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Leszek Nowak, a philosopher…

… who was fired from his position at the University of Poznan for pro-democracy activities, including underground publishing, but was welcomed back after 1989, has died. During his years of protest against the Polish regime, he went on hunger strikes and went to prison.

A Popperian, Nowak urged his students, as they write in an introduction to a volume in his honor, “to look for holes in his theories.”

Nowak was also a Marxist.

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Mr UD just got back from food shopping.

“Nowak. Yes. He was the only Marxist in Solidarity.”

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Mr UD reads this post and says:

Popperian? Maybe in this restricted pedagogical sense; but intellectually he was an anti-Popperian. Popper thought there could be no rational guidelines to scientific discovery. Nowak’s famous phrase, as I recall it, was “caricature in the service of explanation.” The scientist attempts, in Nowak’s view, to capture in a few lines the essence of a phenomenon. Popper would deny that one can say anything about what he considered spontaneous creative guesses about phenomena. For Popper, falsifiability is the only criterion distinguishing real from pseudo science.

Margaret Soltan, October 24, 2009 12:36PM
Posted in: professors

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2 Responses to “Leszek Nowak, a philosopher…”

  1. RJO Says:

    > A Popperian…
    > Nowak was also a Marxist.

    I don’t know from political philosophy, but one of Popper’s most famous books was the staunchly anti-Marxist Poverty of Historicism, dedicated "In memory of the countless men and women of all creeds or nations or races who fell victim to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny."

    One would have to be nimble to be both a Popperian and a Marxist.

  2. Mary Anne Says:

    I have always been amused by the fact that communism in Poland was felled by an organization that was created to advocate for worker’s rights. I am surprised, actually, that Novak was the only Marxist.

    I have never heard of Popper. I blame my undergraduate institution.

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