Władysław Tatarkiewicz, a prominent Polish philosopher born in 1886, kept a diary from 1911 until the end of his long life in 1980. His notebooks from the years 1911–1943 were lost. The extant notebooks, covering the period from 1944 to 1980, were miraculously saved from destruction by Łukasz Ratajczak, the Librarian at the University of Warsaw, and are now being published by a team of scholars from the Universities of Warsaw and Wrocław. The first volume reproduces Tatarkiewicz's diary from 1944 to 1960. The diary is preceded by a detailed biography of Tatarkiewicz from his birth in 1886 to 1939 and is followed by an index of multiple names appearing in the book. The second volume is to be expected soon.
Tatarkiewicz's work is familiar to every student of philosophy in Poland for his three-volume, monumental, and extremely useful History of Philosophy. Some of them would have read his...