Leopold Blaustein’s Philosophy in Context

Witold Płotka (Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University In Warsaw)

The paper presents main theses of the book The Philosophy of Leopold Blaustein: Descriptive Psychology, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics (Springer 2024) by Witold Płotka. Blaustein was a Polish philosopher of Jewish origin, aesthetician, psychologist, schoolteacher and educationalist. He was educated in Lvov (Lwów, no Lviv in Ukraine), where he probably started studying in 1923, but he also held fellowships in Freiburg im Breisgau (in 1925; under Edmund Husserl) and in Berlin (in 1927/28; under Carl Stumpf, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Lewin). Blaustein is regarded as a member of the Lvov–Warsaw School, but his philosophy bore the mark of different philosophical traditions, primarily including descriptive psychology, but also phenomenology, Gestalt theory and humanistic psychology. His teachers at Jan Kazimierz University in Lvov included Kazimierz Twardowski and Roman Ingarden. Because of his studies under Husserl, he is often classified as a phenomenologist. The book is first and foremost a critical analysis of this classification, and it aims at showing that Blaustein used tools of descriptive psychology (in the sense of Twardowski and Brentano), rather than tools of phenomenology (in the sense of Husserl). To show this, the paper is divided into a few parts: (1) a short bibliography of Blaustein will be presented; (2) his affinity to Brentano’s psychology is to be reconstructed; (3) Blaustein’s account of Husserl’s method will be discussed; (4) analysis of Husserl’s theory of intentionality is to be reconstructed, as well as (4) a sketch of Blaustein’s aesthetics is to be reconstructed; finally, (5) the question of the relevance of Blaustein’s philosophy for contemporary debates will be accounted for, including, studies on virtual reality.

https://meet.google.com/idm-boup-spy