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Destrukcja lub synteza. O dwóch metodach interpretacji filozofii Williama Jamesa

Author(s): Zbigniew Ambrożewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 58/2013

The paper describes two styles of interpretation of William James’s philosophy. The first one, defined by me as “analytical-disintegrating”, presents the philosophy of James as a set of mutually exclusive or, at least, a very weakly coherent elements creating a schizophrenic unity. The second one, “synthetic-integrating”, aims at a consistent vision, trying to skip its vagueness or use it for a synthesizing comprehension. In conclusion, I present a third, intermediate path which does not refrain from revealing some of Jamesian inconsistencies, but, at the same time, aims at separating them from some cohesive motives to build so called center of James’s vision. As examples of these tendencies I chose some works of American scholars (J. S. Bixler, W.J. Gavin, R. M. Gale, J.O. Pawelski, Ch. H. Seigfried), Belgian (R. Barthelot) and Finnish (A. Varila). As a heuristic model and the epitome of these two methods I present two characters of Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke, the master of Synthesis, Filidor and his great opponent, a brilliant analist, anty-Filidor.

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On the Transcendental Philosophy in the Light of the Kantian Aggregate – System Opposition

Author(s): Przemysław Parszutowicz / Language(s): English Issue: 58/2013

The article represents an attempt to determine the essence of critical philosophy in the light of Kantian distinction between aggregate and system. In order to achieve this, the article harks back to Kant’s work and to accomplishments of Marburg School of neo-Kantianism and particularly to Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy. Discrimination between aggregate and system as two possible types of knowledge representation rests on the precedent discrimination between substance and function and constitutes the main motive that determines the basic core of philosophical transcendental method in its opposition to the “dogmatic” method.

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Carl Stumpf and the Philosophical psychological Debate at the turn of 19th and 20th Centuries

Author(s): Gemmo Iocco / Language(s): Polish Issue: 58/2013

The book Carl Stumpf – From philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation, edited by Silvia Bonacchi and Geert-Jan Boudewijnse is a collection of critical contributions on different aspects of Stumpf’s philosophy and is intended to demonstrate the pivotal role that Stumpf has played in the definition of psychology in terms of a new science. Most of the chapters in the volume are by scholars who have already focused their studies on the philosophical - psychological debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s.

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The Development of the Ancient theories of Proportions

Author(s): Zbigniew Król / Language(s): English Issue: 56/2011

This paper is devoted to the reconstruction of the development of ancient theories of proportion. I argue that the development of ancient theories of proportion was motivated by the quest for one general mathematical theory and by inquiries of the mutual relations between the highest principles of Plato’s protology: the One (i.e. that which is arithmetical) and the Dyad (i.e. that which is geometrical). Six main types of the theory of proportion are analyzed, with a historical, mathematical and philosophical background.

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Dlaczego konieczne jest nowe polskie tłumaczenie Etyki nikomachejskiej Arystotelesa?

Author(s): Leszek Skowroński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

The main reason is that the present translation (the only Polish translation) contains serious errors. The most important error concerns the conclusion of the treatise. In the present Polish translation the conclusion contradicts that of the original. The first part of this article explains why the translation is wrong and suggests the reason the mistake was made and the reason that it was not noticed for more than half a century. The second part presents the views of commentators criticising the traditional way of interpreting Aristotle’s text. This kind of interpretation leads to a distortion of meaning of the original and the Polish translation is an example of an extreme case of such distortion.

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Uczta mędrców czy sofistów? Wokół antyfilozoficznej wymowy dialogu Atenajosa

Author(s): Marian Andrzej Wesoły / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

In recent translations of Athenaeus the title is rendered as The Learned Banqueteurs, thereby it loses the traditional sense of a controversy between sophists and philosophers. However, the deipnosophists were learned men or scholars neither in the ancient nor in the modern understanding of the term. Unfortunately, almost all translations erroneously render the instructive remark of the Byzantine Epitomator that “Athenaeus imitates Plato in his dramatization of the dialogue” (see below the motto). As a matter of fact, the Epitomator refers to the fact that Athenaeus jealously competes with Plato’s mimetic dramatization and aims completely to overcome it. We may, therefore, highlight here the entire anti-philosophical message of this spectacular and sophisticated dialogue.

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From Etymology to Ethnology. On the Development of Stoic Allegorism

Author(s): Mikołaj Domaradzki / Language(s): English Issue: 56/2011

The purpose of the present article is to show that there is a clear line of continuity between the early Stoics’ and Cornutus’ works, as all of them assumed that the ancient mythmakers had transformed their original cosmological conceptions into anthropomorphic deities. Hence, the Stoics from Zeno to Cornutus believed that the names of the gods reflected the mode of perceiving the world that was characteristic of the people who named the gods in this way. Accordingly, the major thesis advanced in the paper proposes that the Stoics conducted their etymological analyses so as to gather ethnographical information about the origin and development of the existing religion. When doing so, they treated the conventional mythological narratives as sources of information about the early conceptions of the cosmos. Thus, the Stoics from Zeno to Cornutus employed etymology as a certain research strategy: they analyzed the names of traditional deities so as to extract the physical and moral beliefs that constituted the ancients’ world picture. Treated as ethnologists, the Stoics seem to equate piety with retrieving philosophical truths obscured under the guise of primitive mythical formulations. Furthermore, when unrevealing the original worldview inadvertently transmitted by the poets in their poems, the Stoics reconstruct the history of religion and contribute to the development of ancient anthropology

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Quelques remarques sur la fondation cartésienne dans La recherche de la vérité de Descartes

Author(s): Alexandre Guimarães Tadeu de Soares / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

This article aims to reconstruct the conceptual framework set by Descartes in opposition to Aristotelian philosophy. It outlines and comments on fragments from La recherche de la vérité, a dialogue in which a representative of Scholasticism and a Cartesian thinker confront each other. Aristotle is directly addressed in his theoretical kernel, which allows a radical reflection on the principle of non-contradiction and on the notion of principle itself. As a result of this analysis, we may characterize two modes of understanding the status of philosophy or metaphysics, which displays a “founding” function according to both Aristotle’s and Descartes’s followers and. However, for the former this function is merely logical, whereas in Descartes metaphysics performs this task in the full sense of the word.

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Hume et le procès de la métaphysique

Author(s): François Chirpaz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

This article deals with the main themes I discussed in a book under the same title. h e leading thread of the work is to present the issue that Hume, from A Treatise of Human Nature to Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously), continually discusses and examines. h e point aim is to put metaphysics and its claims to a most ruthless test that would ultimately disqualify it. Such disqualification, which brings metaphysics down to an incoherent daydreaming, is the other side and consequence of a notion of science that Hume wants to create foundations for, i.e. a “science of human nature”. In a sense, this enterprise is a continuation of Descartes, who provided philosophy with a new foundation, that is the self-awareness of the human subject. But, if Descartes’ subject is funded on the cogito act, Hume’s turns out to be not a certain “I”, but a non-personal subject, a kind of il y a, whereas the mind is a kind of theatre, on whose stage various perceptions appear in different configurations. Hume’s analyses demonstrated that human cognition has no foundation in any substantial subjectivity, but in temporal genealogy of appearing impressions and ideas. Descartes wants to define the functioning of the mind, beginning with separating it from sensuality, while Hume sees the mind as a simple interplay of relations between ideas, having their source in the sensuality. Hence the critique of metaphysical claims and of religion. It is precisely the study of sources of religious beliefs that constitutes a substantial part of Hume’s work, because they are a good example of how easily the human mind exceeds the borders of experience – the only foundation of knowledge – and how easily it paves the way for metaphysical illusions. For Hume, the subject, comes down to the functioning of the relations between ideas, which merely are simple reflexes of sensuality. In the mind there is nothing and cannot be anything apart from what has already been introduced there by the senses. Thus Hume takes up and radicalizes Locke’s thesis.

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Wyobrażeniowa poetyka zła w utworach Voltaire’a

Author(s): Joanna Ziobrowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

In his descriptions of this “world going round”, Voltaire touches upon the problem of evil, using mimesis and his trademark irony as tools. Scream, anxiety, and confusion over this “scandal for philosophers” are reflected in his polemics with Leibniz. The spectacle of evil presents itself in Voltaire’s symbolic caricature of marionettes – in order to confront the ontological onus of evil with philosophical speculation. h e mechanical descriptions, deformed characters, and grotesque juxtaposition of lucky and unlucky situations found in his “obsessive metaphors” make up his “aesthetics of ugliness”, whose attractive quality seems to unravel some of Voltaire’s myth. His “obsessive metaphors” of evil and his style negating the reality, world, and man create a theatre of nihilism and hopelessness in which Voltaire co-suffers with his actors. The tragic and the comic are wed in the oxymoron of irony – the mood of the spirit – under the mask of which Voltaire hides the secrets of his imagination.

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Verstand und Vernunft. Entwicklung des Selbstbewusstseins in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes

Author(s): Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer / Language(s): German Issue: 56/2011

There is no immediate knowledge, neither empirical nor conceptual. Hegel shows this in his Phenomenology of Spirit. He develops this most important insight in his writings on logic. Science is the project of developing situation-independent generic sentences – which are not to be confused with universally quantified empirical statements. Rather, the sentences articulate law so rules of default inference and proper judgment in a generic way. They are set as “conceptually valid” not only on merely verbal or conventional grounds, but are “material” in their world-relation. In other words, science develops “the (material) concept” which, in turn, enables us to understand, i.e. to use languages and to think about reality and possibilities more or less correctly. “The concept” is, therefore, the system of generic conditions of all “meaning” and “truth” and is, as such, presupposed in empirical judgments of the category of singularity. “Reason” is the subjective side of “spirit”, which, in turn, is nothing but our practice of scientific development. If we look at this practice from within, spirit is the “self-development” of conceptual contents. Moreover, any causal explanation and any appeal to forces or dispositions rest on conceptual constructions of generic models. This is the core claim of Hegel’s idealism with respect to causes and grounds by which we “explain” appearances: h e underlying “Wirklichkeit” is our own scientific construction suited to our joint experiences.

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Substancja jako funkcja. Krytyczne pojęcie substancjalności i problem syntezy a priori

Author(s): Przemysław Parszutowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

The article adumbrates the opposition between Aristotelian “metaphysical” meaning of the concept of substance and its critical relational meaning, strongly accentuated by the Marburg Neokantian School. This opposition was creatively developed by the aforementioned School. It starts with a critique of Aristotle and his concept of the “substance as being in itself” and proceeds to demonstrate with the reference to the Kantian transcendentalism that concept of the “substance as function” is one of the a priori rules of synthetic cognition. In the Marburg School, the history of the development of these two meanings takes the form of a history of two opposing directions of the thought: dogmatic philosophy – leaning toward the former meaning and critical – based on the latter.

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Mantics and Hermeneutics

Author(s): Wolfram Hogrebe / Language(s): English Issue: 56/2011

This paper shows that our epistemological career starts at any rate earlier than Robert Brandom´s theory of inferential reason suggests. So we need a theory of informal ways of getting knowledge in the tradition of Leibniz. To do justice to the intended fragile initial oscillations of primary understanding of a meaningful world we must go back to areas before hermeneutics starts and take recourse to the repertoire of mantic vocabulary

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Henryk Elzenberg a szkoła lwowsko-warszawska. Złożoność wzajemnych relacji

Author(s): Joanna Zegzuła-Nowak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

Until recently, historians of Polish philosophy tended to look at the relations between Henryk Elzenberg and the Lvov-Warsaw School mainly in the context of their mutual antagonisms. Therefore the differences between were emphasized: the distinctness of their scientific and the investigative attitudes and the adopted methodological foundations. Many facts supported such a thesis (i.e. the intellectual and scientific biographies, adopted views). The biographical facts and the philosophers’ works and their correspondence, demonstrate many convergence points, analogies, connections and similarities in their views, as well as in their scientific and academic activities. There are many factors speaking for their influence on the philosophers’ scientific attitudes and on creation and development of their conceptions. The article therefore presents not only the origin and the nature of the mutual antagonisms, but also their ideological similarities, biographical and personal connections between Elzenberg and the representatives of Twardowski’s School. Such an approach, according to its author, is a substantial basis for further analysis of Elzenberg’s complex relations with the Lvov-Warsaw School.

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O osobliwości filozofii i polityki

Author(s): Dorota Sepczyńska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

This article is an attempt at a synthetic study of Political Philosophy. Through a rearrangement of the way that particular discipline of philosophy has been described and understood, it proposes the placement of Political Philosophy within the entirety of philosophical thinking (Political Philosophy as Metaphysics of Politics, Political Ethics or Metaphysical and Normative Perspective, Political and Social Philosophy), and to define its subject (Political Philosophy sensu largo and sensu stricto) and its issues (holism – individualism, elitism – egalitarianism, pessimism – optimism, rationalism – antirationalism, monism – pluralism). It also overviews the history of political philosophy (the differences between classical, modern and contemporary Political Philosophy) and its role in human life.

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Kultura a odpowiedzialność człowieka Na marginesie eseju Ernsta Cassirera Naturalistyczne i humanistyczne uzasadnienie filozofii kultury

Author(s): Karol Chrobak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

This article is an introduction to Ernst Cassirer’s essay Naturalistic and Humanistic Justification of Philosophy of Culture. At the beginning the biographical background of its emergence is outlined. Hitler’s rise to power forced Cassirer to emigrate to Sweden. This difficult situation induced him to substantially rethink the ethical dimension of his philosophy of symbolic forms. In the essay Cassirer distinguishes two currents of modern philosophical reflection about man and culture: the naturalistic and the humanistic one. The former considers culture as a result of purely natural processes that run completely independently of any human decision. Such an approach reduces man to “a marionette” that is blindly obedient to external impulses. According to Cassirer such a way of thinking characterizes Hegel’s idealism, Taine’s positivism as well as Spengler’s fatalism. These different naturalisms he contrasts with a humanistic approach to the philosophy of culture where man turns out to be an active, creative being that produces around himself his own world of culture. Following Cassirer I explain this “new humanism” with reference to the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt. The conclusion that Cassirer draws from their reflections is that culture is the field of manifestation of man’s inexhaustible power of form giving. Although this power is always ascribed to an individual it is realized in a social context of a particular community.

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Naturalistyczne i humanistyczne uzasadnienie filozofii kultury

Author(s): Ernst Cassirer / Language(s): Polish Issue: 56/2011

In this essay Ernst Cassirer addresses two currents of the philosophical reflection about man and culture that emerged at the end of the 18th century. The naturalistic one conceives of man and culture as an outcome of the processes that takes place beyond the reach of human will and consciousness. Among such naturalistically oriented philosophies Cassirer includes Hegel’s idealism, Taine’s positivism and Spengler’s psychologism. All of them imply a characteristic kind of historical fatalism. In opposition to such a deterministic vision of human development stands a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of individual decision and responsibility for the course of history. Cassirer names it “humanistic” as it places man in the very middle of its research. h e initiators of this tradition were Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, foremost representatives of the German romantic movement. The philosopher who took up their humanistic thought and elevated it to the importance of a distinct knowledge was Wilhelm Dilthey. While bearing in mind who is the real creator of culture all these thinkers pay special attention to the question of man’s responsibility for culture as well as for himself. The problem of human responsibility that totally escaped the attention of naturalistically oriented philosophers is somehow a distinguishing characteristic of all humanistic philosophies of culture.

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Duch tragizmu

Author(s): François Chirpaz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 55/2010

This article – devoted to the memory of Professor Barbara Skarga – inquires and tries to solve a question regarding the status of the human mortality marked by the spirit of tragedy. This aforementioned inquire is inextricably related to the understanding of a certain form of consciousness of human being (inhabiting world and life) and which is its most appropriate good. On the one hand it refers to a self–consciousness close to that one which is expressed in the philosophical approach and on the other hand it refers to some kind of consciousness different to the former. Its difference stems from a distinct tone of a initial question which opens up the possibility of thinking.

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Anaxagoras and human rationality

Author(s): Adam Drozdek / Language(s): English Issue: 55/2010

In Anaxagoras’ system, cosmic Mind is one, indivisible and immutable and thus cannot be divided into parts, into individual minds residing in living beings. The same Mind is in one living being as it is in another. Also, the soul is an individual entity, one soul in one living being. Mind does manifest itself in a living being, not as the soul, but through the soul. Mind must be constantly present in the individual soul for the soul to be capable of thought. Only in this sense could the soul’s dormant cognitive ability be called an individual mind. However, for man, only this life remains, although man is highest in the hierarchy among existing beings. Mind seems to make man alive and rational so that man can admire its handiwork, the order and harmony of the world. But this is where man’s cosmic role ends.

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Obrona Sokratesa przed krytyką Ajdukiewicza

Author(s): Adam Olech / Language(s): Polish Issue: 55/2010

The author of this article puts forward two aims: the main one and the collateral one. The main aim is to remind not enough known inference which is to justify the famous thesis of Socrates named “ethical intellectualism”. This thesis claims the sufficient condition to be moral good is to know what is good. That inference is mentioned in K. Ajdukiewicz’s Zarys logiki (The Outline of Logic) but it is inserted in this handbook as the example of inference which is saddled the error of equivocation. If that inference was erroneous indeed than it would fulfill the necessary condition to be the conclusive subjective convinced inference. The author formalizes the inference and he makes it in two languages: in the language of sentential calculus and in the language of predicate calculus. Afterwards he proves the obtained inference schemata are valid. The objection of Ajdukiewicz is caused by – as he claims – two meanings of expression “good” in the analyzing inference: “utilitarian good, that is useful to somebody” and “moral good”. If it really was like this, then the objection of error of equivocation (that is the objection of the formal error) would be well founded. However the extensions of conceptions: “moral good” and “useful to somebody” are – in the case of Socrates’ views–logical equivalent because when Socrates was speaking about usefulness he always meant usefulness only to the soul. The collateral aim of this article is to call in question the rightness of the name “ethical intellectualism”. In the author’s opinion, it would be more suitable to name the famous Socrates’ thesis as “ethical rationalism” because not intellect, but reason – in its phronetical function and not in its the noethical one – causes that we are able to choose what is good, and we are faithful to our choice. Such attitude is named “virtue”, in Latin – virtus, in Greek – areté.

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