Introduction

Leopold Blaustein (1905–1942 [or 1944]) was a Polish-Jewish philosopher, aesthetician, psychologist, schoolteacher, and educationalist whose thought was shaped on the border between the main intellectual trends in Poland and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like a lens, his eclectic but original philosophy focused on new readings in the legacy of descriptive psychology, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology. Certainly, he was well trained in these divergent yet intertwined traditions. After all, Blaustein was educated in Lvov (Lwów, now Lviv in Ukraine), where his teachers were, among others, Kazimierz Twardowski—a disciple of Franz Brentano in Vienna—who supervised his doctoral dissertation, and Roman Ingarden, who was working at that time on the basics of his phenomenological aesthetics, presented later in 1931 in Das literarische Kunstwerk [The Literary Work of Art]. Importantly, while working on his thesis in 1925, Blaustein studied for a few weeks in Freiburg im Breisgau under Edmund Husserl, who was lecturing then on phenomenological psychology. In addition, in 1927/28, he spent a few months in Berlin, where he had occasion to attend lectures given by Carl Stumpf or Max Wertheimer, not to mention his visits to the Berlin Psychological Institute. After his return to Poland in 1928, Blaustein published his first monograph in Polish, Husserlowska nauka o akcie, treści i przedmiocie przedstawienia [Husserl’s Theory of Act, Content and Object of Presentation], which was devoted solely to Husserl’s philosophy. This book is arguably the very first scholarly work which reads Husserl’s idea of intentionality in the context of Brentano and Bernard Bolzano. Later, Blaustein worked out an original methodological device which allowed him to study phenomena such as experiencing a theater play, a movie, or a radio drama. He also explored new ideas in humanistic psychology and the latest attempts to implement phenomenological tools in psychiatry. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise which scholars often emphasize the novelty of Blaustein’s approach.