This article examines one of the themes in Cezary Wodziński’s philosophy, namely the way in which he practises hermeneutics. The starting point is Józef Tischner’s review of Wodziński’s book Światłocienie zła [The Chiaroscuro of Evil]. Entitled Odwrót myślenia [The Retreat of Thinking], the review indicates that Wodziński deals only with words, losing the relationship with the phenomenon to which these words should relate. Focusing primarily on Wodziński’s book Kairos, I show that this is a strategy that really pushes Wodziński (...) beyond the boundaries of hermeneutics. Celan’s formula ‘Das Gedicht ja spricht!’ is instructive here. It is akin to Heidegger’s formula ‘Die Sprache spricht’. In the light of my analysis, I suggest that Wodziński’s trouble with hermeneutics should be understood as his attempt to think of a place for the essence of language in the language. This place might be found in speaking the language, i.e. the act of speaking. (shrink)

We formulate and explore two basic axiomatic systems of type-free subjective probability. One of them explicates a notion of finitely additive probability. The other explicates a concept of infinitely additive probability. It is argued that the first of these systems is a suitable background theory for formally investigating controversial principles about type-free subjective probability.

Mutilation, along with all forms of maltreatment of the dead, was widely condemned by Greek authors of the Classical period. In a culture where the obligation to bury and respect the dead was seen as one of the strongest moral compulsions universal to all men, mistreating the dead was considered to be the most outrageous and unholy of actions, more suitable, as Herodotus states, for barbarians than for Greeks, ‘and even in them we find it loathsome’. The importance of the (...) theme of mutilating the dead in theIliad, where one can find numerous and surprisingly detailed descriptions of warriors maltreating the corpses of their enemies, is therefore puzzling, to say the least. (shrink)

Praktykowanie teorii. Koncepty wczesnych prac Daniela Libeskinda jako wzorce realnej architektury Treści wczesnych prac Libeskinda, w tym zwłaszcza idee zawarte w cyklach rysunków pod nazwą Micromegas: The Architecture of End Space (1979) i Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on the Themes from Heraclitus (1983) oraz trzy maszyny określone jako Three Lessons in Architecture (1985) w decydujący sposób wpłynęły na wszystkie późniejsze realizacje architekta. Prace te w dużym zakresie zmieniły zasady oddzielania teorii od praktyki budowlanej, w tym tak- że odgraniczania architektury od (...) literatury czy filozofii. Już Micromegas były polemiką z traktowaniem rysunku architektonicznego wyłącznie jako utylitarnego narzędzia w procesie stwarzania budowli i postawiły na uczynienie z tej techniki pełnoprawnej postaci realnej architektury. Chamber Works w jeszcze większym stopniu niż prace z serii Micromegas akcentowały samodzielność rysunku i jego odrębność od wszelkiej rzeczywistości czy zewnętrznych źródeł treści. Maszyny połączone w Three Lessons in Architecture streszczały dokonania dawnych epok historii sztuki budowania. Reading Machine opowiadała o rzemieślniczych początkach, Memory Machine o intelektualizmie okresu nowożytnego, Writing Machine zaś o współczesnym okresie mechanizacji pamięci i kreacji. Zadaniem maszyn była metafizyczna refleksja nad głównymi założeniami i mitami architektury, a zarazem przeniesienie tej refleksji na poziom doświadczenia zmysłowego. W berlińskim Jüdisches Museum wymyślone liternictwo architektoniczne połączyło się z narracją na temat zagłady żydowskich mieszkańców miasta. Libeskind wykreował nie tyle budowlę,ile literacką relację o zbrodni przełamującej historię ludzkość. (shrink)

Locke’s theory of property is irreconcilable with intellectual property. Property-like titles in ideal objects cannot be introduced within the framework of the natural law, because they could constrain others from acts necessary for their survival. Nevertheless, followers of Locke’s theory of politics choose to belittle this conclusion and even Locke himself supported early copyright legislation. The inconsistency is important, for it depicts the problem of legitimization of intellectual property as political and demonstrates liberal reification of various aspects of social life.

In the paper two definitions of moments of time as the sets of events are considered. The first one is Russell’s definition based on a relation simultaneity of events. The second one is my construction of moments of time grounded on a relation of being immediately preceding.

Roman Ingarden was a prominent Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, and student of Edmund Husserl. A characteristic feature of his works was the almost complete absence of analyzes from the history of philosophy. That is why it is so surprising that right after the end of World War II, the first text analyzed when Ingarden started working at the Jagiellonian University was Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Ingarden published the results of his research in Polish in 1948 in “Kwartalnik Filozoficzny” and in the early 1960s (...) his essay was translated and published in the renowned American magazine “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” as “A Marginal Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics.” As far as I know today, this text does not arouse much interest among the many commentators and followers of Ingarden’s philosophy. Perhaps this state of affairs is justified: Ingarden’s own ideas are only repeated here, and their usefulness in the meaning of “Poetics” remains far from obvious. However, I think that this relative obscurity is worth considering now, because it shows how modern reason tries to control ancient concepts. The main purpose of this article is therefore to recon- struct the strategy by which philosophy tames the text of “Poetics,” especially its concepts such as catharsis and mimesis. The discovery and presentation of these treatments would not have been possible were it not for the mimetic theory of René Girad, which provides anthropological foundations for a critique of philosophical discourse. (shrink)

In this paper I describe three similar projects, and investigate origins of their success. All of them are non-governmental and non-profit voluntary international initiatives that developed from small local projects. I claim that the basis of their success is universality of their underlying philosophy.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the relationship – conceptualised by Michel Foucault – between politics and truth. Here truth is understood in ontological terms rather than in linguistic and epistemological terms. By outlining some mutual relations between politics and truth, the author tries to show how politics/power determines truth and how truth affects politics. He is particularly interested in parrhesia, which is a form of truth that has emancipatory or even revolutionary potential, i.e. it introduces a difference (...) into the relations of power functioning at a given moment. (shrink)

Conservativeness has been proposed as an important requirement for deflationary truth theories. This in turn gave rise to the so-called ‘conservativeness argument’ against deflationism: a theory of truth which is conservative over its base theory S cannot be adequate, because it cannot prove that all theorems of S are true. In this paper we show that the problems confronting the deflationist are in fact more basic: even the observation that logic is true is beyond his reach. This seems to conflict (...) with the deflationary characterization of the role of the truth predicate in proving generalizations. However, in the final section we propose a way out for the deflationist — a solution that permits him to accept a strong theory, having important truth-theoretical generalizations as its theorems. (shrink)

I explore the economic, social and cultural constraints of the regional mission of a university located beyond a metropolitan area or urban agglomeration, henceforth referred to as a “peripheral university.” In the first part of the paper, I briefly describe the “third mission” of a university and analyze it within the context of a “peripheral university”. The main constraints on the influence of regional mission and regional development are described. In the second part, I examine one type of a “peripheral (...) university,” namely a cross-border university, on a case study of a consortium of two universities: Viadrina University in Frankfurt am Oder and Collegium Polonicum – a department of Adam Mickiewicz University. I focus on issues like civil mission or problems of the regional contribution of a border university. I also analyze hidden-agenda concerns with respect to the trans-culture added value of the cross-border university. The ensuing analysis is based on interviews made with present and former rectors of those universities. (shrink)

Ali Enayat had asked whether two halves of Disjunctive Correctness ([Formula: see text]) for the compositional truth predicate are conservative over Peano Arithmetic (PA). In this paper, we show that the principle “every true disjunction has a true disjunct” is equivalent to bounded induction for the compositional truth predicate and thus it is not conservative. On the other hand, the converse implication “any disjunction with a true disjunct is true” can be conservatively added to [Formula: see text]. The methods introduced (...) here allow us to give a direct nonconservativeness proof for [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

One of the popular explications of the deflationary tenet of ‘thinness’ of truth is the conservativeness demand: the declaration that a deflationary truth theory should be conservative over its base. This paper contains a critical discussion and assessment of this demand. We ask and answer the question of whether conservativity forms a part of deflationary doctrines.

We investigate what happens when ‘truth’ is replaced with ‘provability’ in Yablo’s paradox. By diagonalization, appropriate sequences of sentences can be constructed. Such sequences contain no sentence decided by the background consistent and sufficiently strong arithmetical theory. If the provability predicate satisfies the derivability conditions, each such sentence is provably equivalent to the consistency statement and to the Gödel sentence. Thus each two such sentences are provably equivalent to each other. The same holds for the arithmetization of the existential Yablo (...) paradox. We also look at a formulation which employs Rosser’s provability predicate. (shrink)