Leszek Nowak

Leszek Nowak (7 January 1943 – 20 October 2009) was a Polish philosopher and legal theoretician.

Biography

Education In 1965, he graduated in law from Adam Mickiewicz University's Faculty of Law and Administration, having written Master of Jurisprudence (M.Jur.) thesis under the supervision of Zygmunt Ziembiński, who introduced Nowak to the field of legal theory and convinced him to major in the subject. In 1966 he completed his Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) degree in philosophy at the University of Warsaw under the supervision of . In 1967 he obtained a Doctor of Law (LL.D.) degree, writing a dissertation on the legal interpretation, the rule of law and semiotic functions of language. He obtained his habilitation (post-doctoral degree) in 1970, was subsequently published as a book on the methodological foundations of Karl Marx's Das Kapital. His theory was inspired by ideas he found in Marx’s writings. He made them explicit and precise by using the language of contemporary logical philosophy.

In 1977 he started to work on a new, generalized social theory, which he called the . He was interned on 13th of December 1981 and spent a year in jail. In 1985 he was expelled from the university and in 1989 his professorship was reinstated.