玛丽亚·奥索夫斯卡

作品

• 1947道德科学的基础

  勾勒出一门有别于规范伦理学的描述性道德科学：道德概念的分析、道德心理学与道德社会学。

• 1956资产阶级道德

  依据本杰明·富兰克林等人的文献，把节俭、可靠、勤劳等资产阶级伦理重构为一种历史的道德类型。

立场

Ossowska is regarded as the founder of the science of morality in Poland. In the analytic spirit of the Lwów–Warsaw School she separated the normative question of what is right from a descriptive one: what moral concepts mean, which norms groups hold, how they arise and change. Her “Foundations of a Science of Morality” (1947) outlined three branches – an analysis of moral concepts, a psychology and a sociology of morals – and “Motives of Conduct” (1949) criticised attempts to reduce morality to self-interest. Her historical studies reconstruct types of moral ideal: the bourgeois ethos (1956), the knightly ethos and its variants, including the English gentleman (1973), and the moral thought of the English Enlightenment (1966). In “Moral Norms” (1970) she analysed and classified norms. In the bourgeois ethos she discussed the theses of Max Weber and Werner Sombart on the spirit of capitalism and read Benjamin Franklin’s maxims as a largely secular morality of reliability and thrift. Under Stalinism her work was attacked as “bourgeois” and non-Marxist. Her approach influenced Polish sociology and the history of ideas; critics have asked whether a strictly descriptive study of morality can avoid hidden normative choices, a question Ossowska herself discussed in her work on method.

生平与背景

Maria Niedźwiecka was born on 16 January 1896 in Warsaw. She studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw, mainly with Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Jan Łukasiewicz, and received her doctorate there in 1921. In 1924 she married the sociologist Stanisław Ossowski, with whom she worked closely until his death in 1963. She habilitated in 1932 and taught at the University of Warsaw; during the German occupation she took part in the clandestine university teaching in Warsaw. After the war she was professor in Łódź and from 1948 held the chair of the history and theory of morality at the University of Warsaw. In the Stalinist years of the early 1950s the chair was dissolved and she was barred from teaching; she continued her research and returned to the university after 1956. She was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, lectured abroad, including in the United States, and published several of her books in English. She died in Warsaw on 13 August 1974.

其他主要作品

• Foundations of a Science of Morality (Podstawy nauki o moralności, 1947)
• Motives of Conduct (Motywy postępowania, 1949)
• Bourgeois Morality (Moralność mieszczańska, 1956)
• Sociology of Morality (Socjologia moralności, 1963)
• Moral Norms (Normy moralne, 1970)
• The Knightly Ethos and Its Variants (Etos rycerski i jego odmiany, 1973)