My name is Daniel Matysiak. I am a graduate of the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University in Boston, and a graduate student of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin1. My dissertation is on the subject of mereology, albeit in a very different way than it has so far been approached.
In addition to my recent entrepreneurial activities, I have a strong interest in both the arts and the sciences. Within the sciences, I have a particular interest in philosophy. It is my impression, that philosophy’s reputation has been undermined in the popular imagination as a frivolous, superfluous and pointless discipline reducible to a certain kind of degenerate naval gazing, idle conjecturing and pointless speculation. While this may be what much of what passes for philosophy has become, I will take this opportunity to correct the misconception, and state that philosophy properly understood is, in fact, the first science, within which the field of metaphysics reigns supreme, and whose proper object is ultimate reality. Without further qualification, it may be difficult for some to understand what I mean, and I would expect nothing less than the most precise qualifications myself.
I seem to tend towards Thomist positions on matters of metaphysics and ethics, and I am interested in the history, hermeneutics, methodologies and philosophy of science with respect to the physical sciences. I am interested in metaphysics, epistemology and logic. The “science of science”, epistemology, is something that has interested me for a very long time, and has preoccupied my thinking for at least the last 10 years after a rather devastating experience with scientism, rationalism and French existentialism. It was a blessing and a curse. Philosophers and physicists who have inspired me or resonate with my own thinking include Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Pierre Duhem, Stanley Jaki, Michał Heller and certain members of the Lublin school, all of which maintain more or less strong Thomist, and by extension Aristotelean positions.
Of course, sciences other than philosophy interest me. You can get a haphazard sense of some of those interests from my résumé and work pages.
With respect to the arts, I am just as diversified, although I admit I wish to devote more effort to them than I have. Recently, I began experimenting with drawing in the chiaroscuro fashion, and this past summer I revived a long dormant interest in painting. Music and language also occupy important locations in my hierarchy of interests. The common thread is, naturally, a strong aesthetic drive and a deep appreciation for beauty. In fact, I attribute the degeneration of art in our times to the loss of an appreciation for beauty (the proper subject of fine art), one of the three transcendental goods, the other two of which are the good (the proper subject of ethics) and truth (the proper subject of science).
If you wish to contact me, please email at daniel at danielmatysiak dot com. (In case you’re wondering, I’ve obscured my email address intentionally to make it more difficult for spammers to find).
1Apparently, not only is the philosophy department the largest center of (moderate) realist philosophy in the world, but likewise the largest department in the world. The philosophy “specialization” or “course” (for lack of a better translation) at KUL was recently awarded the Polish Accreditation Commision’s highest honor, a distinction no other philosophy department in Poland possesses.