Znaniecki, Florian Witold

Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958) was a Polish and American sociologist and philosopher of culture, born on January 15, 1882, in Świątniki, Poland. He died on March 23, 1958, in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. He formulated a theory of cultural systems with a humanistic coefficient that relates to the active experience of meaning and the axiological significance of cultural data. For Znaniecki, cultural data consist of values, and these differ from the mere “things” that are the object of research in the natural sciences. With his writings in Polish and English, Znaniecki developed a systematic sociological theory built on a theory of action that aimed at the understanding and explanation of [Page 897]the social dynamics of culture, change, and creativity. Znaniecki considered sociology the centerpiece of the cultural sciences ...