Can philosophy be important nowadays?
Has it ever been of any use?
Can professional, academic philosophy be understood by educated non-philosophers?

Debatable Philosophical Wisdom answers 'yes' to all those questions. It is a concise introduction to philosophy, its history and its issues for those who think critically, appreciate the scientific method and are engaged in problems of the real world especially if seen from humanistic and existential perspectives. It attempts to offer an interpretation of the history of philosophy as a whole as well as tentative up-to-date answers to basic traditional philosophical questions.

Over the millennia the importance of philosophy rested on a precarious balance between abstract conceptual speculation and involvement in basic issues of humanity. For many years, as an academic teacher of philosophy, I have been struggling with the impression that now this balance was upset. After my scholarships in a few European educational institutions in 2012 I wrote the book Debatable Wisdom to be published in cooperation with the Warsaw School of Economics, where I worked for 20 years. It was a manual for students of economics and was meant to restore this balance. Debatable Philosophical Wisdom is a new, enlarged and revised version of the previous work.

Two sources of my inspiration were Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and a great effort undertaken by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in rethinking all philosophical legacy. In Part One I present the main doctrines of great philosophical masters stressing their involvement in real political, economic and existential problems of their times, in the struggle of mankind to survive and flourish. In Part Two I attempt to extract from the contemporary philosophical writings what can be considered well-justified answers to basic philosophical questions (listed at the beginning of the book).

Throughout the book I express two attitudes. Firstly, that the aim of philosophy is to produce reliable knowledge about the world in its most general and existentially important aspects. In that I consider myself a follower of those late nineteenth-century philosophers for whom knowledge originated in common sense, then was corrected by empirical sciences, and finally should be summarized by the interdisciplinary philosophy comprehensible to educated non-philosophers. I deeply regret that philosophers often refuse to cooperate with sciences and indulge in purely conceptual speculations which may be interesting as a kind of abstract art but do not fulfill the mission of philosophy. (However, it must be remembered that the concept of science has changed since the nineteenth century - I devote much attention to presenting Popper's falsificationism.)

Thus I avoid both the jargon and clichés usually found in introductions to philosophy; I translate philosophical doctrines into ordinary language separating rhetorics from real insights into important issues.

In doing so I am occasionally provocative and put fingers in the wounds - like the doubting Thomas in a Caravaggio's painting - even at the expense of political correctness. Thus I keep asking why Europe stopped producing Beethovens and Michaelangelos after World War Two.

Secondly, it is my deepest conviction that the Homo sapiens is unique in the whole known universe and probably destined to play an important role in its development. The whole history of philosophy is a long process of understanding this uniqueness and preparing us to take the burden of responsibility which this situation places on us. The role of philosophers is to educate humankind and build its global consciousness.

Debatable Philosophical Wisdom is available from the official website of the Warsaw University Library http://ebuw.uw.edu.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?id=232617.
However, a slightly more up-to-date version can be downloaded as PDF here (maybe you will need to open this link twice).

Inevitably the book can sometimes be imperfect and debatable. I treat it as a draft to be improved in subsequent years - if I find a suitable place to work on it. So I welcome all comments, both critical and supporting my basic views on the mission of philosophy. Mail: deb.wisd@gmail.com

Więckowski, Paweł (2015). Debatable Philosophical Wisdom. How Philosophy Accompanies the Development of Humankind. Warsaw: e-bUW. ISBN 978-83-943146-0-6

Paweł Więckowski, born in Łódź, Poland, in 1963, earned three MAs from the University of Łódź (theory of literature, philosophy) and the University of Warsaw (English studies: linguistics) and a PhD from the University of Warsaw (dissertation A methodological analysis of Noam Chomsky's generativism). He was employed as an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Warsaw University (1989-1994) and a lecturer of philosophy, logic and critical thinking in the Warsaw School of Economics (1994-2013). Now he is a freelance philosopher struggling for survival. He has published about twenty academic articles in Polish about various issues in philosophy (semiotics, ethics, social philosophy) and now is working on the book Happiness and the Good discussing the basic mistakes of currently popular happiness studies (caused by the shift the psychologists have made from studying happiness as an emotional phenomenon to discussing the ultimate human good which should be the foundation of normative ethics).

The previous, shorter version, completed in 2013, was published as Debatable Wisdom by Warsaw School of Economics. (ISBN 978-83-65416-10-0)