[6] In 1951 he got his master's degree in philosophy, his thesis "Criticism of subjective idealism"[7] in V. I. Lenin’s "Materialism and Empirio-criticism" supervised by Czeżowski.
[9] In 1953 (the height of Stalinism), due to having his freedom of doing philosophical research limited, Wolniewicz quit his academic career, getting a job at the W-8 department of the Labor Union Association (Poznań), the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Gdańsk), the Voivodeship Council of Trade Unions and at one of the State Agricultural Farms.
[10] In 1962 he became a doctor of humanities, his dissertation "Semantics of plain language in Wittgenstein’s new philosophy" written under supervision of prof. Czeżowski and reviewed by Izydora Dąmbska and Henryk Elzenberg.
In 1967, at the University of Chicago (as a visiting associate professor) he gave a trimester lecture on ontology of objects and facts.
[14] Wolniewicz retired in 1997, but continued giving lectures – however, in 1998 The Scientific Council of the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw didn't extend his job contract.
He distanced himself from the main philosophical trends of the 20th century and accepted theses by "great thinkers", like: Aristotle,[18] Leibniz,[19] Hume,[20][21] Kant[22] and especially Wittgenstein.
[23][24] Critical towards Freudianism,[25] phenomenology,[26] post-modernism[27][28][29] and religious fundamentalism,[30][31][32] and partially towards Marxism,[33] he represented an analytical and metaphysical approach.
The main assumptions of his beliefs were axiological absolutism in the rationalist version and metaphysical pessimism in looking at man and society.
It fills the gaps in knowledge for the branches that science hadn't covered in a particular period of history, but also due to the changes to conditions of social life its goals will never become exhausted.
[36] Philosophy has a nature of common-sense cognition: it articulates that every person could get to use common sense while also pondering deep enough in the process.
He put it apart from "philosophical literature", which included "antiquarian philosophy", which examines the evolution of ideas and relations between them, combined with a lack of interest in the actual value of the discussed views, and the "substantive philosophy", which attempts to cast light upon actual problems of the era in its aim for the truth.
Wolniewicz’s anthropological views can be described by the following concepts: anti-naturalism, rationalism, nativism, Manichaeism (this is, recognizing the existence of irrational evil in humans) and voluntarism.
[47][48] In the field of axiology, Wolniewicz continued the work of Henryk Elzenberg,[49][50] yet despite absorbing many of his fundamental ideas, he transformed them and rephrased them.
Like Elzenberg, he divided the entire axiology into the formal and substantive one, covering the former using the conceptual apparatus of the semantics of possible worlds and situational ontology.
[57] The essence of religiosity is an individual and personal attitude to death, which shouldn’t be reduced only to emotion of fear.
[59] According to Wolniewicz, the Roman law is the third foundation of the European civilization, after the scientific view of the world and the Christian religion.
[46] The foundation of the Roman law, on the other hand, is the principle of justice formulated by Cicero and Ulpian cuique suum tribuere ("may all get their due").
In his view, concepts of punishment different from the one based on the Roman principle of justice appeared in (particularly harshly criticized by him) the Enlightenment culture.
[61] Wolniewicz believed that the objection to the death penalty that is present so often these days is a result of a crisis of the European culture as a whole.
[62] The atrophy of this faith and the adversity to protecting the social order make law dead, a paper record devoid of actual meaning to people.
[65] Wolniewicz was analysing the fundamental ethical problems of the present day: capital punishment, euthanasia, transplants, embryo-cloning and abortion.
[86] In 2008, Wolniewicz addressed a packed crowd at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Kraków and shouted "The Jews are attacking us!
We need to defend ourselves", in an event protesting against the Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz book and alongside Jerzy Robert Nowak.
][92][93][94][2] Wolniewicz considered Islam as a harbinger of Asian expansion, and claimed that migration and terror were "weapons" in the hands of Islamists.
During the 2005 parliamentary election he unsuccessfully stood as a candidate to Sejm under Janusz Korwin-Mikke Platform in an electoral district outside of Warsaw.
[99] Later into 2007 he got involved in an event initiated by Jerzy Robert Nowak, a professor at the University of Social and Medial Culture against the book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz by Jan Tomasz Gross that describes the Polish-Jewish relations during World War Two.
Among Wolniewicz's direct students are his doctoral candidates – Zbigniew Musiał, Ulrich Schrade, Beata Witkowska-Maksimczuk; his graduate students – Agnieszka Maria Nogal, Paweł Okołowski, Klaudiusz Suczyński; participants of Wolniewicz's seminars of many years – Jan Zubelewicz, Jędrzej Stanisławek.
Situational ontology also inspires mathematical papers on conditionally distributive lattices by Jan Zygmunt and Jacek Hawranek.
[107] Also faced with criticism in a public discourse was Wolniewicz's expressive manner of speaking (like using such terms as "half-brain",[108] "neo-cannibalism"[73] or "mengelism"[109] when referring to his world-view opponents).
[110] By a decision of president Aleksander Kwaśniewski on November 11, 1997, „for outstanding contribution to the Polish science”, he was awarded with an Officer's Cross of Polonia Restituta.