Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (February 28, 1923 – June 7, 2014) was a Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor (from its inception in the late 1960s) of the book series, ''Analecta Husserliana''. She had a thirty-year friendship (and occasional academic collaboration) with Pope John Paul II.

Biography

Education and teaching career

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was born into a noble Polish-Jewish family. She was daughter of Władysław Tymieniecki and Maria Ludwika Loewenstein. Her acquaintance with philosophy started at an early age with reading of the fundamental work of Kazimierz Twardowski, the founder of the Lwów–Warsaw Philosophical School, ''Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen'' (''On the content and object of presentations''), as well as works by Plato and Bergson. To the philosophy of the latter she was introduced by her mother, Maria-Ludwika de Lanval Tymieniecka.

After the end of World War II she began systematic studies of philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków under the guidance of Roman Ingarden, student of the famous teachers Kazimierz Twardowski and Edmund Husserl. Simultaneously she studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts.

After completing the entire university course within two years she moved to Switzerland to continue studies under another important Polish philosopher and logician, Józef Maria Bocheński, at the University of Fribourg. Her doctoral study, dedicated to explorations of the fundamentals of phenomenology in Nicolai Hartmann and Roman Ingarden's philosophies, was later published as "Essence and Existence" (1957). She obtained her second Ph.D., this time in French philosophy and literature, at the Sorbonne in 1951.

In the years 1952-1953 she did postdoctoral researches in the field of social and political sciences at the College d'Europe in Brugge, Belgium. From that moment on Tymieniecka started her own way in philosophy by developing a special phenomenological attitude that was neither entirely Husserlian, nor entirely Ingardenian.

Her first husband was the Cracow art painter Leszek Dutka. In 1956 she married Hendrik S. Houthakker, Professor of Economy at Stanford University (1954-1960) and Harvard University (from 1960) and member of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers from 1969 to 1971.

In 1979 she published, in collaboration with Karol Wojtyła, who had become Pope John Paul II in 1978, an English translation of Wojtyla's book "Osoba i czyn" (Person and Act). ''Person and Act'', one of Pope John Paul II's foremost literary works, was initially written in Polish; it has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, English and other languages. Tymieniecka's English translation is widely criticized. Critics of this work claim that Tymieniecka "changed the Polish translation, confusing its technical language and bending the text to her own philosophical concerns." It is also said that John Paul II did not agree with this translation. Besides, it was published before the definitive edition of the Polish version, which shows that it was not the final version that the author desired. Her critics suggest that the English title used by Tymieniecka, "The Acting Person" is indicative of the problems involved with the work, as the author's title was meant to convey the tension between subjective consciousness (person) and objective reality (act), an idea central to the written work and the message the author tried to convey. Despite widespread disagreement, Tymieniecka insisted in 2001 that her work is the "definitive" English edition of "Osoba i czyn".

She served as Assistant Professor in Mathematics at the Oregon State College (1955–1956) and Assistant Professor at the Pennsylvania State University (from 1957). She spent the years 1961–1966 at the Institute for Independent Study at Radcliffe College. In 1972–1973 she was Professor of Philosophy at St. John's University.

Relationship with Pope John Paul II

Tymieniecka and Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, began a friendship in 1973 while he was the archbishop of Kraków. The friendship lasted thirty years until his death. She served as his host when he visited New England in 1976, and photos show them together on skiing and camping trips. Letters that he wrote to her were part of a collection of documents sold by Tymieniecka's estate in 2008 to the National Library of Poland. According to the BBC
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