The Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski has just died in Oxford, England, at the age of 81. I was not familiar with him, and so I am poorly positioned to scold the Tribune and Sun-Times for posting the same wire-service obituary that neglected to mention that at one time Kolakowski taught in Chicago.
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But he did, from 1981 to 1994 at the University of Chicago, primarily as a member of the Committee on Social Thought (as was mentioned in the New York Times’s staff written obit). And in 1990 the University of Chicago Press published a collection of his essays, Modernity on Endless Trial. “Mr. Kolakowski’s is a vision of people clawing at truths that give way under their fingers,” wrote Arthur Danto, reviewing the book for the New York Times.
“The cultural role of philosophy is not to deliver truth but to build the spirit of truth.”
