The author’s firm belief is that transitional humanity is not yet humanity proper but pre-humanity. He is especially intrigued by the essence and purpose of today’s contradiction between humanity’s immense advancement in micro-electronics, digital technology and social lore and its shocking moral shortcomings, best visible in its stagnant unchangeability—especially regarding the passionate quest for ever-better weaponry. Will our transience turn out to be nothing more but a phase on the road to human perfection, or will it petrify into an “inborn” (...) scar? These are the main questions the author attempts to answer.As a species we are praehomine, pre-humans, a natural phase of ethical and esthetic imperfection. Typical for transitional humanity is the coexistence of progress. Nonetheless transitional humanity also carries the potential necessary to attain Wisdom, Good, Completeness and Perfection. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

Informatics and the Foundations of Legal Reasoning represents a close collaboration between a wide range of disciplines and countries. Fourteen papers, together with a long analytical introduction by the editors, were selected from the contributions of legal theorists, computer scientists, philosophers and logicians who were members of an International Working Group supported by the European Commission. The Group was mandated to work towards determining how far the law is amenable to formal modeling, and in what ways computers might assist legal (...) thinking and practice. The book is the result of discussions held by the Group over two and half years. It will help students and researchers from different backgrounds to focus on a common set of topics of increasing general interest. It embodies the results of work in progress and suggests many issues for further discussion. A stimulating text for undergraduate and graduate courses in law, philosophy and computer science departments, as well as for those interested in the place of computers in legal practice, especially at the international level. (shrink)

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection finds application far outside biology, for which it was originally invented. Its consequences for science proved far-going, influencing practically every field from thermodynamics to the humanities. While acting on biological systems, the Darwinian mechanism is a source of progress and the local-scale abandonment of the universe’s general tendency towards chaos. However, observations of changes taking place in selection-exposed organisms show that evolutionary success requires some essential limitations. The application of this (...) reasoning to social evolution may appear thought-provoking: stable evolution requires not only intense selection but also a conservative approach to ideas. (shrink)

The essay attempts to outline the historical ideological ties between Spain and its former Latin American colonies, with the main accent on the period following Spain’s and most of Latin America’s conversion to democracy in the wake of the fall of the Franco regime and other Latin-American military dictatorships. The author offers a detailed analysis, focusing especially on the democratic, decidedly pro-European and left-liberal government in Spain and its impact on Latin America, most of which today shows clear leftist tendencies. (...) Also discussed are Latin-American reflections on universalism. (shrink)

The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” (...) and “composition”. (shrink)

This is an account of the Uprising fights of a young machinegunner of the “Baszta” Unit from the “W” hour to the honorable surrender at the end of September.

In his life and work, Leszek Kołakowski traversed many paths, some more and some less well-known. The main focus here is on Kołakowski’s involvement in what one may call an anthropological variant of philosophy of culture. Anthropological philosophy of culture bases on the following assumptions:1. Human conduct is determined by culture. There is neither humanity without culture nor culture without humans.2. Human conduct is by nature referential, in other words, the factual alone is not enough for humans who tend to (...) reach beyond it in their search for the most elemental and ultimate truths.3. Culture is a dynamic phenomenon and a challenge on the path to self-awareness.4. Axiological sensitivity.5. The culture philosopher is immersed in the culture he studies and, by revealing that which it conceals, is a source of reflection on this culture. All these assumptions lie at the core of the philosophy of Leszek Kołakowski. (shrink)

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection finds application far outside biology, for which it was originally invented. Its consequences for science proved far-going, influencing practically every field from thermodynamics to the humanities. While acting on biological systems, the Darwinian mechanism is a source of progress and the local-scale abandonment of the universe’s general tendency towards chaos. However, observations of changes taking place in selection-exposed organisms show that evolutionary success requires some essential limitations. The application of this (...) reasoning to social evolution may appear thought-provoking: stable evolution requires not only intense selection but also a conservative approach to ideas. (shrink)

The present essay focuses on the Frankfurt School’s views on relations between philosophy and science. The author specifically concentrates on Horkheimer, the School’s leader, and Habermas, its most prominent contemporary representative. In her reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s approach to the dependencies between philosophy and science the author—similarly to the Frankfurt theoreticians—abstains from treating it abstractly, instead placing it in its social and historiosophical context. The essay’s leading thesis is that the Frankfurt School sees philosophical self-reflection as a remedy for (...) the crisis in European culture, visible since the beginnings of the modern era in the rise of instrumental thinking. The author reminds that the assumption of philosophy’ primacy over science—or the primacy of wisdom over knowledge—has found avid support among philosophers of other eras and other schools of thought. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

Transparency generates a paradox. For the way that we make things transparent is by simplification which at the same time masks all the information and thus contributes to opacity. The paper looks at how this paradox is played out in the contexts of the interplay between legal rules and particularity and between political representation and complete democracy. This raises questions of the Rule of Law and the functions and meanings of democratic legitimacy and though these are different questions, they are (...) closely related and overlapping. Finally, it looks at how the issues come into focus in questions of governance of an entity like the EU which should not be seen either on the model of a union of states or a nation state itself. (shrink)

Political relations in today’s world are in a deep, perhaps even radically threatening disequilibrium; similarly, humanity’s home—the Earth—is treated with disdain and contempt despite its increasingly angry protests. Moreover, the rules and principles by which most of the world runs its economic affairs and strives to “modernize” its life are founded on a set of market laws devoid of all social context and only serve to deepen the dangerous contrasts between small islands of wealth and a sea of humanity doomed (...) to poverty and alienation. (shrink)

Two important essays on the Warsaw Uprising, both written in distant New York, the first completed after the Uprising’s October, 1944 fall, the second shortly before the second anniversary of its outbreak and days before the author’s death. They came from under the pen of Colonel Ignacy Matuszewski, before the war a member of Poland’s ruling elites and during the war years a leading journalistic voice for Poland’s independence .Both texts belong to the most important Warsaw Uprising accounts and contain (...) a personal note—the title’s “Mewa” was the codename carried by Colonel Matuszewski’s 25-year-old daughter Ewa Matuszewska, a Home Army medic who died in the fighting. (shrink)

In this interview a Warsaw Uprising fighter speaks about his work for the Diversionary Directorate of the Home Army and recalls the dramatic moments of the Uprising and his feelings about the meaning and consequences of this memorable event.

The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” (...) and “composition”. (shrink)

Political relations in today’s world are in a deep, perhaps even radically threatening disequilibrium; similarly, humanity’s home—the Earth—is treated with disdain and contempt despite its increasingly angry protests. Moreover, the rules and principles by which most of the world runs its economic affairs and strives to “modernize” its life are founded on a set of market laws devoid of all social context and only serve to deepen the dangerous contrasts between small islands of wealth and a sea of humanity doomed (...) to poverty and alienation. (shrink)