L’article présente un texte inconnu de J. I. N. Baudouin de Courtenay, publié en 1872 à Poznañ, sous les initiales: „Dr. J. B.”, et intitulé: Du langage et des langues. Baudouin y introduit la distinction fondamentale du structuralisme: langue – langage – parole. Dans l’esprit de vulgarisation, après la lecture des Cours d’Oxford de Müller, il retrace l’histoire de la linguistique avec le comparatisme comme son achèvement et la figure majestueuse de Leibniz. Rejetant la recherche de la langue adamique, il (...) propose une classification des langues non selon leurs racines, mais d’après leurs structures: la structure d’une langue constitue sa „marque caractéristique”. Baudouin discute également le phénomène d’aphasie et se prononce contre la théorie des localisations cérébrales, tout comme Freud dans Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. Le rôle du „pont” entre leurs théories revient à Ernst von Brücke, maître de Freud, auteur des ouvrages traitant de la physiologie de la parole, très appréciés du linguiste. Dès ses premiers travaux de 1865, consacrés au physiologiste tchèque Purkyne, Baudouin se veut continuateur du programme linguistique de l’idéologue Volney, qui est tout simplement l’inverse du projet leibnizien. (shrink)

Tekst jest wyborem fragmentów przypisywanych Janowi Potockiemu. Jean Potocki, mistrz ironii, twardo usadowiony w nieuchwytnym na pozór miejscu pomiędzy oświeceniem a romantyzmem, pozostaje najczęściej plagiatowanym autorem Europy. Zapewne przysłużył się pośmiertnie sprawie praw autorskich, ale i stało się tak, jakby oryginalność i płodność jego myśli była na tyle inna, że nie sposób przedstawić go inaczej jak wymazując jego imię, jeśli po prostu nie niszcząc. Choć historia jego francuskich i amerykańskich plagiatów jest wyczerpująco udokumentowana, nie istnieje jeszcze definitywne wydanie jego arcydzieła: (...) Rękopisu znalezionego w Saragossie, już w 1809 roku przełożonego po części na niemiecki, a w 1847, również w Lipsku, zapewne z udziałem Societas Jablonoviana, w całości na polski. W latach pięćdziesiątych XX wieku trud przywrócenia należnego mu miejsca podjęli R. Caillois, L. Kukulski, W. Has, Emanuel Rostworowski i Maria-Ewelina Żółtowska-Weintraub, której wciąż nieopublikowany doktorat stanowi najpełniejszą biografię hrabiego Jana, powiązaną z karierą bohatera Rękopisu. Skromny ów oficer gwardii walońskiej: Alfons van Worden, po wielu straszliwych próbach, które w gruncie rzeczy niczym innym dla niego nie były jak straszliwymi, teatralnie zaaranżowanymi opowieściami, awansował na gubernatora Saragossy, gdzie wiódł spokojny żywot troszcząc się o córeczkę swą Fatimę. […]. (shrink)

L’objet de cet article est constitué par les motifs cartésiens dans la pensée de Leszek Kołakowski, l’un des philosophes polonais les plus connus et influents de la seconde moitié du xx e siècle. On essaiera ici de montrer que ce qui a organisé la pensée de Kołakowski, et ce non seulement dans sa dimension philosophique, mais tout autant politique, était une réflexion critique sur la légitimité et les limites de la quête cartésienne du savoir fondé sur l’évidence et, à la (...) fois, objectif et vrai. Pour l’auteur de cet article Kołakowski – et avec lui, toute une formation intellectuelle, dont il faisait partie, connue sous le nom d’École d’histoire des idées de Varsovie – interprétait le cartésianisme comme un essai de mise en place du radicalisme intégral, tant philosophique que politique. Dans cet article, on défendra également la thèse suivante : pour Kołakowski et pour bon nombre de ses collègues – anciens marxistes –, le cartésianisme était une philosophie radicale non seulement de la vérité, mais aussi de la liberté. La question que Kołakowski adressait aussi bien à Husserl qu’à Descartes, notamment celle de savoir s’il est possible de découvrir les fondements du savoir, inébranlables et absolument incontestables, sera présentée comme un élément de sa stratégie pour surmonter le marxisme envisagé comme une idéologie qui réduit la liberté humaine à un simple épiphénomène. (shrink)

L’article constitue un essai de caractéristique du motif cartésien dans la phénoménologie polonaise, dès ses premières réactions jusqu’à ses formulations les plus récentes. Son autre objectif est de présenter les positions, les argumentations et les transformations principales qui, toutes ensemble, forment le motif cartésien. Par « motif cartésien », l’auteur entend un ensemble de questions, de problèmes et de propositions de les résoudre, liés entre eux et se rapportant aux éléments spécifiques des philosophies de Descartes et de Husserl. Cet article, (...) en présentant les penseurs choisis, essaie de cerner de plus près ce qu’est le motif cartésien. Dans ce contexte, il a encore pour objectif de déterminer la direction possible que peut prendre le développement de la phénoménologie non-cartésienne. L’auteur défend la position selon laquelle le cartésianisme de la phénoménologie résulte surtout de la façon dont cette philosophie a été exposée. D’après lui, une application de la méthode phénoménologique avec des visées modérées élargit le champ des recherches phénoménologiques. (shrink)

Cet article est un exposé des aspects ontologiques de la philosophie de Descartes à la lumière de l’ontologie existentielle et formelle de Roman Ingarden. Descartes pose le problème philosophique de ce qui est réel et tente de le résoudre conformément à la tradition en introduisant la problématique de la substance. La substance est une clé de voûte de la philosophie de Descartes qui fonctionne à différents niveaux de sa pensée comme une tentative de connexion de l’existence du réel et de (...) l’idéel. La problématique de la substance comprend des questions existentielles, où la substance est traitée comme catégorie, puis relève de l’ontologie formelle, où la substance fonctionne comme une quasi-nature catégoriale, qui permet de distinguer les différents domaines de la réalité. La substance comme catégorie se caractérise par (a) l’autosuffisance ontique ; (b) l’indépendance, qui s’associe à l’exclusion ontique, (c) la durabilité ontique, pour enfin être traitée comme (d) chose existante ( res existens ). Deuxièmement, la notion de substance comme étant sujet des propriétés ( hypokeimenon ) conduit à la reconnaître comme une quasi-nature constitutive, qui ensuite est prise en compte dans chacun des trois types de substances : Dieu, res cogitans et res extensa. (shrink)

Analyses of the dynamics of change present in Europe are not complete without taking into account the role and function of the critical approach as a founding element of European culture. An appreciation of critical thinking must go hand-in-hand with reflection on its essence, forms, and centuries-long tradition. The European philosophical tradition has thematized the problem of criticism since its appearance. This book contains articles on the history of philosophical criticism and ways that it has been understood in European thought. (...) Individual chapters contain both historical-philosophical and problem-oriented analyses, indicating the relationships between philosophical criticism and rationalism, logic, scepticism, atheism, dialectic procedure, and philosophical counseling, among others. Philosophical reflection on critical thinking allows for an acknowledgment of its significance in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of politics, aesthetics, methodology, philosophy of language, and cultural theory. The book should interest not only humanities scholars, but also scholars in other fields, as the development of an anti-dogmatic critical approach is a lasting and indispensible challenge for all disciplines. (shrink)

Nowa Zelandia to jedno z najlepiej rozwiniętych państw świata. Pomimo ogromnej odległości od Polski zamieszkuje tam, począwszy od XIX w., wielu polskich migrantów. Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie aktualnej sytuacji zachowania archiwaliów dotyczących działalności Polaków w Nowej Zelandii oraz stanu ich cyfryzacji. Materiał źródłowy do tego typu badań posiadają archiwa oraz biblioteki państwowe w Nowej Zelandii. Jest on również dostępny w niewielkiej ilości jako cyfrowy zasób polskich organizacji w Nowej Zelandii, obecny na ich oficjalnych stronach internetowych. W Polsce kilka instytucji na (...) własnych stronach internetowych także posiada cyfrowe wersje materiałów Polonii nowozelandzkiej. Dzięki zastosowanym metodom badawczym wskazano poziom cyfryzacji materiałów polonijnych. Podstawową tezą pracy jest stwierdzenie faktu znacznego rozproszenia dorobku kulturowego Polonii nowozelandzkiej, nie tylko pomiędzy instytucjami państwowymi w Nowej Zelandii i miejscowymi organizacjami polskimi, ale również poza jej granicami, w tym nad Wisłą. Głównym wnioskiem artykułu jest utworzenie na antypodach jednego, centralnego archiwum Polonii nowozelandzkiej posiadającego doświadczonych pracowników i dysponującemu środkami pozwalającymi na konsekwentne zachowywanie śladów naszej obecności w Nowej Zelandii. (shrink)

Książka ta ma dwa, bliźniacze, tematy: ekspresję i doświadczenie. Ma także dwoje bohaterów: nasłuchujący podmiot i improwizację. Tym, co spaja przedstawioną tu refleksję, jest audioantropologiczna perspektywa, pozwalająca odsłonić kulturowe kryteria słuchania i improwizowania. A jednak z wielu zgromadzonych tu opowieści wyłania się obraz kultury, w której „nikt nie słucha” i „nikt nie improwizuje” – a może, poprawniej, „nikt słucha” i „nikt improwizuje”. Czy jest bowiem „kimś” podmiot słuchania – wystawiany nieustannie na pokusę fantazjowania i, ostatecznie, wydany na pastwę fantazmatów? Czy (...) jest „kimś” podmiot improwizujący, który czyni wiele, by stać się samoorganizującym się procesem improwizowania? (shrink)

In the article, first I present the atheistic argument from pointless evil and the argument from chance. The essence of the argument from chance consists in the incompatibility of the existence of purposeless events and the existence of a God who planned the universe to the last detail. Second, I would like to show that there is a relation between the evidential argument from evil and the argument from chance. An analysis of the theistic argument from small probabilities is a (...) helpful starting point for the presentation of how the two arguments are related. (shrink)

Max Weber’s thesis on the decisive influence of Protestant ethic on the formation and development of modern capitalism has become one of the best-known and widely shared canonical claims in social sciences. Since its publication at the beginning of the 20th century, this thesis, supported by subsequent great works by the German classic, has rarely been the subject of major controversy. The work of correcting Weber’s thesis was undertaken in the late 20th century by Michael Novak. Novak’s correction is not (...) confrontational, but complementary. The American thinker abandons the research area of minority Protestant communities, which caught Weber’s attention, and undertakes an analysis of the broader religious tradition, developing both before and after the Reformation. In particular, the achievements of Pope John Paul II, interpreted by Novak in terms of the renewal of a liberty current of Catholic social thought, provide important corrective data. (shrink)

Many contemporary writers misunderstand early Christian views on philosophy because they identify the critical stances of the ante-Nicene fathers toward specific pagan philosophical schools with a general negative stance toward reason itself. Dariusz Karlowicz's Socrates and Other Saints demonstrates why this identification is false. The question of the extent of humanity's natural knowledge cannot be reduced to the question of faith's relationship to the historical manifestations of philosophy among the Ancients. Karlowicz closely reads the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, (...) Clement of Alexandria, and others to demonstrate this point. He also builds upon Pierre Hadot's thesis that ancient philosophy is not primarily theory but a "way of life" taught by sages, which aimed at happiness through participation in the divine. The fact that pagan philosophers falsely described humanity's telos did not mean that the spiritual practices they developed could not be helpful in the Christian pilgrimage. As it turns out, the ancient Christian writers traditionally considered to be enemies of philosophy actually borrowed from her much more than we think-and perhaps more than they admitted. -- back cover. (shrink)

Genocide as a part of nation or ethnic group extermination process is not a well-defined concept. Its meaning is understood intuitively. When law intervenes, the issue of defining the term comes back. Nevertheless, the Polish nation has been recognized as subjected to genocide activities during the Second World War by the Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. The paper focuses on the genocide against mainly one group of Poles that is to say foresters. The martyrologic evidence proves that foresters were an (...) occupation group which for a variety of reasons suffered most. The research carried out in this respect by the National Forests in Poland has revealed that over 20% of pre-war staff of the institution actually lost their lives. They were killed by the German and Soviet occupiers, as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In the eastern parts of Poland foresters and their families were deported and sent to various labour and extermination camps e.g. in Siberia. The aim of the paper is to present the scale of genocide with the main emphasis on genocide against foresters. The definition of genocide provided by Lemkin, who coined the term, is a starting point for the analysis. The main research methods included the analysis of pertinent literature and source materials as well as the semiotic analysis of genocide circumstances. The thesis put forward by the authors is that foresters due to their education, practical skills, professional experience and insight knowledge turned out to be the group especially vulnerable and subjected to extermination on purpose. (shrink)

The book deals with martyrdom understood as a philosophical category. The main question pertains to the evidential value of the Christian witness through death. The author approaches an answer through a philosophical interpretation of the belief in the evidential role of martyrdom. Numerous historical documents confirm that ancient martyrdom might have been considered as a kind of proof also by people unaffiliated with the Church. The author observes the theology and the reality of martyrdom through the perspective of the ancient (...) philosophy of death and radical personal transformation. He believes that the Christian stance in the face of persecutions could have been understood as the realization of the unrealized ambitions of philosophy, thereby proving indirectly the veracity of the teaching revealed by Jesus Christ. (shrink)

In the twentieth century, many contemporary epistemologists in the analytic tradition have entered into debate regarding the right to belief with new tools: Richard Swinburne, Anthony Kenny, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Peter van Inwagen defend or contest the requirement of evidence for any justified belief. The best things we can do, it seems, is to examine more attentively the true notion of "right to believe," especially about religious matters. This is exactly what the contributors in this book do.

This article is an attempt to characterize the conventions employed in the interpreting of conversational implicatures. The main objective is to justify the hypothesis that language utterers confronted with conversational implicatures not only use knowledge about rules of the language system and extralinguistic knowledge but also refer to special instructions for interpretation of implicit meanings. The article presents possibilities of verbalizing such instructions and compares them with linguistic rules showing some differences and similarities between them.

Główną część artykułu stanowi przykładowa analiza ilustrowanego ogłoszenia reklamowego, której celem jest zaprezentowanie sposobów perswazji, jakimi posługują się twórcy takich komunikatów. Na poziomie słowa przedstawiona została przede wszystkim strategia wykorzystywania faktu, że poszczególne wyrazy posiadają określone konotacje. W następnym etapie, analizie składni jednej z części tekstu reklamy, wyjaśniono, jak poprzez odpowiednie konstruowanie zdań udaje się stworzyć wrażenie rzeczowej argumentacji. Kolejny krok stanowi - podobnie jak na poziomie słowa - semantyczna analiza dłuższego fragmentu tekstu, jak również części wizualnej reklamy. Analiza ta (...) ma na celu pokazanie, jak m. in. poprzez budowę tzw. płaszczyzn izotopii semantycznej można przedstawić nic tylko obraz reklamowanego produktu, lecz także obraz adresata komunikatu. Ostatnia część analizy zawiera szczegółową prezentację werbalno-wizualnych figur retorycznych występujących w całym ogłoszeniu. Część właściwą artykułu poprzedzają rozdziały zawierające podstawy' teoretyczne do analizy o naszkicowanych ramach. I tak w pierwszej części publikacji przedstawione zostało rozszerzone pojęcie języka reklamy, cechy odróżniające go od języka standardowego, jak również jego aspekty semiotyczne. Następny rozdział poświęcony jest charakterystyce takich lingwistycznych aspektów reklamy jak leksyka, składnia i stylistyka W kolejnym rozdziale omówione zostały problemy semiotycznej analizy komunikatów wizualnych, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem analizy tych treści obrazu, które nie są wyrażone bezpośrednio, lecz tworzą tzw. implikaty. Ostatnia z części teoretycznych dotyczy werbalno-wizualnych figur retorycznych, których istota została tu krótko wyjaśniona na przykładach wybranych z analizowanego w artykule ogłoszenia reklamowego. (shrink)

Autor artykułu stara się wykazać, że etyka troski, a mówiąc precyzyjniej - niektóre postulatyjej wybitnych przedstawicieli, mogą prowadzić do zaniku troski w jej fundamentalnym rozumieniu. Postulaty te zmierzają do rozciągnięcia troski na stosunki społeczno-polityczne. Swoją tezę stara się udowodnić, korzystając z zaproponowanej typologii troski.

Consciousness can be measured in various ways, but different measures often yield different conclusions about the extent to which awareness relates to performance. Here, we compare five different subjective measures of awareness in the context of an artificial grammar learning task. Participants expressed their subjective awareness of rules using one of five different scales: confidence ratings , post-decision wagering , feeling of warmth , rule awareness , and continuous scale . All scales were equally sensitive to conscious knowledge. PDW, however, (...) was affected by risk aversion, and both RAS and SDS applied different minimal criteria for rule awareness. CR seems to capture the largest range of consciousness, but failed to indicate unconscious knowledge with the guessing criterion. We close by discussing the theoretical implications of scale sensitivity and propose that CR’s unique features enable a finer assessment of subjective states of awareness. (shrink)

In this article we examine the role of vocative forms of address in shaping the political space in public/political discourse. We are particularly interested in strategic uses of forms of address by participants in political debates in order to gain legitimacy for their ideologies. Our data come from four formal television debates between Lech Wałęsa, the former Solidarity trade union leader and president of Poland, and two other Polish politicians, which were held between 1988 and 1995. Due to this historical (...) perspective, we are able to contextualize discursive patterns in the rapidly changing political and social situation in Poland, and show the diachronic development of the ideological underpinnings of discourse. (shrink)

In this paper, we study natural language constructions which were first examined by Barwise: The richer the country, the more powerful some of its officials. Guided by Barwise’s observations, we suggest that conceivable interpretations of such constructions express the existence of various similarities between partial orders such as homomorphism or embedding. Semantically, we interpret the constructions as polyadic generalized quantifiers restricted to finite models. We extend the results obtained by Barwise by showing that similarity quantifiers are not expressible in elementary (...) logic over finite models. We also investigate whether the proposed readings are sound from the cognitive perspective. We prove that almost all similarity quantifiers are intractable. This leads us to first-order variants, which only approximate the strong readings, but are cognitively more plausible. Driven by the question of ambiguity, we recall Barwise’s argumentation in favour of strong readings, enriching it with some arguments of our own. Given that Barwise-like sentences are indeed ambiguous, we use a generalized Strong Meaning Hypothesis to derive predictions for their verification. Finally, we propose a hypothesis according to which conflicting pressures of communication and cognition might give rise to an ambiguous construction, provided that different semantic variants of the construction withstand different pressures involved in its usage. (shrink)

Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings.To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as (...) “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans-dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness.Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co-appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event-horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation. (shrink)

This volume is devoted to Brentano's influence on the Polish Analytic Philosophy better known under the name of: Lvov-Warsaw School.

This volume provides the reader with the substantial evidence, presented here for the first time in a chronological manner, of the essential place that Dionysus occupied in Greek and Roman political thought. The eleven chapters that make up the volume are authored by an interdisciplinary team of scholars (including four top specialists in the field, Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, Richard Seaford, Richard Stoneman and Jean-Marie Pailler) and cover the period from archaic Greece to the late Roman empire. The reader can therefore observe (...) how the political ideas and motifs rooted in Greek classical thought were continued, adapted, and developed in successive periods of history. The contributors reconstruct the political significance of Dionysus by examining different kinds of evidence: historiography, poetry, coins, epigraphy, art, and philosophy. They discuss the place of the god in the politics of Greek city-states, explore the long tradition of imitating Dionysus that ancient leaders, from Alexander the Great to the Roman emperors, manifested in various ways, as well as demonstrate how the political role of Dionysus was reflected in Orphism and Neoplatonist philosophy. Dionysus and Politics provides an excellent introduction to a fundamental feature of ancient political thought which until now has been largely neglected by mainstream academia. The book will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars interested in ancient politics and religion. (shrink)

II secolo XX, chiamato secolo delle Ideologie, e - per quanto riguarda il nostro punto di vista - un secolo di particolari tensioni fra la religione e l a cultura. II modelio della cultura dominante da alcune decine di anni cerca ispirazione concentrandosi sul mondo materiale, riducendo il campo di conoscenza alle dimensioni strettamente meccanicistiche, imponendo gli orizzonti puramente positivistici. Le conseguenze di qoesta tendenza - scrive Z. Zdybicka - si sono fatte sentire in tutti i campi dell'attività dell'uomo. E (...) stata infatti escogitata un'utopia tecnica che mirava a trasformare il volto del mondo, a crearlo in qualche senso da capo. Secondo questa visione ideale la nuova realta sarebbe esclusivamente temporale, misurabile, totalmente percettibile attraverso l'esperienza sensibile dell'uomo. La scienza formata sul modelio proposto dalle scienze matematico-naturali dovrebbe garantire agli uomini una sapienza profonda e universale e, grazie alla loro capacita di dominare le forze della natura e alla loro conoscenza delle leggi che regolano la vita sociale e alla sapiente applicazione delle stnitture tecnico-legali - farii diventare persino onnipotenti. (shrink)

II secolo XX, chiamato secolo delle Ideologie, e - per quanto riguarda il nostro punto di vista - un secolo di particolari tensioni fra la religione e l a cultura. II modelio della cultura dominante da alcune decine di anni cerca ispirazione concentrandosi sul mondo materiale, riducendo il campo di conoscenza alle dimensioni strettamente meccanicistiche, imponendo gli orizzonti puramente positivistici. Le conseguenze di qoesta tendenza - scrive Z. Zdybicka - si sono fatte sentire in tutti i campi dell'attività dell'uomo. E (...) stata infatti escogitata un'utopia tecnica che mirava a trasformare il volto del mondo, a crearlo in qualche senso da capo. Secondo questa visione ideale la nuova realta sarebbe esclusivamente temporale, misurabile, totalmente percettibile attraverso l'esperienza sensibile dell'uomo. La scienza formata sul modelio proposto dalle scienze matematico-naturali dovrebbe garantire agli uomini una sapienza profonda e universale e, grazie alla loro capacita di dominare le forze della natura e alla loro conoscenza delle leggi che regolano la vita sociale e alla sapiente applicazione delle stnitture tecnico-legali - farii diventare persino onnipotenti. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” considers how the ultramodernist aesthetics of Central Europe has related to and reacted against the region's political history and cartography. Central Europe has been a rich source of “soluble” realities that can be observed as they emerge, mature, and rapidly decay. Central European modernism, represented here by Adolf Loos in architecture and by Arnold Schoenberg and Leoš Janáček in music, experimented with blurry regions between presence and absence, light and shadow, sound (...) and silence. Loos disrupted the logic of architecture, while Schoenberg and Janáček nearly dissolved the acoustic paradigm of sound. This essay argues that the curious positioning of Central Europe, with its frequently changing borders and national entities, conduced both to positive experiments in cultural vagueness and to a corrosive reaction against existing and potential identities, parameters, distinctions, foci, and logics. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on ‘excentric positionality’ in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar ‘crisis of experience’ used to diagnose ‘what has gone wrong’, it allows us to re-learn how to work with ‘the experience of (...) crisis’ itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on ‘xeno-communication’. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these ‘excentric’ dynamics in turn suggests new ‘excentric methodologies’ based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. ‘Excentric methodologies’ constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. (shrink)

The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic ‘extra-territorial’ identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at (...) one point referred to the ‘peripheral’ sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the ‘navigational hesitation’ underpinning identity and its many trajectories. (shrink)

This article investigates the meaning of the ‘social’ based on Durkheim’s philosophy of society as a ‘collective representation’. I argue that the social, the way Durkheim formulates it, is an abstract sign for reality, a metaphor, which operates on the level of language. Because of this fact, the ‘social’ is from the start limited in its functionality as a descriptor, but it also contains within its own linguistic form, in its word, the possibility of renewal and renaming that is the (...) unique force inherent in language. I propose that this origin of the social operates according to the ‘spirit of postmodernism’, which constitutes a common response to modernity, by what later differentiates itself into the currents of sociology and postmodernism. (shrink)

BackgroundRemotely provided psychotherapy due to the COVID-19 pandemic became common. One of the most significant changes related to providing online psychotherapy services is that clients no longer travel to their sessions.AimsIn the article we are interested in the narrated experience of the absence of journey to psychotherapy sessions. We study clients' stories of past journeys and how their absence, resulting from the change of the mode of therapy provision, is coped with and replaced by other activities in their narratives.MethodsThe study (...) takes a constructionist approach to discourse and focuses on the lexico-grammatical form of the notes. The data come from 12 semi-structured interviews with people who declared attending remote psychotherapy sessions after the national lockdown had been introduced.ResultsIn the collected data, the physical journey is constructed not only as travel time, solitude which can be used for reflection, but, importantly, as an active process which ends with a resolution. In contrast, in narratives of the time before an online session, constructions of unfettered agents are replaced with those of people whose actions are hedged and qualified.ConclusionWe argue that in the informants' narratives the journey to psychotherapy is meaningful and is part of the therapeutic process. We propose that it is a time of passing between two states—one before therapy and one in session. The journey therefore is experienced as a process of change, and not only a process of traveling. (shrink)