Experience as a Source of Knowledge. Analysis of Karol Wojtyła’s Introductions to Love and Responsibility
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The article argues that the “Introductions” Karol Wojtyła authored for the first (1960) and second (1962) Polish editions of Love and Responsibility function as a methodological key to his ethics of sexuality and his broader anthropology. Focusing on the opening argumentative sections of both “Introductions,” it reconstructs a triple framework – historical, ecclesial, and philosophical – in order to explain Wojtyła’s response to the claim that only those with marital experience can speak credibly about sexual ethics. Situating Wojtyła within the ecclesiastical scientific milieu of the mid-twentieth century, the study shows that his central move consists in expanding the notion of experience beyond empiricist immediacy in accordance with the fundamental insights of the phenomenological tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler). Read in this light and within the broader coherence of Wojtyła’s corpus (his studies on Scheler and Person and Act), pastoral experience emerges as a distinct epistemic modality capable of yielding morally significant knowledge.
Source: Wojtyła Studies
Author: Wilkołek, Rafał
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7225437426