The paper investigates the various factors from a socio-cultural perspective that have a bearing on the intercultural couple’s marital satisfaction in Westerner and non-Westerner relationships, and how cultural differences may potentially amplify the difficulties, which non-intercultural couples themselves are already likely to face. These factors include acculturation, language and communication, attitudes toward marriage, individual traits and behaviours, support of the family, societal views, gender roles, managing of the household finances and child rearing. Certain theories are also highlighted in an attempt (...) to explain why these cultural differences have such a profound effect on the marital satisfaction of intercultural couples. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Works of George Santayana, volume IX, Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion ed. by Martin A. Coleman, David E. Spiech, and Faedra Lazar WeissKrzysztof (Chris) Piotr SkowrońskiEdited by Martin A. Coleman, David E. Spiech, and Faedra Lazar WeissThe Works of George Santayana, volume IX, Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The MIT Press, 2023; 359 pp., incl.indexIt is not merely (...) a re-edition of Santayana’s book that is at stake here. This ninth volume of The MIT Critical Edition of The Works of George Santayana is a next step in showing us his vast output with extensive range, depth, and, most importantly, significant stimulation for our generation of scholars and non-scholars. Just to illustrate the scope of Santayana’s work: volume V of the present MIT Critical Edition, published in the years 2001–2008, consists of eight thick books with Santayana’s correspondence throughout seventy years of intellectual activity (around 3000 letters to roughly 350 recipients, William James, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, Sidney Hook, Horace Kallen, B.A.G. Fuller, Hugo Münsterberg, among them), containing philosophical and cultural insights that substantially compliment the views he expressed in his published texts.The original idea of the MIT Critical Edition was to present the published and unpublished works, followed by an elaborate editorial apparatus. As we can read in the present volume, “The goal of the editors is to produce texts that accurately represent Santayana’s final intentions regarding his works while recording all evidence on which editorial decisions have been based” (p. 307). How complex and fascinating the whole project has been we can also learn from a recently published book by Herman Saatkamp, who edited the Santayana edition for twenty-six years (Charles Padrón and Chris Skowroński, eds., Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., A Life of Scholarship with George Santayana: [End Page 462] Essays and Reflections, Brill/Rodopi, 2021). As we can read in Saatkamp’s book (p. 139), the story goes back to 1976, when John Lachs, top Santayana expert, asked Saatkamp to write the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and put forward a proposal for The Works of George Santayana. As the latest of its results today, we have the ninth volume just published, while future volumes are still being prepared for publication (twenty volumes are currently projected).More specific answers to questions: Do we need a critical edition to do this? Is it not enough just to publish the original volume anew? depend largely on the target audience. For those who are unfamiliar with Santayana, having in hand Volume IX shows that it is just a part, although an important part, of a much larger project, and Paul Forster’s lengthy introduction would be very helpful. Forster competently outlines Santayana’s work and life, and subsequently analyzes the book, chapter by chapter, so that we have a penetrating insight into its whole substance. Also, further down in the volume (pp. 303–306), we find a “Chronology of the Life and Work of George Santayana” that is informative to those unfamiliar with Santayana.I suspect that those audiences who are familiar with Santayana have been waiting for this volume impatiently. The original 1913 publication, by Charles Scribner’s Son (New York)—which itself was a collection of rather independent texts in the form of chapters—has been expanded with Santayana’s preface to the second edition, of 1926. Most importantly, however, the whole text (these two editions: 1913 and 1926) have been re-edited, revised, and corrected according to the criteria of a critical edition. Some terms, phrases, names, as well as other issues are explained extensively in a 140-page part entitled “Notes to the Text” (pp. 159–302). Some of these notes are instructive indeed, not only because they explain passages in the text, but also because they refer to other works by Santayana where he explains the issue at hand into more detail or from a different viewpoint. From these notes we learn much more about the ideas discussed and the figures to which Santayana refers in his reflections than we would by reading... (shrink)

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal's “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors' assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully (...) ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing, chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist François Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “dé-tente, relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness. (shrink)

Determinism, causality, chance, free will and divine providence form a class of interlaced problems lying in three domains: philosophy, theology, and physics. Recent article by Dariusz Łukasiewicz in Roczniki Filozoficzne (no. 3, 2020) is a great example. Classical physics, that of Newton and Laplace, may lead to deism: God created the world, but then it goes like a mechanical clock. Quantum mechanics brought some “hope” for a rather naïve theology: God acts in gaps between quanta of indetermination. Obviously, any (...) strict determinism jeopardizes the existence of free will. Yes, but only if human mind follows the laws of physics and only if nothing exists outside the physical limits of space and time. We argue that human action lies in-between two worlds: “earth” and “heavens” using the language of Genesis. In that immaterial world, outside time and space constraints, there is no place for the chain of deterministic events. We discuss, in turn, that the principle of causality, a superior law even in physics, reigns also in the non-material world. Though, determinism in the material universe and causality in both worlds seem to be sufficient conditions, to eliminate “chaotic”, or probabilistic causes from human (and divine) action. (shrink)

Few if any contemporary philosophers have done more to promote American philosophy and philosophy in America than John Lachs. The creativity and sheer industriousness that characterize his sixty-year career as a producer and advocate of both professional and public philosophy are extraordinary, while his reputation as a teacher of philosophy, especially his work with undergraduate students, is described as “legendary” (p. 21). In the appreciative, probing introductory essay to John Lachs’s Pr...

Genocide as a part of nation or ethnic group extermination process is not a well-defined concept. Its meaning is understood intuitively. When law intervenes, the issue of defining the term comes back. Nevertheless, the Polish nation has been recognized as subjected to genocide activities during the Second World War by the Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. The paper focuses on the genocide against mainly one group of Poles that is to say foresters. The martyrologic evidence proves that foresters were an (...) occupation group which for a variety of reasons suffered most. The research carried out in this respect by the National Forests in Poland has revealed that over 20% of pre-war staff of the institution actually lost their lives. They were killed by the German and Soviet occupiers, as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In the eastern parts of Poland foresters and their families were deported and sent to various labour and extermination camps e.g. in Siberia. The aim of the paper is to present the scale of genocide with the main emphasis on genocide against foresters. The definition of genocide provided by Lemkin, who coined the term, is a starting point for the analysis. The main research methods included the analysis of pertinent literature and source materials as well as the semiotic analysis of genocide circumstances. The thesis put forward by the authors is that foresters due to their education, practical skills, professional experience and insight knowledge turned out to be the group especially vulnerable and subjected to extermination on purpose. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 1 Seiten: 13-38.

Max Weber’s thesis on the decisive influence of Protestant ethic on the formation and development of modern capitalism has become one of the best-known and widely shared canonical claims in social sciences. Since its publication at the beginning of the 20th century, this thesis, supported by subsequent great works by the German classic, has rarely been the subject of major controversy. The work of correcting Weber’s thesis was undertaken in the late 20th century by Michael Novak. Novak’s correction is not (...) confrontational, but complementary. The American thinker abandons the research area of minority Protestant communities, which caught Weber’s attention, and undertakes an analysis of the broader religious tradition, developing both before and after the Reformation. In particular, the achievements of Pope John Paul II, interpreted by Novak in terms of the renewal of a liberty current of Catholic social thought, provide important corrective data. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to review some aspects of brain anatomy and neurophysiology that are important for consciousness, and which hopefully may be of benefit to philosophers investigating the conscious mind. Taking as an initial point of reference the distinction between “the hard problem” and “the weak problems” of consciousness, we shall concentrate on questions pertaining to the second of these. A putative “consciousness system” in the brain will be presented, paying special attention to diffuse projection systems. The (...) “center of gravity” will be brain connectivity, since consciousness must, critically, be dependent on coherent activity and timing. “Detectors” of synchronicity and coincidence, like NMDA receptors, also necessarily play a role here. To be conscious, we do not need an entire brain. While even large hemispherectomies need not unequivocally affect consciousness, far smaller brain-stem lesions may be devastating in this regard. Even so, the recent discovery by Matthew F. Glasser et al. of 180 separate areas in the human brain cortex is intriguing from a teleological perspective, as it is quite unthinkable that any of them could be “redundant. (shrink)

Jan Patočka’s extensive oeuvre contains eleven notebooks filled with randomly dated notes from 1946 to 1950. These documents originate from the so-called Strahov legacy, specifically manuscripts discovered in the 1990s in the Strahov library. This legacy includes a collection of Patočka’s manuscripts from the 1930s and 1940s. The 1980s were mainly devoted to the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, and phenomenological reflections on the concept of the world. In 1971, Patočka deposited them in this renowned library in Prague (...) without disclosing this information to anyone (Karfík 2000/2001). (shrink)

Książka ta ma dwa, bliźniacze, tematy: ekspresję i doświadczenie. Ma także dwoje bohaterów: nasłuchujący podmiot i improwizację. Tym, co spaja przedstawioną tu refleksję, jest audioantropologiczna perspektywa, pozwalająca odsłonić kulturowe kryteria słuchania i improwizowania. A jednak z wielu zgromadzonych tu opowieści wyłania się obraz kultury, w której „nikt nie słucha” i „nikt nie improwizuje” – a może, poprawniej, „nikt słucha” i „nikt improwizuje”. Czy jest bowiem „kimś” podmiot słuchania – wystawiany nieustannie na pokusę fantazjowania i, ostatecznie, wydany na pastwę fantazmatów? Czy (...) jest „kimś” podmiot improwizujący, który czyni wiele, by stać się samoorganizującym się procesem improwizowania? (shrink)

This volume is composed of extended versions of selected papers presented at an international conference held in June 2011 at Opole University—the seventh in a series of annual American and European Values conferences organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. The papers were written independently with no prior guidelines other than the obvious need to address some aspect of George Herbert Mead’s work. While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context (...) in which that work was carried out, these papers have brought that work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. There is good reason to classify Mead as one of the original classical American pragmatists (along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) and consequently as a major figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his thought has been marginalized for the most part, at least in academic philosophy. It is our intention to help recuperate Mead’s reputation among a broader audience by providing a small corpus of significant contemporary scholarship on some key aspects of his thought. (shrink)

This article seeks to show that E.A. Milne’s philosophy of science has its roots in the philosophy of Aristotle and it could be an inspiration for Popper’s philosophy. The similarities with Aristotle’s concept are as follows: 1) the aim of science is to explain phenomena by discovering general principles; 2) the mind is responsible for discovering them, although experience guides the search; 3) deducing detailed statements from general assumptions is the most important element of research. On the other hand, Milne’s (...) proposal is consistent with Popper’s main ideas: 1) criticism of the principle of induction; 2) preference for the hypothetical-deductive method ; 3) appreciation of falsification and confidence in the effectiveness of deductive logic. (shrink)

Ewolucjonizm–kreacjonizm. Poszukiwanie płaszczyzny dialogu W artykule przedstawiona została próba wskazania płaszczyzny dyskusji ewolucjonistów z kreacjonistami, która umożliwiałaby dialog zwiększający szansę wypracowania spójnego światopoglądu łączącego elementy wiedzy naukowej i wiary religijnej. W odniesieniu do różnych typów wiedzy zaproponowane zostało wyróżnienie trzech poziomów: 1) przedmiot badań, 2) wiedza o tym przedmiocie, 3) interpretacja tej wiedzy. Dialog może być prowadzony już na poziomie drugim, lecz z poszanowaniem wzajemnej autonomii i ukierunkowaniem raczej na inspirację, niż na integrację. Właściwą płaszczyzną dialogu jest poziom trzeci: interpretacja (...) wiedzy oraz budowanie wizji świata i człowieka. Celem dialogu na tym poziomie jest integracja wszystkich elementów światopoglądu i dążenie do wyjaśnienia i zrozumienia całej rzeczywistości. (shrink)

Nowa Zelandia to jedno z najlepiej rozwiniętych państw świata. Pomimo ogromnej odległości od Polski zamieszkuje tam, począwszy od XIX w., wielu polskich migrantów. Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie aktualnej sytuacji zachowania archiwaliów dotyczących działalności Polaków w Nowej Zelandii oraz stanu ich cyfryzacji. Materiał źródłowy do tego typu badań posiadają archiwa oraz biblioteki państwowe w Nowej Zelandii. Jest on również dostępny w niewielkiej ilości jako cyfrowy zasób polskich organizacji w Nowej Zelandii, obecny na ich oficjalnych stronach internetowych. W Polsce kilka instytucji na (...) własnych stronach internetowych także posiada cyfrowe wersje materiałów Polonii nowozelandzkiej. Dzięki zastosowanym metodom badawczym wskazano poziom cyfryzacji materiałów polonijnych. Podstawową tezą pracy jest stwierdzenie faktu znacznego rozproszenia dorobku kulturowego Polonii nowozelandzkiej, nie tylko pomiędzy instytucjami państwowymi w Nowej Zelandii i miejscowymi organizacjami polskimi, ale również poza jej granicami, w tym nad Wisłą. Głównym wnioskiem artykułu jest utworzenie na antypodach jednego, centralnego archiwum Polonii nowozelandzkiej posiadającego doświadczonych pracowników i dysponującemu środkami pozwalającymi na konsekwentne zachowywanie śladów naszej obecności w Nowej Zelandii. (shrink)

Autor artykułu stara się wykazać, że etyka troski, a mówiąc precyzyjniej - niektóre postulatyjej wybitnych przedstawicieli, mogą prowadzić do zaniku troski w jej fundamentalnym rozumieniu. Postulaty te zmierzają do rozciągnięcia troski na stosunki społeczno-polityczne. Swoją tezę stara się udowodnić, korzystając z zaproponowanej typologii troski.

In this article we examine the role of vocative forms of address in shaping the political space in public/political discourse. We are particularly interested in strategic uses of forms of address by participants in political debates in order to gain legitimacy for their ideologies. Our data come from four formal television debates between Lech Wałęsa, the former Solidarity trade union leader and president of Poland, and two other Polish politicians, which were held between 1988 and 1995. Due to this historical (...) perspective, we are able to contextualize discursive patterns in the rapidly changing political and social situation in Poland, and show the diachronic development of the ideological underpinnings of discourse. (shrink)

In the article, first I present the atheistic argument from pointless evil and the argument from chance. The essence of the argument from chance consists in the incompatibility of the existence of purposeless events and the existence of a God who planned the universe to the last detail. Second, I would like to show that there is a relation between the evidential argument from evil and the argument from chance. An analysis of the theistic argument from small probabilities is a (...) helpful starting point for the presentation of how the two arguments are related. (shrink)

Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings.To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as (...) “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans-dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness.Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co-appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event-horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation. (shrink)

Die Kritische Sozialtheorie sowie die kommunistische Herrschaftsphilosophie haben in der posthegelianischen Befreiungslehre ihren Ursprung. Die Kritische Theorie versuchte diesen Denkansatz gegen seine totalitären Konsequenzen anzuwenden. Dieselben Weltdeutungschemata, die man an der Sowjetideologie anstößig fand, galten aber als akzeptabel, sobald man nur zur Kritik der westlichen Industriegesellschaft überging. Der Hauptpunkt der neomarxistischen Kritik des Sowjetsystems bestand darin, daß man die besondere institutionelle Form, in der der reale Sozialismus das Heil zu verwirklichen beanspruchte, in Frage stellte, ohne andere Lösungen der institutionellen Probleme (...) anzubieten oder das zugrundeliegende Denkprogramm aufzugeben, in dessen Kontext diese Probleme durchaus legitim gestellt werden konnten. Die relativen Leistungen der Kritischen Theorie sind in ihren sozial-politischen Folgen zu suchen, u. zw. darin, daß sie zwei Grundlagen der totalitären Ideologie, von der die Legitimierung des Gesellschaftssystems herrühte, erschütterte: (1) Verfügung über die Tradition; (2) Verfügung über die Sprache, in der über heilsrelevante Fragen gesprochen wurde. /// Both critical theory and communist philosophy arise from the posthegelian theory of salvation. Critical theory undertook the effort to preserve the hard core of this theoretical background and at the same time to criticize by its means the totalitarian consequences the communist ideology had derived from it. In effect, the very same patterns of thought which critical theory believed to denounce as instruments of totalitarian manipulation were accepted as soon as they proved useful to contest advanced industrial society and its world view. The crucial point of the new-leftist criticism of the Stalinist ideology was the rejection of a central claim of the latter according to which the salvation predicted in the leftist-revolutionary tradition has found its actual fulfilment in the institutional framework of the Soviet state. Challenging this claim, the Neomarxists neither abandoned this tradition nor offered another solution to the institutional problems which result from it. The relative achievements of critical theory lie in the damage it has caused to the two foundations of the totalitarian ideology, i.e.: (1) its authority over tradition and (2) its authority over language. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” considers how the ultramodernist aesthetics of Central Europe has related to and reacted against the region's political history and cartography. Central Europe has been a rich source of “soluble” realities that can be observed as they emerge, mature, and rapidly decay. Central European modernism, represented here by Adolf Loos in architecture and by Arnold Schoenberg and Leoš Janáček in music, experimented with blurry regions between presence and absence, light and shadow, sound (...) and silence. Loos disrupted the logic of architecture, while Schoenberg and Janáček nearly dissolved the acoustic paradigm of sound. This essay argues that the curious positioning of Central Europe, with its frequently changing borders and national entities, conduced both to positive experiments in cultural vagueness and to a corrosive reaction against existing and potential identities, parameters, distinctions, foci, and logics. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on ‘excentric positionality’ in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar ‘crisis of experience’ used to diagnose ‘what has gone wrong’, it allows us to re-learn how to work with ‘the experience of (...) crisis’ itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on ‘xeno-communication’. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these ‘excentric’ dynamics in turn suggests new ‘excentric methodologies’ based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. ‘Excentric methodologies’ constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. (shrink)

The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic ‘extra-territorial’ identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at (...) one point referred to the ‘peripheral’ sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the ‘navigational hesitation’ underpinning identity and its many trajectories. (shrink)