In this interview a Warsaw Uprising fighter speaks about his work for the Diversionary Directorate of the Home Army and recalls the dramatic moments of the Uprising and his feelings about the meaning and consequences of this memorable event.

The article presents an analysis of S.I. Witkiewicz’s views on science and its relations with philosophy. Science has its beginnig in a common view, Witkiewicz considers its statements as expressible in psychological terms. Witkiewicz combines the interest in natural science with simultaneous criticism of neo-positivism and physicalism. While speaking in favour of the dialogue between philosophy and science, he still underlines the autonomy of philosophy. Key words S.I. WITKIEWICZ, SCIENCE.

In this article, Brzozowski’s much discussed connections with fascism are reconsidered in the context of interpretations of fascism by Sternhell and Gentile. At the end of his life, Brzozowski tried to reconcile socialism and nationalism. He criticized orthodox Marxism and liberal democracy, underlined the political and cultural importance of the nation, praised irrationalism, strength, imperialism, heroism, asceticism, the labourer and the soldier as ideal attitudes with regard to the world. He wanted to turn Poland into a modern nation, but feared (...) some consequences of modernity. Brzozowski’s ambivalent attitude towards modernity precludes finding an adequate description for them, in particular in the Polish and Central European context, although his concepts were similar to those of some of his contemporaries from France or Italy, such as Georges Sorel or the “La Voce” group, as well as “antimoderns” as described by Antoine Compagnon. At present labels such as “fascism” or even “proto-fascism” seem to be too ambiguous to grasp the originality of Brzozowski’s thinking. The Polish thinker’s case suggests a reconsideration of Sternhell’s thesis that Eastern-European Marxism remained loyal to the Heglian, rationalist, and materialist essence of Marxism. (shrink)

Staram się podjąć z Witkiewiczem „dialog” niepozbawiony elementów krytycznych i odniesień do współczesnego stanu badań. Traktuję więc jego propozycję filozoficzną nie jako obiekt jedynie muzealny, ale żywą myśl, z którą można i należy dziś podjąć dyskusję. Wynika to z przeświadczenia, że myślenie filozoficzne stanowi kontinuum i „rozmowa” z filozofami przeszłości może wnieść sporo do badań prowadzonych obecnie. System stworzony przez Witkiewicza nie był nigdy projektem jednorodnym, jego badania stanowiły raczej splot wątków, trudno jest wskazać jedno, dominujące zagadnienie. Jeśli jednak miałbym (...) wymienić taki leitmotiv jego filozofii, to byłby to problem istnienia ożywionego, upsychicznionego i cielesnego bytu, jakim jesteśmy my sami, a w przekonaniu Witkiewicza również wszystkie inne byty, z których składa się materia (stąd tylko pozornie) nieożywiona. Zawężając zakres tego zagadnienia, dochodzimy do klasycznego problemu psychofizycznego w wersji jednak dość oryginalnej z racji wspominanego odrzucenia materii martwej. O ciągłym zainteresowaniu problemem stosunku ciała do umysłu świadczy tytuł ostatniej większej rozprawy filozoficznej Witkiewicza: Zagadnienie psychofizyczne. Prezentowana praca jest próbą pokazania drogi, którą przebył polski filozof, poszukując odpowiedzi na pytanie o problem psychofizyczny, aż do swoistej wersji cielesno-biologicznego panpsychizmu. (shrink)

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz is an author of a specific and original metaphysics of embodiment developed in the late 1930s. As a supporter of realism and opponent of any type of idealism, Witkiewicz found a kind of a "guarantee" of realism in the body. He proposed a "revised" version of Leibniz's monadology, where monads are no longer spiritual beings but psycho-bodily ones. A sense of embodiment became the primary sensation grounding the metaphysical realism of the author of Shoemakers. The article presents (...) the main points of Witkacy’s philosophy of the body. The central category of "mineness" is discussed, along with the question of relations between Witkiewicz’s findings and classic phenomenological analyses of embodiment proposed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

The article is concerned with the most important threads of criticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as it was presented in Zagadnienie psychofizyczne by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. The main objection refers to the formal character of Wittgenstein’s ontology, which – says Witkiewicz – ignores the basic distinction between the aspects of the dualistic structure of being. The objection is closely connected with the problem of relation between logic and philosophy. At this point Witkiewicz criticized not only Wittgenstein, but also the Lvov--Warsaw (...) school, highly influential in Polish philosophy. (shrink)

Brain activity determines which relations between objects in the environment are perceived as differences and similarities in colour, smell, sound, etc. According to selectionism, brain activity does not create those relations; it only selects which of them are perceptually available to the subject on a given occasion. In effect, selectionism entails that perceptual experience is diaphanous, i.e. that sameness and difference in the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by sameness and difference in the perceived items. It has been argued (...) that diaphaneity is undermined by phenomenological considerations and empirical evidence. This paper considers five prominent arguments of this sort and shows that none of them succeeds. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the concept of an illocutionary rule - i.e., the rule of the form "X counts as 7 in context C" - and examine the role it plays in explaining the nature of verbal communication and the conventionality of natural languages. My aim is to find a middle ground between John R. Searle's view, according to which every conventional speech act has to be explained in terms of illocutionary rules that underlie its performance, and the view (...) held by Ruth G Millikan, who seems to suggest that the formula "X counts as Y in context C" has no application in our theorizing about human linguistic practice. I claim, namely, that the concept of an illocutionary rule is theoretically useful, though not explanatorily basic. I argue that using the formula "X counts as Y in context C" we can classify illocutionary acts by what Millikan calls their conventional outcomes, and thereby make them susceptible to naturalistic explanation. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to use Marina Sbisà’s idea of interactional negotiation to consider what it is for conversing agents to follow illocutionary conventions or, as John L. Austin would put it, what it is for an illocutionary act to be done as conforming to a convention. The chapter is organized into two parts. In the first one, I use the Austinian notions of uptake and response as well as the Lewisian concept of accommodation to discuss a few (...) examples of force negotiation and develop a model of its underlying mechanisms. In the second part, I suggest that interactional negotiation plays a key role in the functioning of all language conventions—phatic, rhetic, illocutionary, etc.—construed along the Millikanian lines, i.e., as families or lineages of linguistic precedents. My contention is that the ideas I propose in this chapter are compatible with Sbisà’s theory of speech acts and can be regarded as its possible extension. (shrink)

The book by professor Stanisław Kowalczyk, renowned scholar in the field of social philosophy, is, without doubt, one of the most important studies on the idea of freedom. The concept of freedom is as old as mankind. It has many meanings and has been interpreted in many different ways. For instance, we also have the word „liberty," which means „freedom or right" and is synonymous with the word freedom, which means „the condition of being free." The author indicates that (...) in our times the notion of freedom is most frequently used; however, it is often misused or deceptive. Mass media and people of all walks of life talk of liberty; everyone talks of freedom and, for many, it is the highest value. Longing for freedom is rooted in the heart of every human being, for freedom is an existential correlate and the fulfilment of the rational human being. The semantic confusion about the notion of freedom leads to many misuses of the concept. Personalism, as a philosophical concept in which a person stands in the centre of all discussion, serves as a framework for the author's delineation on the concept of freedom. He further states that the appropriate understanding of this value is possible in the context of the personalistic interpretation of a human being. This is the focus of this informative and insightful book. (shrink)

This paper discusses three different contemporary uses of philosophy and literature in non-philosophical and non-literary texts. Most often, both discourses are used as tools, and they are invoked instrumentally in popularizing literature or in teaching. Philosophy and literature can also be treated as a source or starting point for reflection outside its mother field, or even as a cause of various social and political processes. The most interesting usage of both discourses is to refer to them as the symptoms or (...) signs of the times allowing us to make diagnoses about the present. These uses of the two discourses show the similarities between literature and philosophy on a purely pragmatic level that is relevant to their contemporary functioning in a non-specialist sphere. The convergence in this regard is a testimony to the transformation of the position of both discourses in the contemporary humanities involving the loss of their privileged position. At the same time, literature and philosophy in this crisis situation are gaining new areas of influence in public discourse, realizing their cognitive and reflexive potential through their utilitarian use. (shrink)

This paper explores the wandering during the Night of Culture, which I consider an essential practice for the people's experience of this event. Looking at this particular form of movement of those participating in this initiative between various event locations also allows us to see the implications of the Night of Culture for urban public spaces. The empirical base of the paper is the visual documentation of the events carried out during the Night of Culture during the 2023 edition. While (...) interpreting the material, I refer to the situationist theory of drift and then reconstruct the structure of the festival's wandering, its rhythm, the type of attention bestowed on the city by the participants, and the form of this ephemeral community. In conclusion, I propose that the atmosphere of places can be used to analyse the city-forming effects of the Night of Culture, to grasp better the specificity of the event and its risks and potentials. (shrink)

Artykuł analizuje problem kosztów powstałych w wyniku realizacji obowiązku udzielenia pomocy osobie znajdującej się w niebezpieczeństwie. Autorzy prezentują trzy odmienne stanowiska dotyczące tego problemu, rozważając scenariusz, w którym osoba decyduje się, z własnej woli lub przymuszona za pomocą prawa, uratować inną osobę, w sytuacji, w której taka pomoc wiąże się z naruszeniem praw trzeciej strony. Przykładowo, A ratuje tonącego B, ale w trakcie ratowania narusza prawa C. Pytanie, które stawiają autorzy brzmi: zakładając, że istnieje obowiązek udzielenia pomocy osobie znajdującej się (...) w niebezpieczeństwie, kto powinien ponieść koszty odszkodowania za naruszenie praw trzeciej strony? Autorzy rozważają następujące możliwości: koszty pomocy powinny zostać poniesione przez (a) ratującego, (b) osobę, której prawa zostały naruszone, (c) ratowanego, (d) całe społeczeństwo. (shrink)