Czy człowiek istnieje tylko konceptualnie? Antropologiczny wątek w myśli Kosutha i Świdzińskiego
Can a man exist only conceptually? Kosuth and Świdziński’ s anthropological ideas.

Summary/Abstract: In ‘Notes on "Crane" (1970), Joseph Kosuth hypothesized that art 'only' existed in conceptual form, because people (presumably) exist only conceptually. Piotrowski considers the anthropological topic of art as more or less a humane game. He analyses ‘Anthropologized Art’ (1974) in the context of postomodernist quenching of revolutionism in modernist art and Jan Świdziński’ s Art as Contextual Art (1976). He compares the doctrines by Kosuth and Świdziński. Although both artists unanimously agreed that the avant-garde revolutionism , ended in the 1970’s and they formed their own strategies for building a humanist commitment to maintaining a critical distance towards unilateral politicization of art as a catalyst for social change. Świdziński, however, was more convincing in the context of contemporary contextualism in epistemology, which is the answer to the old problem of skepticism, or radical criticism of the belief that we have no knowledge of the outside world (Kosuth believed in that idea when working on tautological conceptualism). However, despite the skeptical thesis, according to contextualist ideas, knowledge is always indexed by the context in which it is formulated and which is currently used for social conversation. Contexts are different epistemic standards. We cannot, though, formulate skeptical hypothesis in all contexts (thus formulating a diaporesis that people probably exist only in conceptual forms), because only the contexts of high epistemic standards can be taken seriously. In most contexts epistemic standards are low, therefore pedantic skeptics’ claims must be limited, or even rejected, including radicalism and post-humanism at the forefront.

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