Who is Leszek Kolakowski?

Who is Leszek Kolakowski?

Having spent his youthful years as an ardent communist and atheist, Leszek Kolakowski, one of the great minds of the modern era, turned into Marxism’s most perceptive opponent, and one with a profound respect for religion.

Who is Wladyslaw Kołakowski?

In Poland, Kołakowski is regarded as a philosopher and historian of ideas but also as an icon for anti-communism and opponents of communism. Adam Michnik has called Kołakowski “one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture”. Kołakowski died on 17 July 2009, aged 81, in Oxford, England.

Is Joseph Kolakowski a patronising critic?

Both his experience and beliefs made such criticism seem patronising. Mr Kolakowski had lived under two kinds of totalitarianism, Nazism and communism; his ideas had been censored even in the supposedly more liberal communist Poland of the late 1950s and 1960s.

What did Mr Kolakowski think of analytical philosophy?

Mr Kolakowski showed little interest in the Oxford tradition of analytical philosophy; like his great Oxonian philosophical contemporary, Isaiah Berlin, he formulated no grand scheme of ideas.