On May 13th-14th 2024 the Jacob of Paradies Academy in Gorzów Wielkopolski held an international conference Poesis Philosophorum – Philosophia Poetarum. The head, heart and the soul of this symposium was professor Marian Wesoły with whom Oral history team, including AΦR member, had conducted an interview in December 2023, as it was announced here.

Detailed program of the conference can be downloaded here. Tomasz Mróz was one of the speakers on the first day of the conference. In his presentation he took an attempt to demonstrate how Polish poets referred to philosophers, or how philosophers used poetry to explain philosophy.

T. Mróz discussed both ancient and modern philosophers, whose ideas had been referred to by poetic means. Apart from various verses on Copernicus or Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s poem on Immanuel Kant, T. Mróz presented Ignacy Krasicki’s (1735-1801) satire on Plato and Stanisław Lisiecki’s (1872-1960) use of a church anthem to explain the predominant character of the Good in Plato’s philosophy.

Krasicki was a leading representative of the Enlightenment literature in Poland. The aim of his poem was to ridicule Plato’s philosophy and the figure of an ancient sage in general: Plato, pompously speaking to his disciples as a possessor of wisdom, is ultimately bitten by a flea who in this way declares its possession over Plato. No philosopher, then, can escape nature!

Lisiecki was not a poet, but over a century later classics scholar and translator of Greek philosophy into Polish. He used the lyrics of a church song, praising inexhaustibility, inexplicability and God’s predominance over the created world. His intention was to demonstrate Polish audience that Plato’s highest Good had a similar character to Christian God, the highest being, and could be easily comprehended by means of analogy.

This paper contributed to the variety of topics discussed during the conference, presenting various relations between philosophy and poetry. The conference in general demonstrated that even smaller academic institutions can gather international participants, organise significant academic events and thus contribute to philosophical life, granted that there is some spiritus movens behind them.