Polish philosopher

Piotr Marian M*onius (1 February 1862 in Kursk, Russian Empire – 20 July 1945 in Vilnius (Wilno), prewar Second Polish Republic) was a Polish philosopher and teacher who was born into a family of expatriates during the Par*ions of Poland.

Contents

• 1 Life
• 2 Works
• 3 See also
• 4 Notes
• 5 References

Life

M*onius studied law at the Warsaw University and then abroad, where he took up philosophical and pedagogical studies at various German universities, mainly in Leipzig. He became one of the representatives of the Warsaw school of Positivism who formed a common front against Messianism together with the Polish Neo-Kantians.

Before Poland's return to independence, M*onius wrote for the Polish-language St. Petersburg weekly Kraj and contributed to the Polish-language periodicals Głos, Tygodnik Ilustrowany, Wisła, Gazeta Warszawska and Gazeta Polska. In 1897-1914 he served on the editorial board of Przegląd Filozoficzny (The Philosophical Review). In 1906 M*onius was elected to Russia's first National Duma. In 1906-14 he lectured at Warsaw's Flying University, and in 1920-32, as a professor he conducted courses in philosophy and pedagogy at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, then part of the Second Polish Republic; in these, he focused on epistemology and aesthetics. He became dean of the Humanities Department there. His writings included a collection of philosophical essays, and Polish translations of Western philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Émile Tardieu and Schopenhauer.

On 21 September 1920, in Poznań, M*onius published an essay On Bolshevism, including observations on the 1847 Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. As one of the first Polish scholars following the 1917 Russian Revolution, he warned that communist ideology was merely a tool that enabled the Bolsheviks to *ume the political role of a new ruling cl* in Russian society. Workers and peasants – M*onius wrote – were to become an embellishment for the commissars corresponding roughly to the former Tsarist governors, heads of administrative districts (volosts), prosecutors, heads of treasury offices, directors of school departments, and so on.

He wrote that the new ruling elite, comprising members of the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage) and Red Army officers, regarded as the "right-thinking", had only one thing in common as in every oligarchy. That is, they all represented communist clubs formed in every Soviet town. These clubs cons*uted the actual, though unofficial government, or rather the body overseeing the activities of the official government. From the very beginning the aim of the revolutionaries was not to bring about Marxist equality among the cl*es, but to create a new privileged cl* of their own. Civil equality was never their goal, it was only an object of subversive political manipulation justifying the means, he explained.

Works

• Marian M*onius, Szkice estetyczne (Sketches in Aesthetics), 1884
• Marian M*onius, Über den kritischen Realismus, 1887
• Marian M*onius, Racjonalizm w teorii poznania Kanta (Rationalism in Kant's Theory of Knowledge), 1898
• Marian M*onius, Rozdwojenie myśli polskiej (Duality of Polish Thought), 1901
• Marian M*onius, translations of, and prefaces to, works by E. Tardieu, A. Schopenhauer and E. Dubois-Reimond.
• Dr. Marian M*onius, Dzieje Uniwersytetu Wilenskiego 1781-1832 (History of Wilno University). Notatki z wykładow w roku akademickim 1924–1925 (Notes of lectures in academic year 1924–25), Toruń, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2005.
• Prof. Marian M*onius, "O bolszewizmie" (On Bolshevism). Lecture presented at Poznań, August 21, 1920, in the "Głosy na czasie" (Voices of Our Time) series, no. 45, Poznań, Księgarnia św. Wojciecha, 1921, pp.:8-19, 40-42, 56-64.

See also

• History of philosophy in Poland
• List of Poles

Notes

References

• Tadeusz Czeżowski, Leon Gumański, Knowledge, science, and values Published by Rodopi. Page 284.
• Stefan Konstańczak, "Nurt neomesjanistyczny w filozofii polskiej końca XIX wieku" (Neo-Messianic trend in Polish philosophy at the end of the 19th century), SŁUPSKIE STUDIA FILOZOFICZNE nr 7
• Uniwersytet Stefana Batorego w Wilnie - kadra akademicka. Senat USB Zbiory Specjalne. Do*enty Życia Społecznego, dr Anna Supruniuk, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń