Polish · 1930–2018
Henryk Skolimowski was a Polish philosopher born in Warsaw in 1930. He studied engineering and philosophy, and later taught at the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan and other institutions. He is best known as a founder of ecophilosophy, a field that treats ecological concern as a philosophical question about how people understand nature, knowledge and value. His books include Eco-Philosophy: Designing New Tactics for Living (1981), Living Philosophy: Eco-Philosophy as a Tree of Life (1992) and The Participatory Mind (1994). In these works he argued that mind takes part in creating reality and that modern mechanistic science gives an inadequate picture of the world. He drew on Teilhard de Chardin, Bergson and evolutionary thought, and he urged a spiritual, holistic view of the cosmos. He also wrote on the philosophy of technology and on the logic of science. He died in Poland in 2018.