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History of Classics Discussed at UHK
An essential part of the Oral History and the Classics project was a conference held in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Hradec Králové. This academic meeting which took place on June 1st-2nd and was titled Classics: the Past, the Present, and the Future. It gathered specialists reflecting on various issues related to the development of classical studies including history of ancient philosophy.
The head of the project and the conference was professor Jaroslav Daneš, with some help from Tomasz Mróz (University of Zielona Góra), a researcher in the project. Participants of the conference focused on historical developments of the classics, including their own experiences, “personal paths”, on recent problems, e.g. with teaching classics, and on the perspectives of future research in this area of studies.
Platonic Inspirations was the title of the session during which an AΦR member,T. Mróz, delivered his paper: Plato in post-war Poland. Continuities and novelty. His talk was devoted to three Polish Plato scholars, who survived the World War II and attempted to include their experience of war and the post-war political situation of Poland into their studies on ancient philosophy. They were, starting with the oldest: Wincenty Lutosławski (1863-1954), Stanisław Lisiecki (1872-1960), Władysław Witwicki (1878-1948). It is sufficient to mention that it was the Marxist interpretation of Plato that was pushed in Poland after the war by Polish Marxist philosophers (e.g. by T. Kroński) and in general works on philosophy translated from Russian. In these circumstances Lutosławski planned to published a volume on Plato presenting him as an intellectual and moral remedy for Europe, Witwicki, quite the opposite, blamed the philosopher for inventing totalitarianism, and Lisiecki turned from Plato to Aristotle, who was more acceptable then as a naturalist and a critic of Plato.
Plato’s Adventures with Censorship in Poland
On June, 1st, a talk by Tomasz Mróz was delivered at the Interdisziplinäre Kolloquium Osteuropäische Geschichte / Polenstudien (Martin-Luther-Universität 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. Mróz discussed three (and a half) cases of such interference. The talk was a supplemented and developed version of one of Mróz’s previous papers.
The first case of censorship was relatively harmless, for only one word, namely: socialism, was removed from the title of Wincenty Lutosławski’s book, Plato as a Creator of Idealism [and Socialism], (Warsaw 1899). Imperial Russian authorities in Warsaw removed the word “socialism” 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 Lutosławski’s view, a natural consequence of idealism.
Stanisław Lisiecki represented another case of broadly understood censorship. He was an enthusiast of Plato and a translator of his dialogues, but only his Republic 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 AΦR research group.
Władysław 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, 1947) and a translation of Plato’s Republic (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 (1958) appeared in print in an ideologically “corrected” version.
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.
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.
T. Mróz’s stay in Halle was sponsored by Aleksander-Brückner-Zentrum für Polenstudien from the funds of Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).
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