In order to understand history as it has been practised in the twentieth century, we must go back in time. Not necessarily to Herodotus and Thucydides, nor even to the great founding figures of the ages of learning and of the Enlightenment, however enduring their influence. But to those historians who in the course of the nineteenth century brought to its conclusion the radical renewal of knowledge about the past: the means that enabled them to acquire it, arguments which were (...) accepted as proofs, conceptual frameworks supposed to make deeds intelligible, ways of talking about times past - to historians who integrated this knowledge that was formerly split between literature, learned research and theology supplanted by philosophy, around a discipline comparable to philology as much from the epistemological point of view as in terms of status and driven not only by ambition to retain the exclusive right to the term history but also, very early, by that of conquering a superior position in the world of science. (shrink)

Reprinted from Le Débat, No. 6, novembre 1980, pp. 88–92, with the permission of the author and editor.

Celem niniejszego artykułu jest wprowadzenie do tekstu Dominique’a Pestre’a, który został wygłoszony na konferencji „Parmi les hommes, les objets et les signes / Among humans, objects and signs. Hommage à Krzysztof Pomian”. Wydarzenie to zostało zorganizowane z okazji 85. rocznicy urodzin prof. Pomiana, jednego z najwybitniejszych żyjących polskich naukowców, od 1973 r. mieszkającego i pracującego głównie we Francji. Konferencja odbyła się w Paryżu w dniach 4–6 kwietnia 2019 r. Jej uczestnikami byli współpracownicy, uczniowie i przyjaciele Krzysztofa Pomiana z (...) Polski, Francji, Belgii, Holandii, Wielkiej Brytanii, Niemiec i Izraela. W artykule został krótko opisany każdy z trzech dni konferencji ze szczególnym podkreśleniem znaczenia prac Krzysztofa Pomiana w takich dziedzinach, jak historia kolekcji i muzeów, historiografia, historia Europy. Wystąpienie Dominique’a Pestre’a zostało umiejscowione w kontekście zainteresowań badawczych Krzysztofa Pomiana oraz rozwoju historii nauki we Francji od lat 80. do dzisiaj. Na koniec zwrócono uwagę na istotne znaczenie sieci relacji przyjacielskich i intelektualnych w rozwoju nauki. (shrink)

This book traces the development of the Polish theory of history, analyzing how Jerzy Topolski, Krzysztof Pomian, and Olga Tokarczuk have both built upon and transgressed the metahistorical theories of American historian Hayden White. By deconstructing and reconstructing contemporary theories of history, this research is a unique contribution to the fields of historiography and the philosophy of history.

Sixteen years ago, Prahalad and Hart introduced the possibility of both profitably serving the poor and alleviating poverty. This first iteration of the Bottom/Base of the Pyramid approach focused on selling to the poor. In 2008, after ethical criticisms leveled at it, the field moved to BoP 2.0, instead emphasizing business co-venturing. Since 2015, we have witnessed some calls for a new iteration, with the focus broadening to a more sustainable development approach to poverty alleviation. In this paper, we seek (...) to answer the question: How has the BoP approach evolved over the past 16 years, and has it delivered on its early promise? We conducted a systematic review of 276 papers published in journals in this period, utilizing a rigorous correspondence analysis method to map key trends, and then further examined the 22 empirical studies conducted on the BoP approach. Our results suggest that the field has evolved, passing through a number of trends and coming full circle—with our analysis pointing to more recent BoP literature emphasizing similar themes to those espoused in the initial BoP iteration, rather than reflecting the principles espoused in either BoP 2.0 or BoP 3.0. Our analysis also points to a lack of clear evidence that the BoP concept has delivered on its promise either to businesses or to BoP participants. (shrink)

The introspective devices framework proposed by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) offers an attractive conceptual tool for evaluating and developing accounts of introspection. However, the framework assumes that different views about the nature of introspection can be easily evaluated against a set of common criteria. In this paper, I set out to test this assumption by analysing two formal models of introspection using the introspective device framework. The question I aim to answer is not only whether models developed outside of (...) philosophy can be successfully evaluated against the set of conceptual criteria proposed by Kammerer and Frankish, but also whether this kind of evaluation can reveal some limitations inherent to the framework. (shrink)

Porter and Kramer :78–92, 2006; Harv Bus Rev 89, 62–77, 2011) introduced ‘shared value’ as a ‘new conception of capitalism,’ claiming it is a powerful driver of economic growth and reconciliation between business and society. The idea has generated strong interest in business and academia; however, its theoretical precepts have not been rigorously assessed. In this paper, we provide a systematic and thorough analysis of shared value, focusing on its ontological and epistemological properties. Our review highlights that ‘shared value’ has (...) spread into the language of multiple disciplines, but that its current conceptualization is vague, and it presents important discrepancies in the way it is defined and operationalized, such that it is more of a buzzword than a substantive concept. It also overlaps with many other concepts and lacks empirical grounding. We offer recommendations for defining and measuring the concept, take a step toward disentangling it from related concepts, and identify relevant theories and research methods that would facilitate extending the knowledge frontier on shared value. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the shift in Twardowski’s views between his early psychologistic theory of logic and his later anti-psychologistic theory. In particular, I point out that the interpretation suggesting that this change merely involves Twardowski enriching his ontology with products encounters a certain problem in light of his earlier views. To present this problem more precisely, I discuss the foundations of Twardowski’s theory of products, focusing on aspects relevant to the issue of psychologism. Based on this, I reconstruct (...) Twardowski’s theory of logic and highlight where he identified the fallacy of psychologism. I contrast this reconstructed theory with Twardowski’s earlier views at key points and demonstrate that the difference between his early psychologistic theory and his later anti-psychologistic theory is a matter of a shift in emphasis rather than a significant change in the theoretical system itself, and that Twardowski himself understood it as such. (shrink)

This article examines the question: How do local organizations deal with competing temporal dynamics when building and implementing base/bottom of the pyramid initiatives? Time has been neglected in the BoP literature to date, yet, addressing poverty in a developing country requires a complex perspective of time. An analysis of 21 semi-structured interviews with locally based organizations implementing BoP initiatives in the Philippines revealed that the organizations had an ambitemporal perspective. In particular, we discover that they harmonize multiple temporal pacers by (...) making strategic decisions about the best mechanism of entrainment to utilize to move their community and any stakeholders to a long-term temporal horizon. We find that organizations manage this process by generating what we term a “third time” via a process of push-and-pull entrainment between the communities, the business, and the different temporal pacers. This article develops a conceptual framework for helping organizations to harmonize competing temporal dynamics to generate a bespoke “third time” for each community they work with. (shrink)

This paper is obituary of Leszek Nowak, one of the greatest Polish philosophers of the XX century.

This chapter contains sections titled: Logical Positivism: Basic Information The Hempelian Model of Explanation in Historiography Popperian Critique of Historicism Conclusion Bibliography.

Weakly acyclic games form a natural generalization of the class of games that have the finite improvement property. In such games one stipulates that from any initial joint strategy some finite improvement path exists. We classify weakly acyclic games using the concept of a scheduler introduced in Simon and Apt. We also show that finite games that can be solved by the iterated elimination of never best response strategies are weakly acyclic. Finally, we explain how the schedulers allow us to (...) improve the bounds on finding a Nash equilibrium in a weakly acyclic game. (shrink)

The proposal that probabilistic inference and unconscious hypothesis testing are central to information processing in the brain has been steadily gaining ground in cognitive neuroscience and associated fields. One popular version of this proposal is the new theoretical framework of predictive processing or prediction error minimization, which couples unconscious hypothesis testing with the idea of ‘active inference’ and claims to offer a unified account of perception and action. Here we will consider one outstanding issue that still looms large at the (...) core of the PEM framework: the lack of a clear criterion for distinguishing conscious states from unconscious ones. In order to fulfill the promise of becoming a unifying framework for describing and modeling cognition, PEM needs to be able to differentiate between conscious and unconscious mental states or processes. We will argue that one currently popular view, that the contents of conscious experience are determined by the ‘winning hypothesis’, falls short of fully accounting for conscious experience. It ignores the possibility that some states of a system can control that system’s behavior even though they are apparently not conscious. What follows from this is that the ‘winning hypothesis’ view does not provide a complete account of the difference between conscious and unconscious states in the probabilistic brain. We show how this problem for the received view can be resolved by augmenting PEM with Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts model of consciousness. This move is warranted by the similar roles that attention and internal competition play in both the PEM framework and the multiple drafts model. (shrink)

Zakład Kulturoznawstwa Wydział Pedagogiki i Psychologii Uniwersytet w Białymstoku.

In the present paper an interpretation of the political dimension of pragmatic aesthetic reflection is proposed. The interconnection between politics and aesthetics in three classic American pragmatists: William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is evoked. The author claims that by emphasizing the role of democratic values in philosophy and life, the classic American pragmatists encroach upon the field of the arts and aesthetics. Their emphasis put upon individual activity, free expression of thoughts, plurality of the (...) forms of expression, and acceptance of criticism as a tool helping create better solutions in human cooperation can easily be converted into the postulates about the character of the artistic principles and of the nature of the aesthetic norms and values. (shrink)

In the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a (...) transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot. (shrink)

Pomiędzy filozofią a resztą kultury rośnie przepaść. Podczas gdy filozofowie są całkowicie przekonani o ważności swojej dziedziny i doniosłości tego, co się w niej robi – jej pytań, jej argumentacji, jej odpowiedzi, jej wynalazków pojęciowych, jej błyskotliwych idei, to niefilozofowie coraz powszechniej ważność tę kwestionują, w doniosłość powątpiewają, argumentacji nie cenią, błyskotliwości nie dostrzegają i w ogóle nie pojmują o co cały ambaras. Wszak filozofia drwa nie narąbie, wirusów z komputera nie usunie, cen w sklepach nie obniży, w rubryce „patenty (...) i wdrożenia” napisze „brak”. Zapytajmy więc: po co naszej kulturze filozofowanie? Nie filozofowie i nie instytuty filozoficznych badań i kształcenia filozoficznego, ale właśnie – filozofowanie. Żeby odpowiedzieć na takie pytanie, potrzeba nie tylko filozofii, ale także dobrych narzędzi z innych dziedzin nauki. Trzeba zapytać, jakiego rodzaju grą kulturową jest filozofowanie? Ilu z nas w nią gra? I co się wtedy dzieje? Czy filozofujemy na co dzień, czy tylko od święta? Niniejsza książka ani nie popularyzuje, ani nie przybliża tego, co robią filozofowie. Zamiast tego prowadzi Czytelników od rozmów w pociągach do teorii czerpanych z filozofii i socjologii wiedzy, od lektury nagłówków prasowych do teorii kultury, od obrazów epidemii i biografii Spinozy do studiów nad nauką. Stara się przy tym na pytania wyżej postawione jak najogólniej odpowiedzieć, a przepaść zasypać, pokazać przy tym, że filozofia od swego kulturowego otoczenia nie jest i nigdy nie była odizolowana. Przeciwnie, filozofowanie tak bardzo i w tak licznych miejscach w tkankę kultury wrosło, że bez niego tkanka ta porozrywałaby się na strzępy, że dla kultury współczesnej filozofowanie w najrozmaitszych przejawach jest czymś koniecznym, jest warunkiem trwania, życia i rozwoju. (shrink)

In the paper we introduce two conditions and ) which are strengthenings of Birkhoff’s conditions. We prove that an upper continuous and strongly atomic lattice is distributive if and only if it satisfies and ). This result extends a theorem of R.P. Dilworth characterizing distributivity in terms of local distributivity and a theorem of M. Ward characterizing distributivity by means of covering diamonds.

Canaanite Scribes in the Amarna Letters. By Juan-Pablo Vita. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 406. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2015. Pp. xii + 179, 78 plates. €97.

This book offers an original approach to avant-garde art and its transformative force. Presenting an alternative to the approaches to art developed in postmodern theory or cultural studies, Ziarek sees art's significance in its critique of power and the increasing technologization of social relations. Re-examining avant-garde art and literature, from Italian and Russian Futurism and Dadaism, to Language poetry, video and projection art, as well as transgenic and Internet art, this book argues that art's importance today cannot be explained simply (...) in aesthetic or cultural terms but has to take into consideration how artworks question the technological character of modern power. To emphasize the transformative character of art, the book redefines art as a force field, in which forces drawn from historical and social reality come be to formed into an alternative relationality. Through discussions of such key avant-garde figures as Marinetti, Duchamp, Khlebnikov, and Vertov, and innovative contemporary artists like Viola, Wodiczko and Kac, The Force of Art counters the pessimism about art's social function by recovering and redefining art's transformative role in modernity. (shrink)

Emerging from the disruption of the First World War, surrealism confronted the resulting ‘crisis of consciousness’ in a way that was arguably more profound than any other cultural movement of the time._ _The past few decades have seen an expansion of interest in surrealist writers, whose contribution to the history of ideas in the twentieth-century is only now being recognised._ Surrealism: Key Concepts_ is the first book in English to present an overview of surrealism through the central ideas motivating the (...) popular movement. An international team of contributors provide an accessible examination of the key concepts, emphasising their relevance to current debates in social and cultural theory. This book will be an invaluable guide for students studying a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies, and anyone who wishes to engage critically with surrealism for the first time. _Contributors:_ Dawn Ades, Joyce Cheng, Jonathan P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Guy Girard, Raihan Kadri, Michael Löwy, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Michael Richardson, Donna Roberts, Bertrand Schmitt, Georges Sebbag, Raymond Spiteri, and Michael Stone-Richards. (shrink)