The Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The all experience gained during a long time of doing realistic philosophy by the Lublin School of Philosophy was directed and dedicated to the sake of preparing and editing the Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The whole enterprise of the Chair of Metaphysics and the Polish Thomas Aquinas Association had started in 2000 and was finished by 2008. The complete edition consists of 9 volumes (edited one volume a year). M. A. Krąpiec was the mainspring of the undertaking and A. Maryniarczyk became the editor-in-chief and the supervisor of the whole labor - all staff members of the Chair participated in the enterprise.

 

The Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy refers to the best of the Lublin School of Philosophy tradition. It is an encyclopedia really universal, because although it deals mostly with the heritage of the classic philosophy as the very fundament of the European identity, it also says about the achievements of the Arabic and Jewish philosophy or the philosophy of the East (India, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam) and also of Africa and South America. The encyclopedia provides wide perspective of the philosophy and philosophical considerations (and as such it has absolutely no precedent in literature all over the world), it undertakes the questions that are philosophically and existentially of the very importance, it of course contains all information about the philosophers, the various currents in philosophy and philosophical schools. In writing entries for the encyclopedia helped the philosophers from numerous Polish scientific circles (e.g. Lublin, Warszawa, Wrocław, Kraków, Poznań, Gdańsk, Szczecin, Toruń) and from the foreign countries, too (e.g. Spain, Germany, Italy, France, USA, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Slovakia).

 

The Encyclopedia was the initiative launched by the environment, which during the hardest time for Polish philosophy and humanistic that happened to Poland in 20th century after second world war kept on cultivating and securing and even developing an independent philosophical cognition, in so doing standing up for the Polish culture. The authors have dedicated the Encyclopedia to Polish Nation and handed this dedication over to the greatest son of this Nation - Holy Father John Paul II.