Kołakowski Leszek
Kołakowski Leszek (23 October 1927, Radom – 17 July 2009, Oxford) – philosopher, essayist, columnist, historian of philosophy and religious thought, fiction writer.
Academic worker at the University of Warsaw (professor since 1964) and the Institute of Polish Philosophy and Sociology in the Polish Academy od Sciences. Member of the Polish Workers’ Party, later renamed to the Polish United Workers’ Party. He wrote for a number of magazines, including Nowa Kultura (member of the editorial staff until 1958), Po prostu, Argumenty, and Twórczość. In the years 1952–1956, he was one of the promoters of orthodox Marxism. In 1966, he was removed from the Polish United Workers’ Party for criticising the authorities and rejecting Marxism. After the events of March 1968, when he received a teaching and publication ban, he decided to migrate from the country. He taught philosophy at universities in Canada and the USA. He settled in Oxford in 1970. In the 1970s and the 1980s, he cooperated with Polish emigration publishers.
The entry was written by Aleksandra Król on the basis of source materials of the Virtual Shtetl
