Peter van Inwagen’s answer to the Special Composition Question, call it Organicism, says the xs compose y iff the activity of the xs constitutes a life. What about suspended lives (i.e., cryptobiosis)? Suppose a cat is alive at t1, completely frozen at t2, then revived at t3. Is the cat alive while frozen? Plausibly no, which according to Organicism means the cat-qua-composite ceases to exist at t2. Intuitively, however, the same cat seems present at all of t1, t2, and t3. (...) To account for these intuitions, van Inwagen modifies his answer: the xs compose y iff the activity of the xs constitutes or results from a life. Alas, this modification permits problematic duplication cases where one collection of objects composes something, yet a duplicate collection does not. This prompts the search for alternative modifications that identify frozen organisms as composites without introducing duplication problems. A dispositional variant is proposed. (shrink)

We investigate the semantics of historical counterfactuals in indeterministic contexts. We claim that "plain" and "necessitated" counterfactuals differ in meaning. To substantiate this claim, we propose a new semantic treatment of historical counterfactuals in the Branching Time framework. We supplement our semantics with supervaluationist postsemantics, thanks to which we can explain away the intuitions which seem to talk in favor of the identification of "would" with "would necessarily".

Art as Festival Art has been a privileged sphere in the sense that it appeales to art-receivers because of its power of taking them outside the sphere of everyday life (commonplaceness) and practicality. For the first time the philosophers of ancient Greece propagated this view. In this paper the Pythagorean and Aristotle’s views are considered; however they have different metaphysical bases, there is some aspect common to theirs aesthetics. In 20th century it is Helmut Kuhn, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Władysław Stróżewski (...) who express similar ideas and convictions about an exceptionality of the meeting between art and man. In the first part of the article (the ancient) notion of “leisure” (scholé) is presented, while in the second one the case of “festival”, Festlichkeit and Eigenzeit is taken into account. (shrink)

We point out a yet unnoticed flaw in Dutch Book arguments that relates to a link between degrees of belief and betting quotients. We offer a set of precise conditions governing when a nonprobabilist is immune to the classical Dutch Book argument. We suggest that diachronic Dutch Book arguments are also affected.

The Origin and Development of Environmental Philosophy in the US according to John Muir, Aldo Leopold and J. Baird Callicot. The publication refers to environmental philosophy, which is also called ecological philosophy or ecophilosophy. It shows in what way philosophical reflection on the environment has been shaped in the American tradition. In this context, the views of the thinkers listed below have been presented, analysed and evaluated. John Muir, an astute observer of wild nature, has been presented as an enthusiast (...) and a prophet persuading a return to nature. Muir was a forester under the strong influence of the representatives of transcendentalism. As an activist, he founded national parks that served to preserve virgin areas, and as a writer he popularized the concept of the preservation of wild areas. For many representatives of ecophilosophy, the views of Aldo Leopold, as expressed in his well-known work, A Sand County Almanac, constituted a new pattern of thinking about wild nature. The book itself is almost generally regarded as a bible of environmental philosophy. Leopold, a forester interested in philosophy, created the fundamentals of holistic environmental philosophy, but the theory he developed is not without defects, to which some attention has been paid in this paper. The theory of J. Baird Callicot presents the attitude of an academic philosopher with regard to wild nature. His attitude is fully professional as regards the applied method, thus allowing the author to avoid committing a naturalistic fallacy. Callicot reinterprets the issues of facts and values, because he thinks that the discoveries of the dynamically developing ecology make possible the reformulation of the traditional approach to such issues by utilising a spirit of acceptance, and lead to a shift from is to ought to be. (shrink)

Introduction to a special issue of Erkenntnis.

This paper is obituary of Leszek Nowak, one of the greatest Polish philosophers of the XX century.

In the article the author describes theoretical reasons that stood behind Kołakowski's transition from being an orthodox Marxist to become an actual leader of the polish revisionist movement. His intention is to concentrate on those aspects of Kołakowski's thought that have not changed, apart from any biographical and psychological reasons. (1) First of those features is Kołakowski's inability of completability, the anti-code disposition. (2) The second trait is the moral attitude, an intention to influence on people's morality by convincing them (...) that social and internal (necessarily bound with social) changes are desirable; that an existential calm demolishes morality. (3) Third feature concerns the fact that Kołakowski did not attempt to create his own philosophy, he was rather a historian of ideas, a skeptic, and a critic. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to outline the theory of a historical process developed within the framework of the Poznań School of Methodology, mainly by Leszek Nowak and a team of his co-workers. In the first part of the paper, the meta-philosophical and meta-theoretical assumptions of Poznań school are reconstructed and juxtaposed with the relevant assumptions of Western analytical Marxism. In the central part of the paper, the main ideas of adaptive reconstruction of historical materialism and non-Marxian historical (...) materialism are presented. In its final part, some problems of reception of Leszek Nowak’s theory of historical process in Polish People’s Republic and the Third Republic are discussed. (shrink)

My paper refers to Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth, and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987). Kołakowski’s intention was to write a textbook on the history of Marxism based on his lectures but his book is much more than that. It is a philosophical treatise in which Marx’s doctrine of mankind and the program of its liberation are critically analysed and reinterpreted. The core of Marx’s philosophy is the idea of man and the belief that the (...) real existence of humans is not identical with their essence. Kołakowski shows that this belief is rooted in mythological thinking, the Platonic tradition, and in the Christian thought. A moral that follows from Kołakowski’s critical analysis of Marx’s doctrine is that man has never lived in a paradise and yet he perceives himself as banished thereof; that he will never enter a paradise and yet he cannot live without the faith that this is somehow possible. Therefore, what he should do is to have a minimum of common sense and skepticism related to it, for they would protect him against the traps laid by false prophets repeatedly asserting that they know the means to construct the paradise today or at least tomorrow. (shrink)

The ‘Warsaw School of History of Ideas’ is the name given to a ‘revisionist think tank’ which was led by the historian Bronisław Baczko from 1956 to 1968 in Communist Poland. This group reunited scholars like Leszek Kołakowski or Krzysztof Pomian around questions related to political believes, theological conceptions or utopian thought. Expelled from the University, B. Baczko left Poland and seek shelter in Geneva where he became a Professor of history of Ideas and historiography. In his new home, (...) he developed an original vision on Enlightenment and the French Revolution. (shrink)

The first part of this book contains a selection of Leszek Nowak’s (1943-2009) works on non-Marxian historical materialism, which are published here in English for the first time. In these papers, Nowak constructs a dynamic model of religious community, reconstructs historiosophical assumptions of liberalism and considers the methodological status of prognosis of totalitarization of capitalist society. In the second part of the book, new contributions to non-Marxian historical materialism are presented. Their authors analyze mechanisms of the oligarchization of liberal (...) democracy, the democratization of real socialism, and the development of early modern Ottoman and post-war Chinese societies. The volume will be of interest to graduate and undergraduate students, as well as specialists who deal with the development of capitalist society, philosophy of history, the philosophy of social sciences and the political philosophy of liberalism. (shrink)

The following article begins with my recollection of the only academic conference on Zdziechowski that was organised still under the communist regime in the autumn of 1984 at the Jagiellonian University and ends with a description of the discussion on the genesis and power of evil, with the participation of Czesław Miłosz and Leszek Kołakowski, which was triggered in Poland immediately after the publication of the last edition of On Cruelty in 1993. On Cruelty was first published in 1928 (...) in the journal Przegla̧d Współczesny [Contemporary Review] in Krakow, a second time in 1938 in the volume of articles In the Face of the End, Krakow 1938, and a third – and so far last – time also in Krakow in 1993. On Cruelty, published three times but so far only in Polish, has never been thoroughly analysed or even discussed, which is why this article focuses on discussing it and related questions about the origins and nature of evil, mainly in Europe and Asia, from the earliest times to the present. Zdziechowski was particularly outraged when the cruelty he condemned was justified by religion, especially Christianity (Catholic and Protestant). From these condemnations, he described the activities of the Inquisition, the witch trials, cruelty to animals, and – in the introduction – the “psychology of cruelty.” At the same time, however, he meticulously listed the names of those political and spiritual leaders in Europe and Asia, theologians and thinkers, who, over many centuries, up to the present day, have resolutely spoken out against evil, including cruelty, within and outside the Church. A separate and important issue is Zdziechowski’s attitude to Tsarist Russia and Bolshevism, as outlined in his work On Cruelty. On the one hand, he pointed out that at least two rulers of Russia before 1917 – Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great – had made major contributions to the history of cruelty in Europe and Asia. But Bolshevism, which Zdziechowski condemned in the strongest terms, was in his eyes not a continuation of pre-1917 Russian despotism, but emanated from the depths of Asia. (shrink)

Freud’s 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' was one of the most widely translated and circulated works of German psychology in the last century. This psychoanalytic and clinical approach to analyzing the brain has now been superseded by neuro-scientific techniques of analysis. Once you master neuro-hacking data, you can broadcast people's private, internal thoughts (without their consent) and other brain waves – as an audio signal in a frequency of your choice. Synapse-hacking is juxtaposed with the heroic intellectual legacies of Derrida (...) and Mandela in this article. (shrink)

In a recent revision (chapter 4 of Nowakowa and Nowak 2000) of an older article Leszek Nowak (1992) has attempted to rebut Niiniluoto’s 1990 critical suggestion that proponents of the Poznań idealizational approach to the sciences have committed a rather elementary logical error in the formal machinery that they advocate for use in the analysis of scientific methodology. In this paper I criticize Nowak’s responses to Niiniluoto’s suggestion, and, subsequently, work out some of the consequences of that criticism for (...) understanding the role that idealization plays in scientific methodology. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this Journal San Pedro I formulated a conjecture relating Measurement Independence and Parameter Independence, in the context of common cause explanations of EPR correlations. My conjecture suggested that a violation of Measurement Independence would entail a violation of Parameter Independence as well. Leszek Wroński has shown that conjecture to be false. In this note, I review Wroński’s arguments and agree with him on the fate of the conjecture. I argue that what is interesting about (...) the conjecture, however, is not whether it is true or false in itself, but the reasons for the actual verdict, and their implications regarding locality. (shrink)

The authors of this book reconstruct the philosophical, methodological and theoretical assumptions of non-Marxian historical materialism, a theory of historical process authored by Leszek Nowak (1943-2009), a co-founder of the Poznań School of Methodology. In the first part of the book, philosophical assumptions of this theory are compared with the concepts of Robert Nozick, Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank and analytical Marxism. In the second part, non-Marxian historical materialism is compared with the concepts of Eva Etzioni-Halevy, Andrzej Falkiewicz, Robert (...) Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, Theda Skocpol and Karl August Wittfogel. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to pinpoint the areas of Ludwig Wittgenstein aesthetic thought, in which he is crossing the borders principally imposed upon the method and the language of his philosophy. I am directing my attention to metaphysical and mystical motifs of his reflection devoted to aesthetics, the essence of art and the essence of reality. I wish to discuss this issue based on the texts of Arthur C. Danto containing analysis of chosen notions of Wittgenstein’s aesthetic investigations. Additionally (...) in this matter I am appealing to appropriate theses of Leszek Sosnowski and Wojciech Sady, concerning above issues. (shrink)

A Few Notes on Aspect Seein g in Contemporar y Aesthetics In this paper author examines the problem of aspect seeing in reference to works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Virgil C. Aldrich posing the question of whether they are applicable to experience of musical works. Drawing on examples from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, author maintains that hearing a melody as solemn, sad, et cetera is neither universal nor unequivocal. Musical work, author suggests, does not present itself spontaneously to the listener. Conversely (...) it must be sought and found. To speak of aspect hearing or hearing as (as aesthetic hearing) in reference to music, one must seek out those qualities of musical work that are perceptual but also individually grasped in contrast to what is given in experience through acculturation and training. (shrink)

Today lingers a mistaken belief, which claims, that myth is obsolete and is only relevant to bored historians. Nothing could be more wrong. In this paper the author will explain, what myth is, what meaning it has and why mythical thinking is a current and common phenomenon. The paper focuses on ideas of Kołakowski and Blumenberg, at the same time placing emphasis on the state and related dangers of modern myth. In the course of this work, the author will prove (...) that myth is an essential part of human cognition and is a medium for meaning and for moral values. Rationality not only does not exclude mythical thinking, but, in a way, is its component. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is discuss an application of non-Marxian historical materalism to explanation of non-European societies. Until now this theory has been limited to interpretation of European societies. In order to grasp development of non-European societies (e.gr. Mexico) the extension of typology of societies is proposed which constitutes a new scientific programme based on this theory of historical development.