Stefan Amsterdamski was born in Warsaw in 1929. His father, a medical doctor, died in 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto. He finished secondary school in Siberia where he had been deported from Vilnius in 1941 with the rest of the family. After returning to Poland he studied chemistry at Lodz Polytechnic University. In 1969 he took his doctorate in philosophy at Warsaw University. Between 1954 and 1968 he worked at the Philosophy Department of Lodz University. In 1961-1962 he was in Paris on a stipend from the French government. In 1963 he completed his habilitation, again at Warsaw University. In 1967-1968 he was the Dean of the History and Philosophy Department at Lodz University, but was removed in 1968 by the Minister of Science and Labour. For two years between 1968 and 1970 he remained unemployed. Between 1970 and 1989 he was employed by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1973-1974 he received a stipend from the American Council of Learned Societies, accredited successively at Yale, Boston College and Pittsburgh. Between 1975 and 1980 he collaborated with the Italian Enaudi Encyclopedia. He was one of the founders and a lecturer of Towarzystwo Kursow Naukowych (the so-called 'flying university') between 1978 and 1981. Between December 1981 and November 1982 he was interned in a camp at Jawor in Darlowko. After his release he taught at the College de France and worked in the Institut des Hautes Etudes in Bures near Paris (1984-1985). In 1987-1988 he was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 1989 he was a member of the Solidarity delegation to the Round Table Talks. Between 1989 and 1991 he was the Vice Minister of Scientific Research in the Mazowiecki government. After the resignation of that government he taught at Stanford University (1991) and then at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (1992-1993). Between 1992 and 2004 he was a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Director of the Graduate School for Social Research offering interdisciplinary doctoral studies in the social sciences and humanities. He retired in 2004.

Professor Amsterdamski is the author of 150 publications in philosophy and sociology and of publications devoted to the issue of reform of the financing of scientific research in Poland.

His most important publications are: About Interpretations of the Notion of Probability (1964, translated into French, Russian and Hungarian); Between Experience and Metaphysics (1973, translated into English and Italian); Between History and Method (1983, translated into English and Italian); Science and Order of the World (1986); and Tertium non datur (1994). His numerous editorials and translations include among others: W. Heisenberg, B. Russel, A. L. Rows, T. S. Kuhn, L. Fuller, J. Bronowski, D. Bell, H. Berman, E. Schrodinger, B. Anderson, F. Manuel, K. R. Popper, A. Giddens, A. Kostler, and M. Gilbert.