The article presents a doctor–patient relationship model based on the assumptions of a holistic approach to the patient. The author draws attention to selected patients’ needs, ones taken into account in this model. These are the right to autonomy and an individualised approach to the patient. These issues, considered in relation to philosophy, show a conflict between patients’ values and aspirations and doctors’ values and their experience. Nowadays, patients’ needs are protected by consumer rights as well as being strengthened by (...) postmodern philosophy, which shapes society’s awareness of various definitions of health and underlines the right of the individual to self‐determination. This situation creates an incredible challenge for doctors because attempts to assist is, according to medical knowledge, associated with an inevitable collision with the subjective perception of a patient’s health. Because of this issue, the author considers it necessary to enquire about the needs and aspirations of not so much patients as doctors themselves. It is assumed that the definition of what is currently important for this group determines the scope of any possible admission or intentional ignorance of patients’ needs. (shrink)

Post-modernity as a New Chance for the Enlightenment: On Necessity of Overcoming Modernity. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the end of modernity does not necessary comprise a cultural regress but can also be seen as new stage of the process of Enlightenment in Western history. After the presentation of popular and commonly recognized definitions of modernity and postmodernity, the author will attempt to demonstrate the main limitations of modernity on the basis of philosophies of Max Stirner (...) and Frederic Nietzsche. The author’s main objection to modernity is its tendency to reproduce the centralistic structure of pre-modern traditional communities in which one metaphysical term designated the universally obligatory norms. By way of crashing this structure, postmodernity opens new possibilities to an individual for creating new, particular values, thus enabling the individual to discover new forms of self-realization. To make human life in such a decentralized society possible, the individual would have to attain a new mental level. Civil education, therefore, has to go beyond the borders of modernity and be open to new ways of learning and solving social conflict. (shrink)

My considerations are organised into four sections. The first section provides a survey of some significant developments that determine contemporary philosophical discussion on the subject of ‘time’. In the second section, I show how the question of time and the issue of media are linked with one another in the views of two influential contemporary philosophers: Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Finally, in the third section, the temporal implications of cultural practices which are developing in the new medium of the (...) Internet are analysed and, in the fourth section, related to the central theses of Derrida and Rorty. (shrink)