The Lockean Heritage in Jan Śniadecki’s Experimental Philosophy and its Reception

Résumé

This essay focuses on the reception of Locke in both published and unpublished writings by Jan Śniadecki (1756-1830), the prominent experimental philosopher and mathematician of the Polish Enlightenment. Śniadecki, who spent half a year in London in 1787, was familiar with the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Remarkably, in his Filozofia umysłu ludzkiego [The Philosophy of Human Mind] (Vilnius, 1822), he identified himself as a confirmed, though critical, Lockean and claimed originality in developing the master’s experimental psychology. Also, as a rector of Vilnius University, he propagated Lockeanism. The basic structure of this essay is as follows: First, it analyses Lockean concepts as interpreted by Śniadecki and puts them into the context of his criticism of two extremities: Kant’s obscure transcendentalism and Condillac’s idolatry of sensation. Secondly, it shows how, during the nineteenth century, these concepts were appropriated into the post-Kantian framework. More specifically, the essay discusses “Comments on the ‘Addendum to the Essay about Philosophy’” by Vasilij P. Androsov, Russian Kantian and economist, and An Introduction to and an Overview of Positive Philosophy by Julian Ochorowicz, experimental psychologist and collaborator of Wilhelm Wundt. Finally, it portrays Śniadecki as an experimental philosopher that, like Locke, was in line with the early modern cultura animi, the conception of cultivating the mind. Thus, it highlights how digging into the past enriches recent Śniadecki scholarship by solving some interpretative inconsistencies, e.g., taking at face value Śniadecki’s mockery confession of empiricism as defined by Kant.