not the only institution where prof. Dembiński delivers courses in philosophy. He teaches, for example, at The Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice. He greatly appreciates this opportunity to introduce philosophy to the audiences who represent a different type of sensibility than philosophy students.

Having graduated in philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), Bogdan Dembiński returned to his home region of Silesia and received his Ph.D. on a thesis devoted to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1987). Apart from his university teachers it was Heidegger who induced him to focus on the everlasting legacy of Greek philosophy. Consequently, his postdoctoral thesis had Plato’s theory of ideas as its topic (1998) and subsequently Plato became the most important subject of his research. We shall add that prof. Dembiński was granted a title of the full professor in 2011 and then became a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków.

The list of books on Plato, which were authored by Bogdan Dembiński, includes: Teoria idei – ewolucja myśli Platońskiej [Theory of Ideas – the evolution of Plato’s thought], 1997 and re-editions; Późna nauka Platona – związki ontologii i matematyki [The Late Philosophy of Plato – relations between ontology and mathematics], 2003; Późny Platon i Stara Akademia [The Late Plato and the Old Academy], 2010; Stara Akademia Platona [Plato’s Old Academy], 2018.

Prof. Dembiński spoke about his academic curriculum and emphasised his current involvement in scientific activities of the Copernicus Center for Interdiciplinary Studies, founded by prof. Michał Heller, the recipient of the Templeton Prize. In Dembiński’s view, ancient Greek reflection on the nature and cosmos should be continuously referred to, not only by philosophers, by also by the representatives of contemporary natural sciences, theoretical physics and cosmology, for profound Greek ideas still have the power to stimulate research in many fields.

When the whole recording is edited and furnished with English subtitles, it will be make public and available on the project’s website. The interview meeting with prof. Dembiński would not be possible without his kind consent and hospitality of the UŚ Library staff. The interview was carried out by T. Mróz, while Jan Kadeřábek, a cinematographer and a cameraman, took care of all the technicalities.