The International Society for Universal Dialogue
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Alicja Kuczyńska
PhD, full professor of philosophy, emeritus professor of the University of Warsaw, Poland. From 1970 to 2007 the head of the Department of Aesthetics at the University of Warsaw, in the Institute of Philosophy. Organiser of international conferences; lectured in Canada, Israel, Italy, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Russia. Editor of several collections of papers, among them the international volume Art Transforming Life 2006. In 1989 she founded and for many years was the editor-in-chief of the bi-annual journal Sztuka i Filozofia [Art and Philosophy], published by the University of Warsaw.
She has been a member of the ISUD from 1989 till now. She belonged to the group of the founders of the Society.
The main fields of her research include: aesthetics, meta-aesthetics, social aesthetics, contemporary art. The main problems he was dealing with: the artistic culture of the Italian Renaissance, and Florentine Neoplatonism, creation as an aesthetic category, the social function of art, activity, and the responsibility of recipient-creator; art as a philosophy, the contemporary transformations of the traditional aesthetic categories.
Author of books on the Italian Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino i teoria piękna [Marsilio Ficino and the Theory of Beauty]. 1970; Man and the World [The Antropological Trends in Poetics of the Italian Renaissance]. 1976; Sztuka jako Filozofia [Art as a Philosophy]. 1988, as well as books on modern aesthetic taste: Piękno mit i rzeczywistość [Beauty, Myth and Reality]. 1972, 1977; Wzory modne w życiu codziennym [Fashion and Its Blueprints in Everyday Life]. 1983, 1987; Piękny stan melancholii. Filozofia niedosytu i sztuka [The Beautiful State of Melancholia: Philosophy of ”the Lack” and Art]. 1999.
She also is the author of a stage play Kobro and a novel Carrissime.
Janusz Kuczyński 1930–2017
Professor Kuczyński worked his entire academic career at the University of Warsaw, Poland. He obtained his PhD in 1962, with supervisor Leszek Kolakowski, habilitation in 1969, and professorship in 1975.
In 1973 he founded the quarterly Dialectics and Humanism, in English, which became an international forum for dialogue and pluralism, publishing articles of scholars and philosophers of all orientations. In 1991 this journal was renamed Dialogue and Humanism and then in 1994, Dialogue and Universalism. He was its editor-in-chief for 41 years, until 2014. From 1969 to 1979 he was editor-in-chief of another journal: Studia Filozoficzne [Philosophical Studies]. During the time of the Polish People’s Republic, this journal, published in Polish, was the leading philosophical journal in Poland.
In 1989 he became the founding President of the International Society for Universalism (ISU), later called the International Society for Universal Dialogue. He co-organized symposia of the Society in Berlin, St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, London, Montreal and Warsaw. He was an active member of ISUD and its honorary President up to his death.
He lectured at Columbia University, UCLA, Georgetown University, CUNY, and other schools in the United States, at Toronto, McMaster, Brock in Canada, in Germany, India, Japan, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Yugoslavia, UK, Argentina.
He authored 17 books and hundreds of papers, published in many languages in Europe, America and Asia. The most significant works are entitled Philosophy of Life, Home, Creator, Creativity as a Practical Philosophy (published by UNESCO in English and Spanish), The Meaning of Life, Christian-Marxist Dialogue in Poland (in English), Universalism as a Metaphilosophy, Dialogue and Universalism as a New Way of Thinking (in English). He established the International Library of Universalism.
In the years 1954–1957 he was a member of the editorial staff of the famous anti-Stalinist Polish weekly Po Prostu. In 1986 he founded the Polish Society of Friends of Heart and Life and was elected its first chairman. All his life it was important to him that as a teenager he was a courier, one of the youngest soldiers in the Polish Armia Krajowa (the Home Army), the largest anti-Nazi underground movement in the Second World War.