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A. Habura’s Research Stay in Vilnius
We have already informed that the members of the Ancient Φilosophy Reception research group received a “Small Grant” from the Deputy Rector for Science and International Cooperation of the University of Zielona Góra. The aim of the AΦR team is to pursue research on the notes by Bohdan Zawadzki (1902-1966) from Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s (1886-1980) lectures on the philosophy of the Greeks. Now, we are glad to announce that the work is progressing.
The first phase of the research plan, that is, preliminary analysis of the manuscripts, has just been completed. It was thanks to the works of Adrian Habura, who travelled to Vilnius in May 2026 to assess the value of Zawadzki’s manuscripts and to identify the most significant issues that were emphasised by both, Zawadzki, the student, and Tatarkiewicz, the lecturing professor.
The next steps in the research plan include studies of the most important problems related to Tatarkiewicz’s lectures, as they were rendered by Zawadzki. The results will be presented in near future as conference or seminar papers and academic articles.
The Third Small Grant from the University of Zielona Góra
Prof. Justyna Patalas-Maliszewska, the Deputy Rector for Science and International Cooperation of the University of Zielona Góra, home institution of the AΦR, awarded Tomasz Mróz and Adrian Habura with a “Small Grant” (17th edition). These internal grants are distributed by the Rector annually among those researchers of UZ, who have submitted their proposals to the National Science Centre (NCN), received positive assessements from the experts, yet finally have not been granted funding.
The aim of the “Small Grant” for AΦR is to conduct preliminary research on extensive notes taken by Bohdan Zawadzki (1902-1966), later professor of psychology, during the lectures of Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1886-1980) on the philosophy of the Greeks, which were held at the University of Warsaw in the early twenties of the 20th century. Zawadzki’s manuscript is kept in one of the libraries in Vilnius.
The proposal received highest possible notes and funding will be spent on archival research and attending a conference.
The Second Doctoral Degree by a Member of AΦR Team
On April 14th, 2026, a public defense of Adrian Habura’s doctoral thesis took place in the Institute of Philosophy, University of Zielona Góra (UZ). The title of his dissertation was Aristotle as a Research Material and Source of Inspirations of Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1886-1980). The whole event was chaired by prof. Justyna Kroczak. At the start of the curriculum, the candidate was presented by the supervisor, Prof. Tomasz Mróz, who gave an overview of the candidate’s research and teaching experience, emphasised Habura’s work in a previous research project on S. Lisiecki, and his successful collaboration with prof. Jonas Čiurlionis of Vilnius University, an auxiliary supervisor of the dissertation.
Habura then took the floor and presented the main points of his thesis. His dissertation aimed to answer two questions: 1) how did Tatarkiewicz interpret Aristotle’s philosophy? And 2) how did Aristotle inspire him in his original philosophical reflections? Habura applied Juliusz Domański’s distinction between the researchers and the users of ancient heritage, which helped him to define clearly the conditions of reception process. According to Domański, reception must be preceded by acknowledging and positive evaluation of the subject of study. Habura argued that Tatarkiewicz had met both of these conditions.
To answer the questions of the thesis, Habura focused on chronology of Tatarkiewicz’s life and work and on philosophical problems related to the reception of Aristotle, and applied biographical and comparative methods. His analyses demonstrated that Tatarkiewicz, during his long and fruitful life, developed several interpretations of Aristotle. Therefore, Habura examined relations between these interpretations.
Tatarkiewicz himself stated that during his life, he had developed two “images”, two interpretations of Aristotle, and spoke about him in two different ways. However, as Habura argued, they were not contradictory, but rather complementary. Regarding Aristotle’s research methods, philosophical approach, and philosophical ideas, Tatarkiewicz did not change his position in his later works; he broadened his analyses to include various aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy (from metaphysics to aesthetics). For this reason, Habura concluded that it was fully justified to treat Tatarkiewicz’s interpretations as parts of one coherent image of Aristotle.
From Tatarkiewicz’s earliest works on Aristotle to his final writings, he consistently regarded the Stagirite’s philosophy as pluralistic and teleological. As comparative analyses demonstrated, Tatarkiewicz’s own philosophical thinking could be attributed with these two adjectives as well, because they describe accurately his position in epistemology, methodology, ethics, and aesthetics.
The dissertation was assessed by three reviewers, they were prof. Marian Wesoły (The Jacob of Paradies Academy in Gorzów Wielkopolski / Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań ), prof. Przemysław Paczkowski (University of Rzeszów), and prof. Ryszard Wiśniewski (Jan Długosz University in Częstochowa / Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń). It should be remarked that prof. Wiśniewski, in 1976, was himself an author of a doctoral dissertation on Tatarkiewicz. All the reviewers arrived in Zielona Góra to present their positive assessments of the dissertation and ask a couple of questions. They were concerned with a very detailed character of Habura’s account of Tatarkiewicz’s career. Removing some minor parts could have given, as a result, a thinner volume and clearer argument. The discussion, that followed, focused on originality of Tatarkiewicz’s philosophy, on the attempt to position him against the 20th century interpreters of Aristotle, and on a lacking chapter on Tatarkiewicz in Enrico Berti’s book Aristotele nel Novecento (1992), that could have been written, had Berti known the works of the Polish author. Moreover, prof. Wiśniewski, who knew Tatarkiewicz personally, shared some memories of the philosopher with the audience.
Finally, after hearing the reviews, questions and answers, the commission decided to award A. Habura with a doctoral degree cum laude. His dissertation, no doubt, has broadened the knowledge of the Polish reception of Aristotle and of Tatarkiewicz himself.
Dear Doctor Habura!
Good luck with your research plans!
Philosophy in Zielona Góra. An Anniversary
This year, Institute of Philosophy, University of Zielona Góra (UZ), where Ancient Φilosophy Reception research group is affiliated, celebrates its 30th anniversary. Among the variety of events, there was a conference on 23rd-24th October, devoted to the problem of co-operation in its various relations to theory, history and philosophical practice. AΦR’s history at UZ is obviously much shorter, but two of its representatives actively participated in the conference.
Mariam Sargsyan was the first of them. In her presentation she discussed the results of her doctoral studies at UZ and her dissertation, successfully defended earlier this year. She focused on analyses of Henryk Jakubanis’ (1879-1949) historical-philosophical legacy, which consists of three main parts: 1) his work on Empedocles and its methodology; 2) Plato in his (partly unpublished) writings; 3) his views on ancient and modern ways of doing philosophy. Moreover, Sargsyan presented the conclusions of her research on intellectual genealogy of Jakubanis’ thought.
What was even more significant was the fact that Ukrainian participants (see the photo above) of the conference, who work at the National University of Kyiv, attended Sargsyan’s presentation on Jakubanis, who had studied and worked in Kyiv a century ago. They were very interested in her results and provided valuable feedback that could be helpful in improving the text of her doctoral thesis before it is published. The discussion between them demonstrated how important it is to confront different points of view on one subject which is researched by scholars from different countries, applying various methods and interested in different aspects of the history of philosophy.
The second conference participant from AΦR was Adrian Habura who delivered a paper on Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1886-1980) and his reflection on social aspects of human happiness. Habura discussed Tatarkiewicz’s definition of happiness and his understanding of human life, then he examined the role of the others in individual happiness and the links between human individual and society in their relations to happiness. In his paper Habura developed a general view on the role of society in Tatarkiewicz’s philosophical and ethical considerations contained in his book Analysis of Happiness.
Although Habura’s paper was not directly devoted to the reception of ancient philosophy in Tatarkiewicz’s writings, the following discussion allowed him to address this issue. He highlighted some similarities and differences between Aristotle’s and Tatarkiewicz’s understandings of happiness and convincingly demonstrated how Aristotle could have inspired ethical investigations of this Polish philosopher, whose doctoral thesis on Aristotle was composed under supervision of the Marburg neo-Kantians.
Ancient Φilosophy Reception at the 12th Seminar of Historians of Polish Philosophy
Seminar of Historians of Polish Philosophy (SHPPh) is a cyclical academic event held at various universities in Poland since its first edition in Warsaw in 2006. In 2025 (May 19th-20th), it was for the first time at the University of Zielona Góra (UZ) where Polish researchers of their native philosophical traditions gathered. Central topic of this edition of SHPPh was the problem of classical thinkers and epigons in the development of Polish thought. Detailed programme of the whole event can be downloaded here.
The seminar was also an opportunity to celebrate the second edition of the book Classics of Polish Philosophy by Ryszard Palacz, an essential figure for historians of philosophy at UZ, and a researcher of reception of Greek philosophy in medieaval thought, about whose passing we have informed in the autumn of 2024. Full program of the event can be downloaded here and a brief report (in Polish) on the UZ’s website can be found here (with a photo gallery). The seminar was accompanied by an exhibition devoted to Professor Palacz and many speakers referred to his work and his understanding of classical Polish philosophers.
Two AΦR group members delivered their papers during the SHPPh. Tomasz Mróz talked about Bohdan Kieszkowski (1903-1997) and about Polish and international disputes on his works on Florentine Platonism.
In the thirties in Poland Kieszkowski was engaged in a dispute with Marian Heitzman (1899-1964), who accused him of underestimating the influences of medieval neoplatonism on Ficino. Heitzman and Kieszkowski, two scholars of one generation, two researchers of Renaissance Platonism, represented two different academic centres, conservative Cracow and more progressive Warsaw, and their polemical texts were published separately in philosophical journals in Cracow (Heitzman) and Warsaw (Kieszkowski). Kieszkowski, naturally, considered Heitzman’s position to be an overestimation of medieval influences on Renaissance’s thought and labelled it as ‘medievalism’. On international niveau a polemic against Kieszkowski’s work came from a Portuguese scholar, José Vitorino de Pina Martins (1920-2010), who praised Kieszkowski’s scholarship, yet spared no words of criticism against Kieszkowski’s edition of Pico della Mirandola’s Conclusiones (Geneve 1973).
Adrian Habura’s talk smoothly concluded the whole conference focusing, on the one hand, on a paper titled Four Understandings of Classicism by Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1886-1980), and on the other hand, on Palacz’s (1935-2024) arguments for including Tatarkiewicz among the classics of Polish philosophy.
Habura analysed Tatarkiewicz’s notion of classicism and supplemented Palacz’s arguments for including Tatarkiewicz among the classics, demonstrating that not only his History of Philosophy, History of Aesthetics, and History of Six Ideas, that is, basically historical studies, but also his Analysis of Happiness, the original philosophical work by Tatarkiewicz, bears the mark of classic. Ethical considerations in the Analysis of Happiness, noticeably influenced by Aristotle, not to mention Tatarkiewicz’s doctoral degree from Marburg on a thesis devoted to Aristotle, allowed Habura to highlight an additional aspect of Tatarkiewicz as a classic, for he was not only a classic among Polish philosophers, but also a classic in another understanding: as a follower or – to use the term proposed by Juliusz Domański – a user of Aristotelian philosophy. And it was Aristotle whom Tatarkiewicz himself regarded as the most classical among all the classical philosophers of ancient Greece.
H. Jakubanis’ Empedocles in OA
Last year we announced publishing Polish translation of a Russian study by Henryk Jakubanis (1879-1949), originally published in Kyiv over a century ago, Empedocles: a Philosopher, a Doctor and a Magus, therefore there is no need to repeat all the information here. Suffice to say that the text was translated by Mariam Sargsyan and Adrian Habura, and the whole volume ends with an afterword by Katarzyna Kołakowska, a contemporary Polish expert on Empedocles.
The book can be purchased on the publisher’s website here. We are now, however, glad to inform that it is available in OA, via online repository of the University of Zielona Góra.
A Guest from Vilnius University
In the last week of November Institute of Philosophy hosted an Erasmus+ visitor from Vilnius University, prof. Jonas Čiurlionis, a long-time collaborator of Ancient Φilosophy Reception research group. It was his second visit in Zielona Góra. One of the tasks of our guest was to consult conclusions of the dissertation by Adrian Habura, the topic of which is a multifaceted reception of Aristotle in Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s oeuvre. It is sufficient to add that prof. J. Čiurlionis is Habura’s auxiliary supervisor.
The most important, however, were Čiurlionis’ lectures and talks for students of philosophy and related fields of study. During the first of them he discussed Aristotle’s Physics. He focused not only on the most significant problems of this work, as, for example, the theory of four elements, but also presented the broader context of Stagirite’s reflection, his fundamental premises and his general view of the world. At the end of the lecture, prof. Čiurlionis referred to Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, who considers Aristotelian physics to be still topical and not outdated.
The second lecture on ancient philosophy was devoted to the subject of harmony, broadly considered. Starting with Pythagorean and Platonic concepts, prof. Čiurlionis moved on to other authors dealing with this issue and demonstrated how harmony manifested itself in various aspects of ancient Greek philosophy and, more broadly, in Greek culture, and in subsequent centuries, in music and astrology.
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