Bronisław Malinowski, the founder of modern social anthropology, was a philosopher by way of his tertiary education at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche on the one hand and Ernst Mach on the other. At the height of his brilliant career, he enjoyed a lengthy exchange of views with Bertrand Russell. This chapter will explore the place of philosophy in his innovative contribution, with special emphasis on the relationship between philosophy on the one hand and science, religion, culture, civilization, war and state on the other. The tension between Malinowski's emphasis on empirical research and his quest for theory building is well reflected in all his writings. Philosophy played an essential part in Malinowski's anthropology, but at the same time Malinowski never attempted to philosophize anthropology and should be seen as opposed to his lifelong friend Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (‘Witkacy’), whose prolific creativity in art and literature was a strong philosophical parallel.

In Kraków, where Malinowski was born in 1884 and where he attended Sobieski Grammar School and the Jagiellonian University, philosophy occupied an important place in his education. In fact, Rev. Stefan Pawlicki, an outstanding philosopher at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, taught Malinowski both at Sobieski and Jagiellonian. Professor Pawlicki's influence on Malinowski was such that, after first studying mathematics and physics, he chose philosophy as his main subject and wrote his doctoral thesis On the Principle of the Economy of Mind under Pawlicki's supervision.