{"id":310,"date":"2022-06-03T15:17:49","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T13:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/?p=310"},"modified":"2022-06-04T10:49:58","modified_gmt":"2022-06-04T08:49:58","slug":"platos-adventures-with-censorship-in-poland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/?p=310","title":{"rendered":"Plato’s Adventures with Censorship in Poland"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On June, 1st, a talk by Tomasz Mr\u00f3z was delivered at the Interdisziplin\u00e4re Kolloquium Osteurop\u00e4ische Geschichte \/ Polenstudien<\/a> (Martin-Luther-Universit\u00e4t Halle). The topic of the presentation was the interference of various types of (broadly understood) censorship with Plato scholars and research on Plato in Poland. T. Mr\u00f3z discussed three (and a half) cases of such interference. The talk was a supplemented and developed version of one of Mr\u00f3z’s previous papers<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The first case of censorship was relatively harmless, for only one word, namely: socialism, was removed from the title of Wincenty Lutos\u0142awski\u2019s book, Plato as a Creator of Idealism<\/em> [and Socialism<\/em>], (Warsaw 1899). Imperial Russian authorities in Warsaw removed the word \u201csocialism\u201d from the title and from the table of contents, without even looking into the text of his book on Plato, for “socialism” occurs on many pages, being – in Lutos\u0142awski’s view, a natural consequence of idealism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by Paulina Guli\u0144ska-Jurgiel<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Stanis\u0142aw Lisiecki represented another case of broadly understood censorship. He was an enthusiast of Plato and a translator of his dialogues, but only his Republic <\/em>saw the light of day in the interwar period, while all the remaining dialogues were left unpublished in the manuscripts. His leaving the clergy and Roman Catholic church was the most probable the reason of his difficult situation in Polish academia, for some scholars were unable to accept him as a colleague and assess his works without religious prejudice. As a result, his works were not published, but some justice in this regard has been recently done by the members of the A\u03a6R research group<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

W\u0142adys\u0142aw Witwicki was more succesful in his translations of Plato’s works. Soon after the Word War II he managed to publish a small book on Plato (Plato as an Educationalist<\/em>, 1947) and a translation of Plato’s Republic <\/em>(1948). In the book and in his commentaries to Plato’s text, he compared the post-war reality of Poland and Plato’s political project to a concentration camp, great monastery, or a totalitarian state. Some of his remarks were censored and the second edition of the Republic <\/em>(1958) appeared in print in an ideologically “corrected” version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the additional “half” of the censorship cases, Witwicki’s struggle with his sister, who was a Catholic nun, were presented. She tried to convince him not to criticize Catholicism in his commentaries, but he replied to her with a short comic story depicting his and Plato’s imaginary meeting with her, and Plato’s escape from holy water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by Paulina Guli\u0144ska-Jurgiel<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to the fact that the audience consisted of specialists in East-European history, in philosophy and in the historiography of philosophy, a wide spectrum of questions appeared and the author did his best to satisfy multi-oriented demands of the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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T. Mr\u00f3z’s stay in Halle was sponsored by Aleksander-Br\u00fcckner-Zentrum f\u00fcr Polenstudien<\/a> from the funds of Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On June, 1st, a talk by Tomasz Mr\u00f3z was delivered at the Interdisziplin\u00e4re Kolloquium Osteurop\u00e4ische Geschichte \/ Polenstudien (Martin-Luther-Universit\u00e4t Halle). The topic of the presentation was the interference of various types of (broadly understood) censorship with Plato scholars and research on Plato in Poland. T. Mr\u00f3z discussed three (and a half) cases of such interference. The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[155,58,54,164,165,8,166,5,56,24,13,55,4,59,137,6,14],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks","tag-155","tag-catholicism","tag-censorship","tag-halle","tag-idealism","tag-in-english","tag-marxism","tag-plato","tag-poland","tag-republic","tag-s-lisiecki","tag-socialism","tag-t-mroz","tag-totalitarianism","tag-translations","tag-w-lutoslawski","tag-w-witwicki"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.aphr.ifil.uz.zgora.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}