Abstract

This article is a close reading of Józef Tischner's Historia filozofii po góralsku [History of Philosophy in Góral], considered alongside Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire européen des philosophies [European Vocabulary of Philosophies] and in the context of European unification. Written in the Góral dialect of Polish and recounting the history of philosophy as if it belonged to Górals, Tischner's book re-imagines Europe as a space of reciprocity, equality, and freedom. This gesture is inseparable from the mode of as if, a mode that translation, literature, reading, and the future anterior tense all hold in common.