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Nietzsche o wolności jednostki, czyli o niespełnionych i spełnionych marzeniach

Author(s): Marta Baranowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2016

The subject of the article is an analysis of the idea of human liberty. Nietzsche denies the idea of freedom of will. Although he believes that it is possible to become free, that freedom is a realizable ideal. Human beings are able to improve. Nietzsche is creating the concept of superman as a more excellent kind of being. Nietzsche’s elitism was devoted towards the self-creation of an individuality of great strength. People demand freedom only when they have no power.Freedom means that the manly instincts dominate over other instincts. The free man is a warrior. Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves. In real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills.

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Wprowadzenie do filozofii twórczości. Uwagi pojęciowe – historia idei – perspektywa interdyscyplinarna

Author(s): Monika Chylińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2016

It has been a long time since the ability to create is not percieved only as the domain of poets and artists, and the eventuality of deliberating over its nature is not restricted only to aesthetics. In the present analyses I would like to show this modern and postmodern variety of the studies on the creatio phenomenon, which today is often to be comprehended as the universal human creativity (described mainly by psychologists and educators). By introducing the fundamental considerations over the traditional and non-traditional definitions and explanations of creativity, this article has to facilitate at the same time the task of raising more specific and detailed issues (which I partly describe in the article “On the main dilemmas of the philosophy of creativity: A synthetic view of the contemporary research” in this volume of Roczniki Filozoficzne).The present introduction to the philosophy of creativity field will be made in three main steps: (1) by evoking some previous philosophical analyses, (2) by describing the traditional and modern ways of defining the concept and (3) through showing the selected psychological theories of the process of creating the new, valuable and original artifact.

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Gustaw Szpet – próba portretu

Author(s): Bogusław Żyłko / Language(s): Polish Issue: 35/2013

Gustaw Szpet was born on 7 April (25 March old style) 1879 in Kiev. His first book – The Phenomenonand Sense – with subtitle Phenomenology as a basic study and its problems, is dedicated to EdmundHusserl. The book is an introduction to phenomenology which refers to the program of work of thethinker from Göttingen. Szpet’s position is pluralist. His pluralism is based on social ontology. It isempirical, experimental pluralism. Multiplicity of realities demands different – as Husserl describesthem – “material or regional” ontologies. Szpet started his mature period of philosophical – scientificactivity by writing an astute record about the creator of phenomenology and developing his ownhypotheses. With a reliable research method which was particularly predestined to explore thehuman world, he studied different “regional ontologies”, or ontologies – as it was named at the time –a separate “series of cultures”. History turned out to be an important field of social – cultural realityfor Szpet. He treated history (historical science) as another “subject” demanding eidetic analysis. Inthe twenties, much more detailed studies were rooted in philosophical ideas, which were concentratedaround the problems associated with the traditional methods including the “first philosophy”(or, as some prefer to metaphilosophy). For Szpet they were focused (what is natural for phenomenologist)on consciousness and the subject. Szpet was tracing psychologism in humanistic studies.He decided to confront psychologism on its own territory by publishing in the second half of thetwenties a book dedicated to ethnic psychology. Before his life was brutally ended during the peakof his career in 1937 he made a significant contribution toward Russian philosophy and culture.

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Historia oczyma Guriewicza

Author(s): Stanisław Kandulski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 35/2013

In the text author tries to present conception of historical anthropology, which was included in Gurievitch’s works. The text contains two perspectives on his theory: scientific (the methodologicalapproach of soviet historian directly declared in his perspectives on recognizing the past) and nonscientific (which points at the ideological involvement of science, not necessarily conscious by thesoviet author).

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Dobro jako kategoria etyczna i ontologiczna w twórczości Fiodora Dostojewskiego

Author(s): Dorota Jewdokimow / Language(s): Polish Issue: 35/2013

The question of the good and the evil in Dostoyevsky’s work has been repeatedly analysed andexamined from different research perspectives, often giving contrary results. Such rich and diversestudies of his writings is an interesting subject in itself. The academic work by Leo Zander and SergiuszHessen concentrates particularly on issues of the good from readings of Dostoyevsky. Bothscholars in their examination derived the concept of the good from the idea of God, according to theprinciple of “Good from God”, thereby establishing a direct dependence on religion and ethics.Ethics without religion, outside God, inside its own structure is becoming impossible and is morphinginto deadly ethics of willfulness. The emergence of the concept of the good from a divinebeing establishes a dependence on ethics from ontology, ontology precedes ethics. These studies arethe starting point for further reflections on the matter of independent ethics and even universalexplanations of Dostoyevsky’s creativeness which incorporates the possibility of exceeding moralrelativism.

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Ksenofanes z Kolofonu i greckie źródła problemu poznania

Author(s): Dariusz Kubok / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2013

Criticism is nowadays broadly defined firstly, as a cognitive attitude consisting in investigation of rightness of one’s beliefs and considering true only those statements which are substantiated. Secondly, it is a cognitive attitude opposed to dogmatism (e.g. skepticism understood not as negative dogmatism but as zeteticism and ephecticism), which allows the possibility of changing one’s opinion as a result of occurrence of new facts or theories. Cosmological-ontological interpretation of early Greek philosophy, which is currently dominant, may be complemented (or even overcome) by a critical one. The article presents elements of Xenophanes’ philosophy (especially Xenophanes’ theological fragments) in the light of the problem concerning the historical origins of philosophical criticism. In this paper I try to recognize Xenophanes’ theological fragments not as a positive theology, but rather as an attempt to construct a dialectical metaphor (like in case of Gadder’s interpretations of Plato’s polis), which has emphasized the epistemological assumptions of his philosophy.

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Metoda dialektyczna a funkcje chôrismos w metafizyce Plotyna

Author(s): Rafał Oleś / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2013

The subject of this article is the role of chôrismos (separation) in the philosophy of Plotinus. Its primary aim is to explore relationships between chôrismos, dialectical method and noetic knowledge. The first part of this article demonstrate metaphysicaland methodological function of chôrismos, the essence of which is to establish thesubject matter of metaphysics (i.e. ontos on). The second part contains an analysisof the anagogic way of a soul to self-knowledge in the context of chôrismos andPlotinus’ aretology. The third part sums up our investigations. It develops relationships,extracted in previous sections, especially connections between dialectic andfunctions of chôrismos.

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Dwie (anty)filozoficzne „gramatyki” Ludwiga Wittgensteina

Author(s): Ewa Czesna,Adam Nowaczyk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2013

Wittgenstein is the author of two conceptions of “grammar”, that were meant to betools of reaching the same goal: discrediting of the traditional, i.e. “metaphysical” questions of philosophy. His early conception concerns logical grammar being thelanguage of logic notation, which is devoid of logical constants. This idea was supportedby the ontological thesis that there are no logical objects. In fact, it was notindispensable for achieving the intended purpose, since the elimination of philosophicalproblems was provided by the semantic argument that the only sensiblestatements are those of the natural sciences.The second concept of grammar, presented in the writings of the later Wittgenstein,seems more ambiguous. Grammar is a set of rules of the language game,having a status of grammatical statements. Examples of such statements are diverse,and desirable, according to the authors, reformulation of them all into concrete ordersor prohibitions seems problematic. In the Investigations Wittgenstein distinguishes between deep and surface grammar, which serves to determine the proper task ofphilosophy as description of the deep grammar (especially the grammar of philosophically relevant words). In this sense New Philosophy is a kind of philosophicalgrammar. Wittgensteinian grammar is also anti-philosophical, as it aims at theelimination of erroneous (pseudo)metaphysical claims derived from misleadingforms of surface grammar. Despite the differences in the concepts of language andgrammar in the early and late Wittgenstein, he has not changed his critical approachto the traditional philosophical questions.

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Wittgenstein i zagadka Anzelma

Author(s): Jakub Gomułka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2013

The paper is devoted to the problem of the two paradoxes: the paradox of absolutevalue in Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics and the paradox of Anselm’s Name of Godfrom the Proslogion. I try to present semantic determinants of the paradoxes as wellas similarities of their structures. However, the main part of the article focuses on thesolution of Anselm’s paradox given by Cora Diamond, the prominent Wittgensteinianscholar in her paper Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle. Diamond develops extensivecomparison of the concept of that than which nothing greater can be conceived anda series of peculiar riddles – she calls the Anselm’s concept the great riddle, since, asin other riddles presented, we cannot deal with it in a usual way. The author showsthat what enables us to resolve, say, the riddle of Sphinx, is our obtaining a new wayof understanding the words which compose the riddle itself, for the old way will notlead us to the proper answer. However, when it comes to the great riddle we knowthat we cannot obtain any way of understanding which will enable us to conceiveit. This does not mean that the riddle cannot make any sense for us. We can believethat there is a solution (in fact, we have the solution – it has been given to us inthe Revelation – but we cannot understand it) so we can treat the great riddle as aneuqation which we lack proof but we know there is one. As Diamond calls it, wehave the promissory meaning of the riddle. In my opinion the idea of the promissorymeaning is an interesting solution of Anselm’s paradox, but I notice that the ideaitself is conditioned by religious faith or by something I call the empathic atheism(in short: an attitude which lets atheists take the believers’ point of view).

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Czy Alfred Tarski jest relatywistą aletycznym?

Author(s): Jacek Moroz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2013

In the article Popper, Tarski and Relativism Jennings argues that according to T-equivalence all ontology (all sort of things in the world) is the derived from the first-order language. So such argumentation leads directly to the relativistic interpretation of Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. This interpretation is very controversial especially given that almost all philosophers of the Lvov-Warsaw School assert that truth is a nonrelativistic value. It seems that Alfred Tarski shares this view with Kazimierz Twardowski and his students. However there are many incompatible interpretations according to which the semantic theory of truth generates different consequences. Thus we can understand this theory in a relativistic, deflationist or absolutist ways. In this article I am reconstructing the relativistic and nonrelativistic interpretations of the semantic theory of truth and I attempt to provide an answer to the important question about whether or not Alfred Tarski is a relativist?

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Quinean Ontological Commitment Derailed

Author(s): Roxanne Marie Kurtz / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

What should we believe exists? The Quinean response is straightforward: We should believe in all and only those objects over which we must quantify in our best scientific theories. Let us call this view Ontological Commitment = Quantifier Commitment, or OC=QC. The author draws upon resources from Jody Azzouni and Stephen Yablo, who reject this criterion to disrupt a central argument for platonism in mathematics. The project has two parts. First, the negative project is to argue that OC=QC is misguided because we ought not read our ontological commitments off of our quantifier commitments. Second, the positive project is to suggest an alternative criterion to OC=QC that allows us to accept the idea that statements that quantify over mathematical objects that would be abstract if they existed are indispensable to our best scientific theories, but nevertheless reject the existence of numbers.

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The Civic Duty to Pay Taxes and the Fair-Share Calculation

Author(s): Donald Morris / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

In its 2009 Taxpayer Attitude Survey, the U.S. IRS Oversight Board asked taxpayers: “Is it every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes?” Respondents strongly believe it is, with 70 percent claiming they “completely agree” and 25 percent that they “mostly agree.” On very few public issues is it possible to obtain 95 percent agreement and any such broad consensus should be met with skepticism. The near-unanimous response may mean no more than that people recognize that the functions of government must be paid for and that each person should pay a certain part. But in light of the reported $450 billion annual U.S. tax gap and evidence of declining taxpayer compliance, this paper raises questions about what taxpayers understand by “fair share” and the duty to which it gives rise. In this paper, I argue that the key to understanding how there can be a growing problem of tax cheating and yet a preponderance of taxpayers acknowledging a civic duty to pay their fair share, lies in taxpayers’ calculation of their fair share.

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Non-Homogenous Moral Space (from Bentham to Sen)

Author(s): Piotr Bołtuć / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

The notion of moral space covers all thin (universal) and thick (particular) characteristics that may plausibly be seen as morally relevant. In this paper, I investigate certain properties of moral space so defined. These properties are not easily visible if we analyze moral characteristics individually, but become clear once we consider them collectively. In particular, following Amartya Sen, I claim that the value of moral properties is, in part, a function of positional characteristics. I call this notion the non-homogeneity of moral space.

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Existence

Author(s): John Skorupski / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

The question what really—ultimately, basically, and so forth—exists remains a fundamental question of philosophy. It is also, however, a prime example of how misleading it can be to try to answer a philosophical question without first taking pains to clarify it. In this case, clarification has turned out to be difficult and controversial, which leads to a meta-question: Is this apparently fundamental question—the ontological question—also a pseudo-question, a question that should be dissolved rather than solved? This paper answers for an answer that is somewhat Meinongian.

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No more Mad-dog Concept Nativism

Author(s): Justyna Japola-Des Vergnes / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

According to Jerry Fodor, there are two possibilities with respect to the origin of concepts: a concept is either innate, or it is acquired from experience by means of the process of ‘concept learning.’ Fodor’s view in his 1975 and 1980 is that the empiricist method of concept acquisition, forming and testing hypotheses about objects that fall under a concept, can only work for complex concepts. He claims that we must possess some concepts in order to form hypotheses, so none of our simple (or primitive) concepts can be learned. If we have them—then they must be innate. In his 2008 Fodor contends furthermore that no new concepts at all, neither primitive, nor complex, can be learned, and so that all concepts must be innate. I argue that Fodor’s famous mad-dog concept nativism should be rejected because it could only work together with what I call neural nativism, and the latter turns out to be scientifically untenable. In addition, I suggest that one’s position in the empiricism/nativism debate should be a function of one’s account of the architecture of the mind, which, in Fodor’s case, only implies architectural nativism, and so, the existence of innate mechanisms. It neither obviously requires, nor precludes, representational—or concept—nativism.Keywords

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Some Arguments for the Operational Reading of Truth Expressions

Author(s): Jakub Gomułka ,Jan Wawrzyniak / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

The main question of our article is: What is the logical form of statements containing expressions such as “… is true” and “it is true that …”? We claim that these expressions are generally not used in order to assign a certain property to sentences. We indicate that a predicative interpretation of these expressions was rejected by Frege and adherents to the prosentential conception of truth. We treat these expressions as operators. The main advantage of our operational reading is the fact that it adequately represents how the words, “true” and “truth,” function in everyday speech. Our approach confirms the intuition that so-called T-equivalences are not contingent truths, and explains why they seem to be—in some sense—necessary sentences. Moreover, our operational readingof truth expressions dissolves problems arising from the belief that there is some specific property—truth. The fact that we reject that truth is a certain property does not mean that we deny that the concept of truth plays a very important role in our language, and hence in our life. We indicate that the concept of truth is inseparable from the concept of sentence and vice versa—it is impossible to explicate one of these concepts without appeal to the other.

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Aristotelian Forms and Laws of Nature

Author(s): Alexander R. Pruss / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

Aristotelian Forms are mysterious entities. I offer an account of them as entities that makes the laws of nature be laws. The Aristotelian ontology is fundamentally an anti-Humean ontology: Not only are laws a reality over and beyond regularities, but that in virtue of which they are laws is in fact that which is most truly called substance. If we further take it, say, on ethical grounds, that there are individual forms, then we get a multiplicity of substances in the universe, including multiple substances of the same sort, and the laws of nature end up being grounded in their powers. But we have global regularities, then, only because there is coordination between the lawmakers, or forms, of the solo doings of individual entities, a coordination that entails global patterns.

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Uncovering the True “Wealth” of Happiness —Examining the Limitations that Govern Croesus’s Question about Happiness and Aristotle’s Subsequent Reply

Author(s): Alon Segev / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

The goal of the article is to present the context in which we, modern readers and scholars, make meaningful use of the words “happiness,” “luck,” and “fortune.” This discussion starts by examining Croesus’s question to Solon, who is the happiest man on earth, and then continues by analyzing Solon’s reply that a man can only be called happy after his death. Next, it aims to show what is implied and meant in Solon’s obscure reply. As the article explores, it turns out that Solon is talking about the transient fortune (ευτυχιη) and the permanent fortune (ολβος), measured after the number of fortunate moments in one’s lifespan, and not about the subjective disposition of being happy, as the modern speaker uses this term. At this point, the article offers Aristotle’s reading of Solon and his alternative interpretation of Solon’s concept of happiness. According to Aristotle, happiness is more a matter of character, of quality rather than quantity. The article continues by isolating the term “happiness” from the quantitative factor which still plays a role for Aristotle. In conclusion, the article presents a paradox that stems from conceiving happiness as a quantitative matter; that is, that not even death can serve as an ultimate final stage after which we could conclusively declare someone to have been happy or not.

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Emergence in Dynamical Systems

Author(s): John Collier / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2013

Emergence is a term used in many contexts in current science; it has become fashionable. It has a traditional usage in philosophy that started in 1875 and was expanded by J. S. Mill (earlier, under a different term) and C. D. Broad. It is this form of emergence that I am concerned with here. I distinguish it from uses like ‘computational emergence,’ which can be reduced to combinations of program steps, or its application to merely surprising new features that appear in complex combinations of parts. I will be concerned specifically with ontological emergence that has the logical properties required by Mill and Broad (though there might be some quibbling about the details of their views). I restrict myself to dynamical systems that are embodied in processes. Everything that we can interact with through sensation or action is either dynamical or can be understood in dynamical terms, so this covers all comprehensible forms of emergence in the strong (nonreducible) sense I use. I will give general dynamical conditions that underlie the logical conditions traditionally assigned to emergence in nature.The advantage of this is that, though we cannot test logical conditions directly, we can test dynamical conditions. This gives us an empirical and realistic form of emergence, contrary those who say it is a matter of perspective.

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A nyughatatlan kísértet az 1989 utáni világrendben

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A nyughatatlan kísértet az 1989 utáni világrendben

Author(s): Miklós Szalai / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3-4/2015

G. M. Tamás: Kommunismus nach 1989. Beiträge zu Klassentheorie, Realsozialismus, Osteuropa Herausgegeben und übersetzt von Georg Wallner Mandelbaum, Wien, 2015. 252 oldal, 19.90 €(kritik & utopie)

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