Count August Dołęga Cieszkowski (; 12 September 1814 – 12 March 1894) was a Polish philosopher, economist and social and political activist. His Hegelian philosophy influenced the young Karl Marx and action theorists. Biography Cieszkowski was born in Nowa Sucha, in the Duchy of Warsaw. He studied at the Jagiellonian University and in then, from 1832, at the University of Berlin where he became interested in Hegelianism through the lectures of Karl Ludwig Michelet, who became a lifelong friend. He gained his doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University in 1838. After his studies he travelled around Europe, visiting France, England and Italy before returning to Poland in 1840 and settling permanently in Wierzenica, near Poznań, in 1843. Cieszkowski co-founded the Polish League (Liga Polska) in 1848. He was a member of the Prussian National Assembly (1848–1855) and a political activist. He (unsuccessfully) endeavoured to start a university in Poznań and co-founded the Poznań Society of Friends of Arts and Sciences (PTPN) in 1857, being elected to its presidency three times (1857–1858, 1861–1868, 1885). It was the most important cultural and scientific society in Poland until the creation of Kraków's Academy of Learning (Akademia Umiejętności) in 1871–73. In 1870 he founded the Halina School of Agriculture in Żabikowo, named after his wife Halina, who had died in 1861. In 1873 it became affiliated to the Kraków Academy of Learning, established in 1872. Philosophical work Cieszkowski coined the term historiosophy in his 1838 work Prolegomena zur Historiosophie (Prolegomena to a Historiosophy), a revision of the Hegelian philosophy of history. He adopted a threefold division of human history from medieval millenarians such as Joachim of Fiore ( 1135 – 1202) and mixed it with Hegelian categories and concepts. He is arguably the creator of the "philosophy of action". Cieszkowki's first period of history was that of antiquity. The second period was the Christian era, which represented the birth of reflectiveness, a turning inwards and upwards from natural sensual immediacy toward the universal and abstract. The spirit existed "for itself" (für sich). This period was marked by an intolerable duality between the opposed worlds of the God and temporal existence, spirit and matter, action and thought. The Hegelian philosophy of spirit, thought and universality at the expense of will, matter and particularly the (Hegelian) spirit had not yet experienced the division of mind and body and living in a primal pre-reflective unity with nature,