Maria Ossowska

Maria Ossowska (née Maria Niedźwiecka, 16 January 1896, Warsaw – 13 August 1974, Warsaw) was a Polish sociologist and social philosopher.

A student of the philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński, she originally in 1925 received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Warsaw with a thesis on Bertrand Russell. In her later work, she focused on the philosophy and sociology of ethics. Ossowska is often mentioned as a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school.

From 1941 to 1945, Ossowska taught in the Polish underground university system. In 1945-48 she was a professor at the University of Łódź, after that at the University of Warsaw. She was banned from teaching between 1952 and 1956, while sociology was removed from Polish universities as a "bourgeois" discipline. From 1952 to 1962, she directed the Institute for the History and Theory of Ethics within the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). In 1972 the Communist authorities awarded Ossowska a first-degree Polish National Award (Polska Nagroda Państwowa I stopnia), the highest Polish state accolade.

Ossowska was married to sociologist Stanisław Ossowski, with whom she closely cooperated in research and teaching.

Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski are considered among the founders of the field of "science of science" due to their authorship of a seminal 1935 paper titled "The Science of Science."

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