The renowned logician and philosopher Józef Maria Bocheński (1902–1995), a professor at the University of Fribourg, belonged to the analytical philosophical school (Whitehead, Wittgenstein) and gained worldwide fame with bestsellers "The Path to Philosophical Thinking" (German 1959, Czech Conversations, 1985) and "Dictionary of Philosophical Superstitions" (Polish 1987, Czech samizdat, 1988). He lectured and wrote in five languages. Bocheński's greatest contribution is his analysis of Marxism, which he sees as an ideological and sociological combination of the greatest superstitions of the last two centuries: scientism, i.e., the assumption that scientific methodology is the only rationality, humanistic anthropocentrism, according to which man is the absolute measure of all things, and finally progressivism, the belief in the omnipotent technical and scientific progress that supposedly will solve even the existential meaning of life. Bocheński considered the European West as the only dynamic civilization, with its three fundamental attitudes towards reality: the Greek sense of pure ideal form, the Roman attitude towards society (law), and the Jewish-Christian view on the existential problems of man. Bocheński's "superstitions" amusingly and wittily, with relentless logic and Aristotelian realism, reveal the contradictions and confusion in thinking...
