As he describes in his Memoirs, it was a chance encounter with a male relative, whose height made him stand out above the crowd at a Krakówrailroad station, upon the outbreak of World War I that led Tatarkiewicz to spend the war years in Warsaw. There he began his career as a lecturer in philosophy, teaching at a girls' school on Mokotowska Street, across the street from where Józef Piłsudski was to reside during his first days after World War I. During World War I, when the Polish University of Warsaw was opened under the sponsorship of the occupying Germans – who wanted to win Polish support for their war effort – Tatarkiewicz directed its philosophy department in 1915–19. In 1919–21 he was professor at Stefan Batory University in Wilno, in 1921–23 at the University of Poznań, and in 1923–61 again at the University of Warsaw. In 1930 he became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. During World War II, risking his life, he conducted underground lectures in German-occupied Warsaw. After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising he again consciously risked his life when retrieving a manuscript from the gutter, where a German soldier had hurled it. Władysław Tatarkiewicz died the day after his 94th birthday. In his Memoirs, published shortly before, he recalled having been ousted from his University chair. Characteristically, he saw even that indignity as a blessing in disguise, as it gave him freedom from academic duties, and leisure to pursue research and writing. Tatarkiewicz reflected that at all crucial junctures of his life, he had failed to foresee events, many of them tragic, but that this had probably been for the better, since he could not have altered them anyway.
View on happiness
Tatarkiewicz believed that "satisfaction with particular things... is only partial satisfaction; happiness requires total satisfaction, that is, satisfaction with life as a whole."
Major works
Tatarkiewicz belonged to the interwarLwów–Warsaw school of logic, created by Kazimierz Twardowski, which gave reborn Poland many scholars and scientists: philosophers, logicians, psychologists, sociologists, and organizers of academia. Tatarkiewicz educated generations of Polish philosophers, estheticians and art historians, as well as a multitude of interested laymen. He posthumously continues to do so through his History of Philosophy and numerous other works. In his final years, Tatarkiewicz devoted considerable attention to securing translations of his major works. Of the below incomplete listing of his works, his 1909 German-language doctoral thesis, and his History of Philosophy, Łazienki warszawskie, Parerga, and Memoirs have not been translated into English.
Die Disposition der aristotelischen Principien : Tatarkiewicz's 1909 doctoral thesis, published 1910. First Polish-language edition: Układ pojęć w filozofii Arystotelesa, translated from the German by Izydora Dąmbska, Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1978, 126 pp.
Łazienki warszawskie, with photographs by Edmund Kupiecki, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Arkady, 1968, 299 pp. A study of the aesthetics of what Tatarkiewicz identified as the "style of Stanisław August", as manifested in the structures and grounds of Warsaw's Royal Baths Park.
Parerga, Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1978, 141 pp. Polish language. Chapters:
On Perfection. English translation by Christopher Kasparek was serialized in Dialectics and Humanism: the Polish Philosophical Quarterly, vol. VI, no. 4 — vol. VIII, no. 2 . Kasparek's translation has subsequently also appeared in the book: Władysław Tatarkiewicz, On perfection, Warsaw University Press, Center of Universalism, 1992, pp. 9–51; the book is a collection of papers by and about the late Professor Tatarkiewicz.
