We ignore the history of philosophy at our peril. Engels, who typically conflates Marx and Marxism, points to the relation of Marxism to the tradition while also denying it. In his little book on Feuerbach, Engels depicts Feuerbach as leading Marx away from Hegel, away from classical German philosophy, away from philosophy and towards materialism and science. This view suggests that Marx is at best negatively related to Classical German philosophy, including Hegel. Yet Engels elsewhere suggests that Marx belongs to (...) the classical German philosophical tradition. In the preface to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels wrote: “We German socialists are proud that we trace our descent not only from Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte and Hegel”. In this paper I will focus on Marx’s relation to Fichte. This relation is rarely mentioned in the Marxist debate, but I will argue, it is crucial for the formulation of Marx’s position, and hence for assessing his contribution accurately. One of the results of this study will be to indicate that Marx, in reacting against Hegel, did not, as is often suggested, ‘leave’ philosophy, but in fact made a crucial philosophical contribution. (shrink)

Increasingly recognized threats from climate change and the progressive sixth mass extinction require not only searching for new technological solutions, but also changing the perception of the world and the beings living in it. There is an urgent need to include individual practices; practices that are an integral part of integrated policies to protect habitats, the climate, and the homo sapiens itself. Eric S. Nelson, in his latest book Daoism and Environmental Philosophy. Nourishing Life introduces the reader to the environmental (...) approach known to Chinese communities for centuries. In a comprehensive and accurate manner, the author presents the Chinese approach to life and development, the understanding and interpretation of which has changed over the centuries, invariably emphasizing man’s belonging to the world of nature. This review introduces the author’s assumptions presented in the book, combining them with relatively new thoughts and paradigms appearing in the 20th and 21st centuries in Western Europe and the United States. (shrink)

MNiSW grant 261/ WCN/2019/1 “Wsparcie dla Czasopism Naukowych”.

After the publication of Jaques Derrida’s book, L’animal que donc je suis, anti-speciesism has been looking for a theoretical foundation for its ethical content. In my opinion, the defect of all these philosophical perspectives is that they still reduce animals to objects of human philosophy. Here, I develop a new framework in which animals are considered as subjects of their own philosophy. In analogy to the concept of ethnophilosophy, the concept of speciophilosophy is here introduced. The different ways of thinking (...) between humans and other animals are outlined, by explaining the difference between verbal reasoning and thinking through images. Human philosophies are shown to be anthropocentric ideologies, related to carnivorism. Subsequently, animal speciophilosophies are discussed and a dialogical symphilosophein among all living beings is proposed to be the extension of the so-called philosophy of dialogue. Finally, it is shown how this perspective was present in the original Christian ethics. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical evaluation of ethical and philosophical concerns about the effective altruism as an ethical position. Effective altruists claim that one of our important ethical obligations is to do the most good possible, with the biggest possible positive impact. This impact should be measured with rational tools and by evaluating the effectiveness of our actions. At first glance, this might seem as a consensus building position, a good starting point for building a community of people wanting to (...) change the world for the better. In our paper, we present some difficulties which are connected with such a way of thinking about charity and an ethical obligation to donate. We discuss the problem of the commercialization of ethical values, understanding effectiveness, agreeing about goals, as well as the political consequences of effective altruism understood as an ethical position. (shrink)

Understanding modeling in biology requires understanding how biology is organized as a discipline and how this organization influences the research practices of biologists. Biology includes a wide range of sub-disciplines, such as cell biology, population biology, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and systems biology among others. Biologists in sub-disciplines such as cell, molecular, and systems biology believe that the use of a few experimental models allows them to discover biological universals, whereas biologists in sub-disciplines such as ecology and evolutionary biology believe (...) that the use of many different experimental and mathematical models is necessary in order to do this. Many practitioners of both approaches misunderstand best practices of modeling, especially those related to model testing. We stress the need for biologists to better engage with best practices and for philosophers of biology providing normative guidance for biologists to better engage with current developments in biology. This is especially important as biology transitions from a “data-poor” to a “data-rich” discipline. If 21st century biology is going to capitalize on the unprecedented availability of ecological, evolutionary, and molecular data, of computational resources, and of mathematical and statistical tools, biologists will need a better understanding of what modeling is and can be. (shrink)

Why is there no philosophy of International Relations? Why, despite the significant intellectual and institutional development of International Relations after World War II, has IR failed to generate any ‘grand ideas’ that would influence the broadly understood humanities? None of the theories of international relations indicates the exceptional features of interna- tionality as its foundation. None of these theories formulates a fundamental claim to its subject matter in International Relations the way geography, history or sociology do. This leads to the (...) conviction that international relations do not have to be formed by aspects of the social world that are specific to them, and can be interpreted in terms of ideas imported from the disciplines that deal with examining aspects relevant to them. The basic disadvantage of this openness of International Relations to other disciplines is the lack of reflection on its own ‘deep ontology.’ This seems to be the most important reason for the lack of a philosophy of International Rela- tions. The author accomplishes two basic goals in his text. Firstly, he undermines the legitimacy of the three attitudes prevailing in IR on understanding internationality, which he calls internal- ism, externalism and correlationism. Secondly, he presents the essence and consequences of the negative character of IR, which involves the absence of the philosophy of IR and studying internationality in the same manner as political science does. The author argues that understanding this ‘strange orthodoxy’ can be a means to overcom- ing it, thereby opening up the possibility of conceiving the ontology of IR, or outlining the path leading to the philosophy of International Relations. Finally, the author refers to the proposal of Justin Rosenberg, to then present an idea for an ontology on which the philosophy of Interna- tional Relations could be founded. (shrink)

In a Requiem for Media Jean Baudrillard described the civil war in Timisoara, Romania, in 1989. He discovered that the war was to a large extent instigated by the mass media. Nowadays, the media have the possibility to decontextualize events and objectify them by placing them in a different context, alongside other decontextualized events. This could be very dangerous and lead to serious national security problems. Media could provoke social turbulence and “real” crimes. My aim in this paper is to (...) describe this problem and show possible solutions. While following the methodology adopted, I examine case studies and analyze specific historical events. (shrink)

The article was translated by Stephen Dersley, with the translation supported by the grant 261/ WCN/2019/1 “Wsparcie dla Czasopism Naukowych” in order to promote original Polish research worldwide.

The development of increasingly intelligent and autonomous technologies will eventually lead to these systems having to face morally problematic situations. This is particularly true of artificial systems that are used in geriatric care environments. The goal of this article is to describe how one can approach the design of an elder care robot which is capable of moral decision-making and moral learning. A conceptual design for the development of such a system is provided and the steps that are necessary to (...) implement it are described. (shrink)

The current condition of philosophy as a discipline is quite problematic, in particular if we consider its relationship to other human sciences and to other disciplines in general. The philosophical debate appears fragmented, and philosophy itself has lost any specific role in the present scientific landscape. This situation determines a sort of “identity crisis”, whose main consequence is the coexistence of antinomical views about philosophy in the contemporary scientific and public discourse. Starting from this context, the paper aims at providing (...) a description of philosophy as “theory of mediation”. This description does not want to be ‘original’, but rather tries to emphasize an element that is always been rooted in the very essence of philosophy, but that has also often been neglected. Philosophy has always pointed out the necessity to think the in-between of things, their relation and the passage from one to another, rather than just offering a taxonomy or a factual description of the world. In order to prove this point, the paper offers an analysis of some classical texts, in particular of some fragments by Heraclitus and of a passage taken from Hegel’s early writings. A view that rethinks philosophy as “mediology” allows a rehabilitation of philosophy as a specific discipline and as a systematic enterprise, at the same time providing a new framework for the understanding of the relationship between philosophy and other sciences. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to show that the so-called “philosophia perennis” is valid for our modern times too. Four philosophical schools of the Hellenistic times remain influential for the following centuries: Plato and Neoplatonism, Aristotle and the Peripatetics, the Stoics and the Epicureans. We are interpreting two, only two, poems from Thomas More and Jacob Balde, and so we see the greatest possible influence of all these four ancient philosophical schools.

In the present paper, the author aims at laying the foundations of a symbolics of technical gesture, according to the thesis that symbolic faculty is another face of the technological one, and that they are both in truth two sides of the same coin. Accordingly, the author suggests to rename the whole dimen-sion as “meta-environmentality”. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a specific comparison between Cassirer’s definition of “animal symbolicum” and its scientific consistence in the light of (...) modern palaeontology. “Animal symbol-icum” is here compared with Leroi-Gourhan’s homo technologicus, and Cassi-rer’s ideas on human identity tested starting from paleoanthropological data. The result of the inquiry lead us to recognize the urgency of integrating Cassi-rer’s argument with the primacy of the technological capacity, but a deep anal-ysis of the characterizing attributes of the latter compels us to uphold the symbolic attitude of the technological dimension. The author then sketches a basic description of the guidelines of a symbolic theory of technology, and tries to show how the basic elements of such an approach were familiar both to Cassirer and Leroi-Gourhan. As a consequence of the whole theory, the author elaborates a chronological analysis of human identity, whose basic result is the determination of the future as main temporal dimen-sion of human acting. (shrink)

The aim of the study is articulated in the title. The author is reconstructing Kantian philosophy and pedagogic, the thesis of postmodernism and post-modern pedagogic and indicates the relationships and differences of those two systems. Both Kant and the Baden-based neo-Kantians enabled the emancipation of the humanities. The Kantian model of pedagogy was the basis for pedagogic directions, belonging to the meta-theory of humanistic education and critical pedagogy, especially the postmodern one. There are clear links with Kantian ideas of pedagogy, (...) the way to capture the role of dignity, knowledge and freedom in the morality of a human being. There are also significant differences: Kant did not include to his pedagogy social, political and pluralistic questions, which are so important in postmodern pedagogy. (shrink)

My work upon this article was possible due to the grant of National Science Centre, Poland.

The aim of this article is to outline the theory of a historical process developed within the framework of the Poznań School of Methodology, mainly by Leszek Nowak and a team of his co-workers. In the first part of the paper, the meta-philosophical and meta-theoretical assumptions of Poznań school are reconstructed and juxtaposed with the relevant assumptions of Western analytical Marxism. In the central part of the paper, the main ideas of adaptive reconstruction of historical materialism and non-Marxian historical materialism (...) are presented. In its final part, some problems of reception of Leszek Nowak’s theory of historical process in Polish People’s Republic and the Third Republic are discussed. (shrink)

This article seeks to present how the manner of recording the spatial phenomena analysed by Henri Lefebvre in his numerous publications can serve as a basis for reflections on the suitability of his theories for the description of the creative class in a modern city. Because Lefebvre pursued a number of lines of thought in his philosophical ideas, we can state that there is a strong correlation between the city image he created and preferences of the creative class in a (...) modern city. The article is also intended to make the reader realise that records of philosophical ideas can, in many instances, contribute to the improvement of the actual space in a city. (shrink)

The article presents a philosophical-methodological conception of an empirical-scientific model of geography as an empirical science. It consists of an introduction and two parts. The introduction discusses the notion of philosophical-methodological models of geography and philosophical orientations. Part one addresses the philosophical-methodological foundations of the model, which are three successive philosophical streams: empiricism, logical empiricism, and scientific philosophy. Part two offers a characterisation of the empirical-scientific model in terms of the principles of scientific philosophy embracing three chief problem areas: ontological, (...) epistemological and methodological. (shrink)

The connection between law and literature can still affect surprisingly. The theme of the present article is to summarize some of the basic features of the movement, which is called „Law and Literature” and to suggest some starting-points with which it is associated. These starting points include, for instance linguistic conception of law, narratology in law or the relations between law and culture. The article offers an overview of the classical approaches connecting law and literature and mentions the reasons for (...) this connection: e.g. cultivation of law and lawyers, improvement of judicial decisions or improvement of legal interpretation. Some of the findings resulting from the joint of law and literature can be used in practice and goes beyond „mere” theory. The article is to be seen as an introduction to the movement of „Law and Literature”, presentation of ideas on which this movement is based and offering the possibility of its further development. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine Jizang’s theory of knowledge and truth in terms of contemporary philosophy. Firstly, I present the main areas of Madhyamaka thought, especially those concerning human knowledge and cognition, enunciated in Nagarjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartani. Secondly, I raise the issue of the acceptance of Madhyamaka in the area of Chinese thought, which provides us with the question of the inception and development of the sānlùn zōng – the Three Treatises School. Thirdly, I expound the main points (...) and key notions of Jizang’s philosophy: the crucial concepts of the “refutation of erroneous views as the illumination of right views” and “the Four Levels of the Two Kinds of Truth”. I try to explicate and develop these ideas in terms of modern epistemology, which in the first instance is related to the Münschausen trilemma. (shrink)

Reading numerous readings of Jacques Derrida made by Richard Rorty during the period of the last twenty years or so, one can get the impression that Rorty admires French deconstructionist without reservations, presenting him as an example of a new way of practising philosophy - a way which is private, idiosyncratic and publicly uncommitted, which is original, but publicly useless, which, finally, leads to individual autonomy. A way leading to self-creation, getting out of the influence and power of one’s precursors (...) by way of a para-Oedipal struggle of a son with a father. Derrida in Rorty would be supposed to break with Heidegger in the way Heidegger tried to overcome Nietzsche, and Nietzsche struggled with Plato. And just like Nietzsche wished to be a new figure of a philosopher who "philosophizes with a hammer", but in Heidegger’s reading turned out to be merely "the last metaphysician" and "inverted Platonic", similarly Heidegger in the eyes of Derrida is not - despite the former’s assurance and unshakeable self-confidence - the first post-metaphysical thinker, but precisely the "last metaphysician", the last figure from the "ontotheological tradition" being destroyed or from the tradition of the "metaphysics of presence". Derrida overcomes Heidegger, Rorty reminds us, when he is trying to be the first post-metaphysical philosopher e.g. when he says that "there will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being", about which, incidentally, he already spoke as a broader project in a volume of interviews entitled Positions, telling his interviewer that he is attempting to locate in Heidegger’s texts "the signs of belonging to metaphysics". But philosophical search for fame - and hence immortality - leads to an infinite number of recontextualizations and redescriptions, to new readings fighting with old ones, and the characters of philosophical stories being told are philosophers who are closer and closer to us. And just like Jacques Derrida was not willing to leave Heidegger in peace until he overcame him, putting himself in a new light, similarly Richard Rorty relentlessly bites in his own way Derrida’s philosophizing. (shrink)

Herbart’s scientific educational theory pointed to the fact that the application of pedagogical ideas in educational practices would brought a guaranteed outcome with a regular, mathematical precision. Herbart he was personally aware that this system contains the danger of formalism and unilateral intellectualism and therefore he endeavored, in theory, to overcome the concept of educational learning. This emphasis, however, was neglected by his pupils and followers.

We are cyborgs. We are transhumans; transitory people that exist in a luminal phase, waiting for a transfer to the posthuman world. Our children do not need education; it is cyborgization that ensures their development. This is the idea of transhumanistic philosophy, a thoroughly pedagogic idea. In this paper, I will present basic transhumanism ideas and stress the criticism on education created within this philosophy. This text is neither a systematic study on transhumanism nor a pedagogical analysis. It is merely (...) an attempt at showing teachers how education can be deprecated in modern philosophies that are technologically-oriented. (shrink)

The author introduces a fundamental distinction between human rights and the law of human rights which is subsequent to these rights. While examining these issues, the author follows M. Piechowiak and his way of understanding human rights. According to Piechowiak, human rights are objectively existing relationships between a human being and a global good, welfare that is due to him/her. Particular aspects of this global good are what we used to call an object of a particular human right. Therefore, human (...) rights have an ontic nature. These relationships have their normative consequences. It may be stated that these relationships ontologically justify that the norms protecting these rights stay in force. These relationships and the norms protecting them can be recognized. Notwithstanding what was stated above, human rights shall be proclaimed and the ontic norms protecting them, adequately recognized, shall be positivised, that is, acts of positive law shall introduce these norms into legal systems. (shrink)

The present book is devoted to "European connections of Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism". The theme, chosen carefully and intentionally, is supposed to show the motivation behind the writing of the present work, as well as to show its intended extent. Let us consider briefly the first three parts of the theme, to enlighten a little our intentions. ''European'1 is perhaps the most important description for it was precisely this thread that was most important to me, being the only context seriously taken (...) into account, as I assumed right from the start that I would not be writing about rather more widely unknown to me - and much less fascinating from my own, traditional, Continental philosophical perspective - American analytic philosophy. So accordingly I have almost totally skipped "American" connections of Rorty’s philosophy, that is to say, firstly, a years-long work within analytic philosophy, secondly struggles with it on its own grounds, and finally attempts to use classical American, mainly Deweyan, pragmatism for his own needs and numerous polemics associated with it- th e questions that are far away from my interests and that arise limited interest among reading and writing philosophical audience in Poland, and perhaps also among Continental philosophers. It did not seem possible to me to write a book on Rorty in his American connections for they are insufficiently known to me, demanding knowledge of both post-war American analytic philosophy as well as pragmatism of its father-founders. I could see, setting to work on Richard Rorty, that a book on his American connections written by a Polish philosopher in Poland and then in the USA was not a stimulating intellectual challenge but rather a thankless working task. (shrink)

Let us begin our more detailed discussions with a rather general chapter that is an attempt to get close to Richard Rorty’s philosophical discourse on as broad a plane as possible and with a brief and introductory analysis of certain themes, questions and issues present in his recent books. Thus this will be a chapter not so much introducing to a wider context but rather introducing to Rorty’s thought itself. In the next chapters there will appear in the form of (...) more detailed analyses, reconstructions, redescriptions and readings some questions incidentally and generally put here in this chapter. The first volume of Rorty’s Philosophical Papers is devoted, for the most part, to the philosophers from the analytic circle, whereas the second to the figures and questions at the heart of which lie the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Foucault. It causes some noticeable tension between the two volumes but the links between them are created by "pragmatism", strongly stressed and still clarified by Rorty. The first volume is shadowed mainly by one philosopher - Donald Davidson. Whereas when Rorty was writing his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the first and extremely influential book, he was strongly influenced, as he admits himself, by Wilfrid Sellars and W.v. O. Quine, during the next decade it was Donald Davidson that impressed him most and affected his philosophizing to the greatest extent. "I have been writing - explains Rorty - more and more about Davidson - trying to clarify his views to myself, to defend them against actual and possible objections, and to extend them into areas which Davidson himself has not yet explored". Also in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity - the book which seems to use the knowledge and experience of a multitude of texts from the collection of Philosophical Papers, and perhaps a crystallization of these articles - he sees Davidson as an absolutely crucial figure for his own considerations, especially those devoted to language, relations between language and reality, created truth rather than discovered one and so on. As is commonly known, Davidson is an antirepresentationalist and antiessentialist, he rejects the notion of language as some medium, as the third thing, intruding between the self and the reality. Knowledge, both to Rorty and to Davidson as well, is not a matter of getting reality right but rather a matter of "acquiring habits of action for copying with reality", as the former puts it. (shrink)

I would like to take into consideration in this chapter the possibility of Richard Rorty's evolution of views in terms of - suggested by him - distinction between the private and the public as well as in terms of his dichotomous pair of "solidarity" and "self-creation". My efforts would aim at showing that Rorty as a commentator on other philosophers is more and more inclined to value the significance of a self-creational, developing one's "final vocabulary" way of philosophizing, while on (...) the other hand - as a philosopher himself he has remained as far as the private sphere goes - in his own philosophizing - rather moderate and full of reserve. Thus I would like to trace two roles possible in a philosophical language game - to have a look at Rorty’s account of particular philosophers as heroes of the philosophical tradition and to have a look at Rorty himself in the role of a philosopher in a traditional sense of the term, that is to say, interested in the so-called "philosophical problems, "eternal, perennial problems of philosophy", generally - a language game of Philosophy with a capital "p”. First, we would have to outline briefly the Rortyan sense of particular elements of the aforementioned dichotomies, explain a little the concepts from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that interest us in this chapter. Let us begin by saying that Rorty - distinguishing between writers of self-creation on the one hand and writers of solidarity on the other - advises us not to attempt to make choices between the two kinds, not to oppose the two camps and rather, as he puts it, to "give them equal weigh and then use them for different purposes". (shrink)

From the perspective of subsequent books and texts by Richard Rorty it can be clearly seen that to have a look at his anti-Platonism and anti-essentialism, it is not enough to read either only Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, or only Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Consequences of Pragmatism and both volumes of Philosophical Papers. For me it turns out that the impression given by various readings of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in Reading Rorty - the first serious (...) collected volume devoted to the American pragmatist - is totally misleading, or at least extremely one-sided. The book, it is claimed there, is merely criticism of traditional epistemology carried out on the grounds of American analytic philosophy not too interesting to a wider public. And yet it can only be seen retrospectively that the book provides most interesting philosophical "foundations" to later, often more metaphilosophical, literary and cultural ideas. To put it in a nutshell: one can find there the idea of solidarity and self-creation, there is the fundamental question about the place of philosophy in culture rather than merely that about the place of epistemology in philosophy; as well as there is a question about the future of the philosopher in culture, about mechanisms of production and collapse of his self-image, there is also the germ of the project of the "post-Kantian culture", "philosophy without mirrors" and criticism of merely cognitive - and derived from Plato - paradigm of human activity. (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s approach to fiction results from its consistently - to use here his own opposition - "solidarity-related" account; the "other side", literary self-creation, remains programmatically and intentionally undiscussed with much seriousness. One can just get the impression that literature, and the novel in particular, has been burdened with heaviness of responsibility... Does in Rorty’s reflections the novel appear as a source of multifarious metaphors, of the whole worlds born out of the writer’s imagination? Is there in it another dimension (...) of the reality in which mundane obligations no longer bind the human being and where one can give rein to usually hidden desires and passions? The answer is in the negative. The world of fiction of which Richard Rorty writes is a pragmaticized one - and fiction itself is supposed first to build, and then to defend a democratic, liberal order as one of utopias feeding that order. On the other extreme, let us hasten to add, there is philosophy with its right to choose self-creation. The situation as outlined by Rorty might be described in the following manner: the writer has to be responsible, the philosopher may indulge in certain irresponsibility - or rather certain irrelevance with respect to social problems. It is as if "poets" are returned back to polis after more than twenty five centuries and made to think about the state and laws, relieving at the same time at least some philosophers from the respectful Platonic duty of "enlightening the darkness" of the world. In today’s intellectual climate it is probably easier to accept a new role for philosophers than to accept putting part of the burden of responsibility for the success of a contingent, like it or not, experiment of liberal democracies on the writer’s shoulders. Rorty thus seems to me to be making both one step forward and two steps backwards, as his pragmatism does not allow for leaving society at the mercy of spiritless technocrats, social engineers of the future, when poets and philosophers no longrr have much to say. (The opposite direction is taken by Jacques Derrida. He accords this "strange institution called literature", as he writes, the right of tout dire, of saying everything, the power of breaking away from existing rules and conventions, of questioning and dislocating them. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to provide a philosophical and historical background to current discussions about the changing relationships between the university and the state through revisiting the classical “Humboldtian” model of the university. This historical detour is intended to show the cultural rootedness of the modern “idea of the university”, and its close links to the idea of the modern national state. The background is provided by the discussion of such German philosophers and scholars as Wilhelm von Humboldt, (...) Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich W.J. Schelling in the 19th century, as well as the controversy between Karl Jaspers and Jürgen Habermas in the 20th century. The paper consists of the following sections: the university and society: basic questions; the modern university, the nation-state, and “retrospective constructions; the three main principles of the Humboldtian university; the nationalization of European universities: serving the nation; the national aspect of the German Bildung; the pursuit of truth vs. public responsibilities of the modern university; the idea of the university vs. its embodiments ; the university and the state: a modern pact; the renewal of the university vs. the regeneration of the nation; knowledge for its own sake and Wilhelm von Humboldt; Humboldt‟s university vs. the “Humboldtian” university; the University of Berlin: new weapons to continue the struggle lost in the battleground; Humboldt and the role of Bildung; the rebirth of the German nation through education?; giving birth to a new world and the Heideggerian overtones; the state, the university, and academic freedom ; philosophy and education ; and conclusions. (shrink)

There are several points of interest, several catchwords that evoke the whole complicated heart of the matter: Martin Heidegger in 1933 and later, Paul de Man in the years of 1940-42 and later, Robert Faurisson and the whole group of histo- rians-"revisionists" of the Holocaust in France and in the USA in two recent decades. I would say the following: the material for the discussions that are of interest to me today are the most traumatic events of the twentieth century (...) and the behaviour of the philosopher, or in broader terms, the intellectual, associated with them. We can add to them Sartre’s conception of the "committed literature", Georges Bataille’s fascinations with the war, Maurice Blanchot’s fascist texts from the pre-war "Combat" journal, "maoist" involvements of the French intellectuals in the hot sixties, Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm with respect to the Iranian "spiritual revolution", Noam Chomsky’s basically positive attitude to the "revisionists" who negate gassing in Auschwitz etc etc. If we add that all, we can see a certain complex of questions and issues the penetration of which may be one of today’s "tasks of thinking". (shrink)

The university in the form we are familiar with - the modern university - derives from the intellectual work of German philosophers: from Kant and Fichte to Schleiermacher and Humboldt. Being a modem institution, it is relatively new and was bom together with the rise in national aspirations and the rise in the significance of Nation-States in the 19th century.A tacit deal made between power and knowledge, on the one hand, provided scholars with unprecedented institutional possibilities and, on the other, (...) obliged them to support national culture and to help with constituting national subjects - citizens of Nation-States. The alliance between modem knowledge and modern power gave rise to the foundations of the modem institution of the university. Both European, as well as American universities were either founded or transformed on the basis of the project written in 1808 by Wilhelm von Humboldt for the University of Berlin. The place, social function and role of the university as one of the most significant institutions of modernity were clearly determined. But currently, when the project of modernity undergoes radical transformations, it is no longer known what the exact place of the university in society is, for the society itself gets changed. (shrink)

The question of the place, role and tasks of philosophers in postmodernity is perplexing and complicated. I am going to talk here about French and American thinkers, but always having Central Europe in mind. And the question of the social, cultural and political status of philosophers in postmodernity is one of the most intriguing today, especially considering its self-referentiality: philosophers asking questions about themselves... Let us refer here first to several points of interest, several catchwords that evoke the whole complicated (...) heart of the matter: Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophical minds in the twentieth century, with his Nazi illusions in 1933 and later, Paul de Man, the future founder of the American deconstructionist school of literary criticism, in the years of 1940-42 and later, the Historikerstreit in Germany among German historians and philosophers in the eighties. I would say the following: the material for the discussions that are of interest to me today are the most traumatic events of the twentieth century and the behavior of the philosopher, or in broader terms, the intellectual, associated with them. We can add to them Sartre's conception of the "committed literature", Georges Batai- lle's fascinations with the war, Maurice Blanchot's fascist texts from the prewar "Combat" journal, "Maoist" involvement of the French intellectuals in the hot sixties, Michel Foucault's enthusiasm with respect to the Iranian "spiritual revolution", Noam Chomsky's basically positive attitude to "revisionist" historians who negate gassing in Auschwitz etc. If we add that all, we can see a certain complex of questions and issues the penetration of which may be one of today's "tasks of thinking", one of organizing principles within philosophy of culture. (shrink)

Questions about the intellectual's place and role in society, his tasks and obligations, the status he ascribes to himself and that society ascribes to him have recently become a significant part of the ongoing discourse in the humanities. There are different reasons in different countries for this, but whether in English-speaking countries, in Germany or, especially, in France, questions about the intellectual have been important points of reference in numerous discussions at the end of the 20th century. Lepenies' thinking convincingly (...) shows that the dominating French discourse on the subject requires a significant supplement today, for it depicts merely a part of a larger whole which does not confine itself to France aloneFrench questions about the intellectual do not exhaust the catalogue of all the questions that can and should be asked today; nor do they restrict our account of the issue of the intellectual to the adventure of being seduced by the Marxist thinking which started with the October Revolution of 1917 progressing to the middle of the seventies on the part of French writers and philosophers, followed only by their disappointment with and gradual distancing from it after the Algerian war of independence and the events of 1956 ; furthermore, these questions, heading mainly back through history - and mainly to that of the 20th century France - basically pass in silence the present and the future. (shrink)

The general context for this essay is the following: postmodern philosophy was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, especially in his postwar French readings from Bataille to Blanchot to Deleuze to Klossowski. It was Nietzsche in these readings who provided basic contours of a new self-image of the philosopher : instead of thinking about changing the social and political world, philosophers now found new terrains for thought. No longer associated with History, and less and less associated with politics. From the perspective of (...) this essay, it is interesting to think about philosophy through the lenses of the self-images philosophers assume. The transformation of the self-image of philosophers entails the gradual transformation of the role and place of philosophy in culture. For what is philosophy, in broadest terms - is what philosophers regard as accepted as philosophy. The passage from the Hegelian to the Nietzschean self-image in France in recent decades heralded the advent of postmodernity - if we accept the idea that what philosophers think about themselves while practicing philosophy is culturally significant. (shrink)

I would like to take into consideration in this text the possibility of Richard Rorty's evolution of views in terms of — suggested by him — distinction between the private and the public as well as in terms of his dichotomous pair of „solidarity" and „self-creation". My efforts would aim at showing that Rorty as a commentator on other philosophers is more and more inclined to value the significance of self-creational, developing one's „final vocabulary" way of philosophizing, while on the (...) other hand - as a philosopher himself he has remained, as far as the private sphere goes — in his own philosophizing — rather moderate and full of reserve. (shrink)

The fundamental questions to be addressed are these: What is the impact of "postmodernism" on the relationship between philosophy and science? What are the possible consequences of the postmodernist whirlwind on the status of philosophy in contemporary culture? And, does postmodernism add new questions to the gnawing issue over the degree, if any, to which a philosopher is a scientist? It would seem that the relationship between science and postmodern philosophy is a radically new one, not only because the place (...) of philosophy in culture is changing, but because the place of science in culture is undergoing a radical transformation as well. (shrink)

What I am trying to do in the present text is to draw a sketch of postwar French philosophy from the perspective of the question of relations between philosophy and politics. I am showing a distinction between the community and the text that is present in this philosophy from Sartre to Barthes to Foucault and beyond. The general passage from the community-oriented philosophy to the text-oriented philosophy took place in the sixties, following the books by Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and (...) Pierre Klossowski on Nietzsche. I am discussing the formulation of this opposition by Jean-Paul Sartre, its reversal suggested by Roland Barthes and, finally, an attempt made by Michel Foucault to go beyond the very oppositions pertaining to "writing" as such in his dichotomy of "universal intellectuals"/"specific intellectuals". The passage from the French Hegel to the French Nietzsche as a "master thinker" in French philosphy was also a manifest passage from the community to the text as a main focus of philosophical interest, and the discussion of relations between philosophy and politics is at the same time that of the role, place, tasks and obligations of the philosopher in culture. The detour to these discussions is made in order to stress the continuity of the text/community opposition in current debates on postmodernity and to ask about relations between philosophy and politics today. (shrink)

This book argues that the current renegotiation of the postwar social contract concerning the welfare state in Europe is being accompanied by the renegotiation of a smaller-scale modern social pact between the university and the nation-state. Current transformations to the state under the pressures of globalization will not leave the university unaffected, and consequently it is useful to discuss the university and its future in the context of the state. In the new global order, against the odds, universities are striving (...) to maintain their pivotal role in society. Their role as engines of economic growth and contributors to economic competitiveness between increasingly knowledge-driven economies is being widely acknowledged. But it is a radical reformulation of their traditional social roles. The main reasons for current transformations of the university include globalization pressures on nation-states and their public services, the end of the «Golden age» of the Keynesian welfare state, and the emergence of knowledge-based societies and knowledge-driven economies. Therefore the university can no longer be discussed solely in traditional, relatively self-contained disciplinary contexts. Here the university is seen from a variety of perspectives and through the lens of a wide range of disciplines. Contents Contents: The University in a Global Age - The University Between the State and the Market - The Idea of the University Revisited - The University and the Nation-State: the Impact of Global Pressures - The University and the Welfare State - Globalization, the Welfare State, and the Future of Democracy - The University and the New European Educational and Research Policies. (shrink)

The question regarding the educational work of G.W.F. Hegel may appear absurd to the defenders of the philosophical purity of his thought. However, generally speaking, it could be asserted that every philosophical system does include a theory of education. The present paper elaborates the assumption that there is an educational signifi cance inherent in Hegel’s philosophy and that the concept of education is contained in his Phenomenology of Spirit.

The book is an attempt to explore the affinities between contemporary critical theories and modernist and postmodernist American poetry. The analysis focuses on poststructuralist theories, notorious for their tendency to destabilize generic boundaries between literary, philosophical and critical discourses. The main argument and the structure of the book derive from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Che cos’è la poesia” [What is poetry?] in which the philosopher postulates the impossibility of defining poetry by comparing a poem to a hedgehog – prickly, solitary, untamed, (...) fragile and protective, rolling itself up into a ball at the first sign of danger or when in the hands of the reader-intruder. The metaphor captures thus the fragility of the relationship between poetry and the world. The book examines this relationship as exemplified by the erinaceous poetics of high modernists and their postmodernist followers In the study I employ also other oststructuralist theories, such as the notion of the text and the pleasure of the text formulated by Roland Barthes, the heories of metaphor as seen by Paul Ricoeur or Paul de Man, and gender-sensitive theories of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. (shrink)

The present study discusses the concepts of education and training, while also highlighting the paradigm wars of the positivistic and naturalistic views, beginning with the age of ancient philosophies and continuing to the latest era of postmodernism. Additionally, language education is examined considering the linguistic and educational fundamentals which all need to be based on and combined by a philosophy. The research in foreign language education is evaluated from both the teaching and learning perspectives in order to reach conclusions concerning (...) the current situation and the requisites of futuristic and innovative FL education. What is my educational philosophy? is proposed as a key question that not only FL teachers but also all educators should ask themselves; a question that will guide teachers throughout their entire lives and illuminate their minds throughout their teaching practice. Teacher and learner roles are discussed in order to determine whether teachers or learners should come first in the process of education. It is emphasised that the philosophical perspectives of education urgently need to be built into the minds of educators prior to asking them to convey knowledge of any kind or to apply the materials of a specific teaching method. The study concludes with the observation that there exists a serious discrepancy between the needs, preferences and interests of the learners and the views held by educational decision makers, who seem to fail to catch up with the trends in technology and globalisation. (shrink)

The text attempts to answer the question whether musicians need a philosophy of music. The answer to the question of what music contributes to philosophy – a question superordinate in relation to the investigations of the links between philosophy and music – can be formulated clearly, since we find it in the texts of the most prominent representatives of European philosophical thought, including Schopenhauer, whose ideas are discussed in the paper. These issues are also discussed in literature which explores philosophical (...) issues, by such classics of the genre as Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse, whose profound descriptions bring us closer to an understanding of that which music does directly, by expressing spheres beyond words that cannot be expressed otherwise than through music. Karl Popper regards polyphony as the greatest discovery of European culture, and provides evidence of the closeness of science and philosophy. These three levels of approaching the relationship between philosophy and music lead to demonstrating the axiological essence of music, revealed by performers, who make it possible for music to exist to the full in its sonority, unveiling its metaphysical perfection to its listeners. (shrink)

The article is devoted to an interpretation of Aleksander Świętochowski'a essay entitled "Dumania pesymisty" ("The Pessimist's Thought). That work was published in 1876 and raised the question of the main rules of positivist philosophy. "The Pessimist's Thought" demonstrates interesting changes of Polish positivism which, in some apects, was transformed into an idealistic model of neo-Kantianism.