Racjonalność i życzliwość

Author(s): Maciej Kassner / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The article traces the trajectory of Stanisław Filipowicz’s scientific career. Topics covered include his books and articles on Polish and American political thought, dilemmas of Enlightenment and democracy, and the relation between hermeneutics and political inquiry. Rationality, benevolence, and interpretation are acknowledged as the key categories in his entire oeuvre. Filipowicz’s intellectual project can be understood as an attempt to establish interpretative political science inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy.

Płynność i wielość w liberalnej demokracji?

Author(s): Bogdan Szlachta / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Liberal democracy, founded on the ideas of negative individual rights and connecting democracy with liberal constitutionalism, has today lost its normative ground. The protection of human rights is the distinguishing element of modern Western liberal constitutionalism, although John Locke’s proposition had changed to cram into the language and concept of rights, whatever each of us supposes to be admirable or advantageous. Proposals presented by postmodernists and Chantal Mouffe are confronted with this process.

Lewiatan, Behemot, obywatel – liberalne zmagania z suwerennością

Author(s): Sławomir Szarejko / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

This article explores how liberalism, using several easily identifiable concepts (law of nature, rights of the individual, social contract), obscures the role of politics. Liberal discourse not only indicates the basis of political authority but also posits a relation-ship between the legitimate political order and the emancipation of the individual. The liberal political theory rejects the absolutisation of established power. Nevertheless, it reproduces the relations of domination and legitimises the existing order, as long as it may be presented as a product of rational and peaceful communication. Thus, liberal political theory functions as a discourse of power and domination masked by an act of voluntary submission by which subjects constitute themselves as wanting to be ruled over.

Kapitalizm przeciwko demokracji

Author(s): Andrzej Szahaj / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The main goal of the text is to consider the relationship between today’s capitalism and democracy. The author indicates the increasingly deeper process of erosion of democracy due to acting free market forces, especially the vast internet corporations. In this context, he identifies technocratic-libertarian utopia (power of technocrats in the economic milieu free from state influences) – typical for the convictions of their owners – as very dangerous for the future of democracy. He also investigates the destructive impact of neoliberal ideology on the different state leaders who, despite political origins, have implemented the same kind of economic decisions giving the reason for a widespread conviction that democratic choices are not in a position to change the actual situation of citizens. In his opinion, one of the elements of this ideology is that democracy is a good thing as long as it does not threaten disorganised capitalism in Milton Freidman’s style. He undermines the broadly represented conviction that there is a natural alliance between capitalism and democracy.

Demokratyzacja demokracji, czyli niedokończony projekt nowoczesności

Author(s): Tadeusz Klementewicz / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The modernity of Enlightenment and the bourgeoisie has brought about several qualitative changes. In economy, they included: freedom of contract, equality before the law and, separately, within the realm of political life, civic liberties. The objective became to create a society of individuals characterised by freedom, equality and fraternity – and concentrated on financial success. Yet, modernity remains an unfinished project. One thing was omitted as it was being put into life: the role of private ownership of means. The very idea of empowerment of an individual was realised in a capitalist market economy. In such a society, under market conditions, liberty and equality become exploitations and dominations in social relations. The consequence is the replacement of a civic democracy with a market democracy. An interesting switch occurred. A citizen was replaced with an investor; a voter turned into a creditor, usually from another country, elections were replaced with share prices, and public opinion – with interest rates. Consequently, democracy changed its function: it became a sphere for expressing populist discontent rather than a rational debate on the hierarchy of social needs and the strategy for meeting them. The climate crisis amplifies the call for a profound reconfiguration of the current neoliberal form of capitalism. It deprives more and more people of material and cultural conditions for meeting social needs: health, education, reproduction, and free time. Meanwhile, the politics of the common good requires a different type of state than what we know today. Only then could the Greek idea of a good life return – a life of harmony with nature and community.

Państwo i społeczeństwo w pandemii i po niej

Author(s): Jolanta Itrich-Drabarek / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The article presents the reflections on the search for answers to the questions of what pandemics (once plagues or pestilences) are for politics and the philosophy of politics: a turn of epochs, an accelerator of change, an unveiling of a new reality and new meanings, a chance for a new beginning or just an episode in the history of humankind?

Bez rzeczy najwyższych?

Author(s): Tomasz Żyro / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

A jubilee essay commemorating Prof. Stanisław Filipowicz as a serious student of political affairs can not be written in a kind of dry disquisitions on a chosen subject. If it depicted a problem in chiaroscuro style, it would quickly diminish the importance and scope of reflection, wherein Prof. Filipowicz took active part during his long and brilliant academic career. Light-and-shade effects are useful in a good rhetorical speech. A general concern dedicated to studying ideas and political ideas, particularly, needs shades. From the very nature of the essay, it is to be written in a tone of sfumato, as Bolesław Miciński once prescribes. The essay focuses upon varied, to say differently, the Protheusian shapes that the contemporary culture took, deeply penetrated by liberal ideas and practices.

Technopolis – we władzy techniki

Author(s): Krzysztof Pieliński / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The text presents the basic assumptions of American technocratic utopianism, an ideology developing in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, including the genealogy of this ideology with its ontological, epistemological, axiological and anthropological assumptions. Technocratic utopianism turns out to be an extreme variant of the vision of the ‘end of history’ – the emergence, based on a radical interpretation of the principle of technical determinism, of ultimately perfect order. Robotic technology is treated here as the final variant of technological development, an entity that makes obsolete the conflict of values known from history, the discretionary nature of human actions and institutions, as well as a factor that guarantees a specifically understood economy of abundance – an order that satisfies all human needs. The premise of this state is the reduction of values to facts and a specific interpretation of the catalogue of natural human needs.

Oświecenie na mieliźnie

Author(s): Krzysztof Kowaluk / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The philosophy of the Enlightenment tried to reconcile two significant concepts: the idea of rational knowledge, obtained through scientific cognition, and the project of maximal approximation of reflective wisdom to human experience. However, this reconciliation failed, as demonstrated by such thinkers as David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Though in conflict with each other, both concepts have nevertheless become important myths stimulating the aspirations of people living in contemporary Western societies. In this perspective, the message of the populist movements should be treated instead as an expression of rebellion of one part of the Enlightenment tradition against another rather than a frontal attack on the message of the Age of Reason.

O filozofii z dystansu, czyli w 40 lat później

Author(s): Paweł Kaczorowski / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

In an essayistic form and personal tone, the author points out the negative aspects of philosophical cognition. They include: excessive, peculiar ambitions and loftiness of philosophers, their unjustified proneness to act as humanity’s functionaries, epistemic promises impossible to fulfil, unavoidable yet disguised individualism of the formulated views, which are to be both objective and universally valid, specific mysticism of the cognitive approach – contrary to its declared methodicalness and rationality, the vagueness of the subject of philosophical enquiries, flagrant contradictions among various viewpoints, the destructive character of knowledge which highlights problems but does not solve them. At the same time, the author points to the need and possibility of the inventive use of the achievements of European philosophical tradition.

Idee i instytucje

Author(s): Maciej Kassner / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The article reexamines the notion of political science proposed by Nevil Johnson. According to Johnson, ideas and institutions are the fundamental concepts of political analysis. Studying politics explores how a given community solved the problem of institutionalising political order. Thus political thinking is always normative and contextual. Nevil Johnson criticises the mainstream vision of empirical political science as a discipline concerned mainly with formulating and testing hypotheses. In his view, this vision assumes false ontology based on a mistaken belief that the domain of politics is subject to general laws. From a conservative point of view, this constitutes a case of metaphysical madness, a tendency to replace the knowledge of concrete circumstances with abstract principles. Although Johnson’s critique of mainstream political science is not without merit, the article remains sceptical about prospects for formulating a general ontology of political experience. It suggests, instead, adopting a hermeneutical approach to understanding different ontological visions.

Kultura pamięci i racjonalny osąd polityczny

Author(s): Leszek Nowak / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The article aims to analyse the significance of the Krakow historical school in the debate on Polish identity. The author deals only with a specific aspect of this issue, namely the critique of certain patterns of political thinking and action associated with political romanticism. In this context, the problem of political reason and the relationship between ethics and politics plays a special role. By recalling the work of the most eminent representatives of the Krakow historical school and their adversaries, the author tries to show the historical form that these issues have taken in Polish political debates. The article proves that the criticism of certain aspects of Polish political thought and political culture, formulated by representatives of the Krakow historical school, is persuasive. Still, the reluctance with which opponents constantly refer to them shows the dominant position of political romanticism in the Polish political tradition.

Przyczynek do fenomenologii maski

Author(s): Mirosław Karwat / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The phenomenon of the mask is entangled in the relationships and differences between the subject’s identity, their self-definition, their moral and ideological character, and their image (how they are perceived, how they present themselves to others). The mask is not the same as the identity of a person or group, its real nature, but neither is it simply its negation or mere appearance. Paradoxically, the mask can emanate authenticity in the attitudes of individuals or groups – as an expression of their aspirations and beliefs. It can be both a personal and free choice of an individual strategy of self-presentation and self-promotion, as well as a manifestation of conformism forced by the pressure of a group or community. From an instrumental point of view, the mask is considered in terms of hiding and, at the same time, pretending something, simulation. The mask is then a mystification – as self-illusion or as an instrument of an intended game of appearances, a form of deceiving the surroundings. In times of significant changes and historical breakthroughs, the initiators of experiments and political innovations often adopt a retrospective costume or a substitute banner by referring to ideas, symbols and figures from the past. The new, as yet undefined, appears in a mask borrowed from celebrated tradition. The mask not only masks politicians but also unmasks them contrary to their calculations. Not only can it deceive or subjugate others, but it can also prove to be a corset and a trap. When we govern others with the help of a mask, we may notice, with some surprise and delay, that our mask… governs us.

Gorgiasz na Twitterze

Author(s): Sławomir Józefowicz / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

The main goal of the article is an interpretation of the current ‘problems with truth’ in politics, social life and the media in the context of the idea of postmodernity as well as the techno-social circumstances shaped by the growth of the Internet and the new means of communication, mainly social media. The author argues that the current situation should be considered in terms of technologically radicalised postmodernity, which increases relativistic tendencies, enables cultural fragmentation and cognitive confusion as well as intensifies the ‘adversary culture’. The article also attempts to assess the ideological impact of specific postmodernist inspirations, especially regarding identity politics and knowledge-power relations.

Dyskretny urok liberalizmu

Author(s): Jarosław Makowski / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Od Nietzschego do Kosellecka

Author(s): Edyta Pietrzak / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Uniwersytet nie daje pracy

Author(s): Jakub Dudek / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Czy wiemy, co może być za zakrętem?

Author(s): Robert Walenciak / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Czas przebierańców

Author(s): Robert Walenciak / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Czy prawda ma przyszłość?

Author(s): Magdalena Prokopowicz / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0