The Lublin Philosophical School: Founders, Motives, Characteristics

The article is focused on the Lublin Philosophical School; it explains its name, presents its founders, reveals the causes of its rise, and introduce the specific character of the School’s philosophy. It starts with stating the fact that in the proper sense, the term “Lublin Philosophical School” describes a way of cultivating realistic (classical) philosophy developed in the 1950s by a group of philosophers at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. The Lublin Philosophical School is characterized by cognitive realism (the object of cognition is really existing being), maximalism (taking up all existentially important questions), methodological autonomy (in relation to the natural-mathematical sciences and theology), transcendentalism in its assertions (its assertions refer to all reality), methodological-epistemological unity (the same method applied in objectively cultivated philosophical disciplines), coherence (which guarantees the objective unity of the object), and objectivity (achieved by the verifiability of assertions on their own terms, which is achieved by relating them in each instance to objective evidence). The term is the name of the Polish school of realistic (classical) philosophy that arose as a response to the Marxism that was imposed administratively on Polish institutions of learning, and also as a response to other philosophical currents dominant at the time such as phenomenology, existentialism, and logical positivism.