Cracow Circle. Theology in the Lvov-Warsaw School

Abstract

There was hardly an area to matter in the Polish intellectual life of the interbellum which was not under influence of the Lvov-Warsaw School. The Cracow Circle was a systematic and institutionalized attempt to enlarge the influence of the School on academic institutions of the Catholic Church. The members of the Circle were Jozef M. Bochenski, Jan F. Drewnowski, Jan Salamucha and B. Sobocinski. They were acting under auspices of Jan Łukasiewicz and Konstanty Michalski. Łukasiewicz was a chief figure of the Warsaw School of Logic, the Vice-Chancellor of the Warsaw University for two terms and for some time even a member of the government, the Minister of Religious Denominations and the Public Enlightenment. Michalski was a prominent scholar of the Catholic Church in Poland, for some time the Vice-Chancellor of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and the head of the Faculty of Theology there. With such patrons, the joint enterprise of four brilliant scholars must have been considered promising. In this paper I attempt to account both the history of the Cracow Circle and its key achievements with the special focus on the Circle’s influence on the contemporary philosophy.