PROFIL PRACOWNIKA: Andrzej Kaniowski

The Department of Ethics is one of the four departments of the Institute of Philosophy. The research profile of the Department of Ethics is defined by the broadly understood questions of practical philosophy, including: social philosophy, philosophy of state and law, as well as applied ethics, metaethics, axiology, and aesthetics. The Department of Ethics also conducts research on medieval philosophy.

* The Institute of Philosophy at the University of Lodz was established in 1971, after the re-establishment of philosophy at the University of Lodz. At that time, the Department of Ethics was headed by Prof. Ija Lazari-Pawłowska (1921-1994), a disciple of Maria Ossowska and Janina and Tadeusz Kotarbiński, followers of the independent trend in ethics. She was interested in Indian ethics. She dedicated several books to Mahatma Gandhi, including the widely known monograph Gandhi (1967). Prof. Lazari-Pawłowska edited the volume Metaethics (1975), the first such comprehensive publication in Poland presenting metaethical issues. In 1976 she published a book on the ethical thought of Albert Schweitzer, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. Her best known and most discussed text is Three Concepts of Tolerance (1984).

Prof. Ija Lazari-Pawłowska was the head of the Department of Ethics (transformed into the Chair of Ethics in 1981) until 1991. She was succeeded by Prof. Józef Piórczyński, an expert in German philosophy. Since 2000 the Chair has been held by Prof. Andrzej Kaniowski.

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dr. hab. Andrzej Kaniowski, prof. UŁ

Head of the Ethics Department at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Lodz. His main research interests are: social and political philosophy (with special emphasis on classical and contemporary German philosophy), epistemological and methodological problems in the social sciences, ethics (moral philosophy, history of ethics, ethics as a subject in school education; bioethics and ethics in medicine), critical social theory of the Frankfurt School and the philosophical and social thought of Jürgen Habermas, as well as deontological ethics and the philosophy of law of Immanuel Kant.

Since 2004, Dr. A. M. Kaniowski has participated in several foreign projects (funded by the Europäische Akademie Bad Neunahr-Ahrweiler and the Deutsch-Polnische Wissenschaftsstiftung, among others) and has directed international projects (funded by the Deutsch-Polnische Wissenschaftsstiftung) and national projects (including a project funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and a project funded under the NPRH programme). In the winter semester of the academic year 2019/2020, he was a visiting professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.

Since 2014, he has been organising international conferences as part of the "Normativity & Praxis" series (http://normativityandpraxis.uni.lodz.pl/) in cooperation with the Ethics Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Łódź Branch).

He has been a member of the expert team on numerous occasions, including chairing the expert team of the HS1 Panel at the National Science Centre. He has been a member of evaluation teams on numerous occasions, first on behalf of the University Accreditation Commission, then the State Accreditation Commission, as well as the Polish Accreditation Commission.

Since 2015 he has been the editor-in-chief of Folia Philosophica. Ethica - Aesthetica - Practica; he is also a member of the scientific boards of ten (Polish and foreign) scientific journals. Since 2007 he has been a member of the Committee of Philosophical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and in the term 2019-2022 he is a member of the Committee of Ethics in Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The President of the German-Polish Society for Philosophy (DPGfPh) is a collective member of the German Society for Philosophy: dgphil.de/verbaende-und-ags/fachverbaende/.

He is the author or co-author of several books, editor of several anthologies, editor or co-editor of several thematic volumes of the "Folia Philosophica" and a volume of the "Colloquia Communia" devoted to Habermas, and has published over 80 articles on social philosophy, ethics and bioethics. His translations from German include O. Höffe, Kant; H. M. Baumgartner, Endliche Vernunft; J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns; J. Habermas, Zur Verfassung Europas.