Andrzej Walicki, the last Polish world-renowned humanist of the 20th century, passed away in August this year. The article offers a concise description of his personality and work, which partly undermines some aspects of his autobiography published in 2010. Walicki, who, like Leszek Kołakowski, was a member of the 56’ generation, also known as the “thaw” generation, became famous, first and foremost, as an expert in Russian thought. His publications, devoted to, among other things, retrospective utopianism and liberalism in the (...) 19th and 20th century Russian philosophy and social thought, were novel on a world scale. Equally novel were his works on the history of Marxism, where he challenged Kołakowski’s standpoint. Moreover, Walicki signifi cantly contributed to research on the history of Polish romantic philosophy, which had previously been overshadowed by great poetry. Walicki is considered to be one of the personalities who, in the 1960s and 70s, the time when Poland was part of the Soviet empire, made Polish humanities flourish. However, no matter how highly one estimates Walicki’s achievements, the impression that humanities were thriving in the communist Poland aft er de-Stalinization is an illusion. The illusion is an eff ect of the crisis in which humanities in Poland found themselves aft er the change of the regime, under neoliberal and populist governments. (shrink)

I attempt to answer thequestion about the place of Eurasianism in theRussian intellectual tradition. I reconstructits historiosophical assumptions as well thepolitical ideology following from them. I sharethe opinion of certain historians thatEurasianism is interesting for a variety ofreasons, but I disagree with those who see init nothing more than a synthesis of standardideas often found in the history of Russianthought. Eurasianism''s originality includes itsacknowledgment of the positive contribution ofthe Mongols to the history of the Russianstate, the radicalism of its critique (...) of theWest, the innovativeness of its theory ofrevolution, as well as the absence, unusual forRussian thinkers of the period, of aneschatological sensitivity. (shrink)

This study is an attempt to reconstruct and sum up philosophical interpretations of Stavrogin, the main hero of the classic Dostoevsky’s novel “The Devils”, given by the outstanding Russian religious thinkers in the twentieth century. The author emphasizes that, however different can be their philosophical premises, the discussed interpretations of Dostoevsky’s hero are compatible and complementary. Confronting and, above all, synthesizing different points of view, he tries to grasp the basic historiosophical, anthropological and religious ideas of Russian renaissance.

This study is an attempt to reconstruct and sum up philosophical interpretations of Stavrogin, the main hero of the classic Dostoevsky’s novel “The Devils”, given by the outstanding Russian religious thinkers in the twentieth century. The author emphasizes that, however different can be their philosophical premises, the discussed interpretations of Dostoevsky’s hero are compatible and complementary. Confronting and, above all, synthesizing different points of view, he tries to grasp the basic historiosophical, anthropological and religious ideas of Russian renaissance.

The article is a comparative analysis of the philosophy of the Russian Religious Renaissance and the views of Marian Zdziechowski (1861–1938), a Polish religious thinker, historian of ideas, and historian of literature. Zdziechowski was also an expert on and promoter of Russian religious thought. As a thinker, he was influenced by it and attempted to cope with the same problems that were plaguing the Russians: the Bolshevik revolution, the decline of Christian religion and culture, and the imminent catastrophe of the (...) whole civilization. The paper describes the affinities between Zdziechowski and the Russian thinkers in detail, yet its main task is to grasp the differences between them, i.e., the distinctive features of Zdziechowski’s thought. The conclusion is that Zdziechowski, who—in contrast to the Russians—was not interested in the recent currents of Western philosophy, as a critic of historical Christianity and an eschatological thinker was less radical than the Russians, but as a philosopher of history he turns out to be a greater pessimist. An important part of the analysis is confrontation of literary styles typical for the Polish thinker and the Russians. A specific feature of Zdziechowski was his tendency to express his own views not in a straightforward manner, but rather by commenting and reconstructing other authors’ ideas. (shrink)

In this paper, we complement proximate or ‘how’ explanations for the origins of language, broadening our perspective to include fitness-consequences explanations, i.e. ultimate, or ‘why’ explanations. We identify the platform of trust as a fundamental prerequisite for the development of a language-like system of symbolic communication. The platform of trust is a social niche in which cheap but honest communication with non-kin is possible, because messages tend to be trusted as a default. We briefly consider the place of the platform (...) of trust on the road map as laid out in the Mirror System Hypothesis. We then turn to recent research on turn-taking in primates, which has been proposed as a precursor of the cooperative structuring of conversation in humans. We suggest, instead, that human turn-taking, in its full richness that makes it an interesting explanatory target, may only appear in a communicative system that is already founded on a community-wide, cooperative platform of trust. (shrink)

We study the structure of analytic ideals of subsets of the natural numbers. For example, we prove that for an analytic ideal I, either the ideal {X (Ω × Ω: En X ({0, 1,…,n} × Ω } is Rudin-Keisler below I, or I is very simply induced by a lower semicontinuous submeasure. Also, we show that the class of ideals induced in this manner by lsc submeasures coincides with Polishable ideals as well as analytic P-ideals. We study this class of (...) ideals and characterize, for example, when the ideals in it are Fσ or when they carry a locally compact group topology. We apply these results to Borel partial orders to rederive a theorem of Todorcevic and to Borel equivalence relations to answer a question of Kechris and Louveau. As another application we give a characterization of σ-ideals of μ-zero sets for Maharam submeasures μ on the Cantor set which is to a large extent analogous to a characterization of the meager ideal due to Kechris and the author. (shrink)

The set of design features developed by Charles Hockett in the 1950s and 1960s remains probably the most influential means of juxtaposing animal communication with human language. However, the general theoretical perspective of Hockett is largely incompatible with that of modern language evolution research. Consequently, we argue that his classificatory system—while useful for some descriptive purposes—is of very limited use as a theoretical framework for evolutionary linguistics. We see this incompatibility as related to the ontology of language, i.e. deriving from (...) Hockett’s interest in language as a product rather than a suite of sensorimotor, cognitive and social abilities that enable the use but also acquisition of language by biological creatures. After a reconstruction of Hockett’s views on design features, we raise two criticisms: focus on the means at the expense of content and focus on the code itself rather than the cognitive abilities of its users. Finally, referring to empirical data, we illustrate some of the problems resulting from Hockett’s approach by addressing three specific points—namely arbitrariness and semanticity, cultural transmission, and displacement—and show how the change of perspective allows to overcome those difficulties. (shrink)

A new approach to semantics, based on ordered Banach spaces, is proposed. The Banach spaces semantics arises as a generalization of the four particular cases: the Giles' approach to belief structures, its generalization to the non-Boolean case, and fuzzy extensions of Boolean as well as of non-Boolean semantics.

The paper describes in detail the procedure of identification of the inner language and an inner logico of a physical theory. The procedure is a generalization of the original ideas of J. von Neuman and G. Birkhoff about quantum logic.

In the 1980s, computer-aided experimental research became standard in the majority of leading research laboratories. Unfortunately, this shift was not adequately reflected in the professional literature related to the philosophy and methodology of science. A new experimentalism did emerge, aimed at adequately describing experimental practice (to be discussed in the first part of this article); however, in its initial phase, it failed to consider the role of computers in experimental research (discussed in the second part). This oversight by the philosophers (...) of science, the proponents of the new experimentalism, is significant and calls for supplementation (addressed in the fourth part). By the turn of the 20 th and 21 st centuries, there were numerous philosophical analyses related to computer experiments, such as computer simulations. However, this article focuses only on classic experiments facilitated by various computer systems (e.g., LHC at CERN). In the final part of this article, I will present examples of aspects of experimental work that have not yet been analyzed and could potentially enhance new experimentalism with insights from computer-aided experiments. (shrink)

There is proposed the analysis of conceptual foundations in researching of Poles’ national character on materials of Julian Leopold Ochorowicz (1850-1917) scientific heritage connected with philosophical and pedagogical implications of his ideas. Ochorowicz’s contribution to interdisciplinary approach on Poles’ national character is emphasizing. The heuristically potential of this approach is explicated using reconstruction and systemizing of his views, which had played a significant role in determining intentionality in discussions on the matter «What philosophy do Poles need?” for the successful self-statement (...) in their national being. Critically evaluating of this experience there is combined with verifying of his theoretical assumptions that should be actual also in Ukrainian social and cultural contexts. Ochorowicz belongs to the group of outstanding Polish scholars with wide scientific interests and original achievements. This article presents his research on history perceived as a collective psychological process. In Poland, Ochorowicz should be regarded as a precursor of psychohistory. An important role in his conception is played by the theory of the so-called residual symptoms, on the basis of which he developed the concept of Poles’ national character with its educational implications. The question about the rudiments of our national character sharpens in border situations, in which those traits, previously presented in a declarative form, are verified. The strength of a nation is encoded in the irreal sphere, i.e. in the sphere of values around which people group themselves. (shrink)

Livio Rossetti, Le dialogue socratique, Éditions Les Belles Lettres, Paris 2011, ss. 296.

§1. Introduction. Ideals and filters of subsets of natural numbers have been studied by set theorists and topologists for a long time. There is a vast literature concerning various kinds of ultrafilters. There is also a substantial interest in nicely definable ideals—these by old results of Sierpiński are very far from being maximal— and the structure of such ideals will concern us in this announcement. In addition to being interesting in their own right, Borel and analytic ideals occur naturally in (...) the investigations of compact subsets of the space of all Baire class 1 functions on a Polish space, see [12, 18]. Also, certain objects associated with such ideals are of considerable interest and were quite extensively studied by several authors. Let us list here three examples; in all three of them I stands for an analytic or Borel ideal.1. The partial order induced by I on P: X ≥I Y iff X \ Y ϵ I and the partial order.2. Boolean algebras of the form P/I and their automorphisms.3. The equivalence relation associated with I: XEI Y iff X Δ ϵ I.In Section 4, we will have an opportunity to state some consequences of our results for equivalence relations as in 3. (shrink)

We construct free algebras in the variety generated by the equivalential algebra with conjunction on dense elements and compute the formula for the free spectrum of this variety. Moreover, we describe the decomposition of free algebras into directly indecomposable factors.

We prove that for every family I of closed subsets of a Polish space each Σ 1 1 set can be covered by countably many members of I or else contains a nonempty Π 0 2 set which cannot be covered by countably many members of I. We prove an analogous result for κ-Souslin sets and show that if A ♯ exists for any $A \subset \omega^\omega$ , then the above result is true for Σ 1 2 sets. A theorem (...) of Martin is included stating that this result is also true for weakly homogeneously Souslin sets. As an application of our results we derive from them a general form of Hurewicz's theorem due to Kechris, Louveau, and Woodin and a theorem of Feng on the open covering axiom. Also some well-known theorems on finding "big" closed sets inside of "big" Σ 1 1 and Σ 1 2 sets are consequences of our results. (shrink)

We prove that every analytic set in ω ω × ω ω with σ-bounded sections has a not σ-bounded closed free set. We show that this result is sharp. There exists a closed set with bounded sections which has no dominating analytic free set, and there exists a closed set with non-dominating sections which does not have a not σ-bounded analytic free set. Under projective determinacy analytic can be replaced in the above results by projective.