Present day anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric both in European countries and in the USA makes reference both to shared tropes and to culture-specific rhetoric devices. The paper analyzes four instances of Polish rabid anti-refugee rhetoric that is eminently country specific: they invoke Holocaust scenario as the means of dealing with the refugee question, should they appear on Polish soil, and specifically suggest exterminating them in former Nazi death camps. The analysis is carried out within the Conceptual Integration Theory, (...) amended by the Author with the notion of parasitic blends: these are said to occur when audiences recruit into the blend some elements of the two input spaces that were not intended to be recruited and come up with an emergent meaning that differ from the intended one. It is claimed that such possibility is actually built into CIT and explains why some of the criticism of CIT claims blends’ non-predictability and generally ex-post character of most analyses found in relevant literature. (shrink)

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)

In debates about the nature of scientific explanation, one theme repeatedly arises: that explanation is about providing understanding. However, the concept of understanding has only recently been explored in any depth, and this paper attempts to introduce a useful concept of understanding to that literature and explore it. Understanding is a higher level cognition, the recognition of connections between various pieces of knowledge. This conception can be brought to bear on the conceptual issues that have thus far been unclear (...) in the literature. Though this notion of understanding is broad, explaining various concepts of explanation, it is robust enough to underwrite an objective and useful notion of explanation. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to outline a long-neglected issue and relate a general category, usually placed outside the achievements of “traditional” art, to stricte literary phenomena. The first chapter, Na tropach kiczu (On the trail of trash), concentrates on establishing the range of meaning of the term discussed. It is not aimed at constructing an unambiguous definition but at producing a brief outline of the complex character of the issue. The author does not limit herself to a negative understanding (...) of the phenomenon, but also emphasizes its multi-aspect presence in widely termed culture. The second chapter, О kiczu literaturze (On trash in literature), deals with the general ways in which the phenomenon functions and the ways of revealing the phenomenon in literary works and discusses various manifestations of the problem in particular texts. It presents instances of plain trash as well as pieces of writing where trash appears at the level of the world presented and where it is often subject to all sorts of tricks and many kinds of mystification. Chapter third, entitled Kicz opisany i sparodiowany: proza Manueli Gretkowskiej (Trash described and parodied: the prose by Manuela Gretkowska), is directly connected with the issues raised in the title of the article. The subjecl of this part of the publication is the literary output of this contemporary Polish writer, particularly her first three novels: My zdies' emigranty [1992], Tarot paryski (The Paris Tarot) [1993] and Kabaret Metafizyczny (Metaphysical Cabaret) [1994]. However, the aim of this chapter is not to characterize the novels but to comprehensively present the issue of trash in actual practice; that is, to give examples of the problems briefly discussed above. In the prose trash manifests itself at various levels of meaning and is subject to parody, the aim of which is not only to discredit or mock the phenomenon, but also to reach its essence and reveal its unique mechanisms. In the texts discussed here trash seems to lead to parody and parody to trash, which means that both the categories are closely and inseparably linked with each other. This is especially visible at the level of the strategy of reception, which is part ol the novels. The issue is discussed in the fourth chapter, entitled Gdzie jest czytelnik, gdy go nie ma? Strategia odbioru według Manuell Gretkowskiej (Where is the reader when there is no reader? The strategy of reception by Manuela Gretkowska). The last chapter, with the title Wokół postmodernizmu (On postmodernism), is an attempt to summarize the above issues and place them in a wider context. It presents the three novels against a background of the achievements of contemporary literature and art, which are usually regarded as postmodernist, makes them part of aesthetics, using a specific sort of style called camp-art by Susan Sontag, which consists in deliberate staggering on the borderland between bad and good tastes, an apotheosis of exaggeration as well as exhibiting trash perceived as a cultural element, a symptom of “new sensitivity” and an absolutely ambiguous phenomenon. (shrink)

Metaphor is a pervasive and significant feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard philosophical theories of meaning, because it straddles so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association. ;In this dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory of metaphorical utterances which reconciles (...) two apparently incompatible intuitions. The first is that metaphors are vehicles for undertaking speech acts with a propositional content distinct from their conventional sentence meaning. The second is that metaphors are tools for inducing the essentially non-propositional effect of 'seeing things in a new light' or under a new aspect. These intuitions seem to be incompatible because it is assumed that only one can capture the essential function of metaphor. I propose instead that non-propositional 'seeing-as' or aspectual thought serves as the means by which speakers intend to accomplish their end of communicating content. This does not imply that speakers are not interested in and even committed to the effects of aspectual thought as well, only that it is not their sole, ultimate intention. ;In order to substantiate this proposal about how metaphor works, I develop an account of the psychological structures on which aspectual thought operates and the changes it engenders; I then show how the content of the speaker's intended speech act is determined by the aspect the sentence generates. By bringing propositional content and non-propositional aspectual thought together in this way, my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from 'ordinary' to 'poetic', within a unified theory. Armed with this account, we have the explanatory resources necessary to acknowledge both that ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient and sometimes essential vehicles for communicating determinate propositional contents, and also that rich, poetic metaphors are invitations to an open-ended contemplation of the subject under discussion. These apparently very different effects turn out to be manifestations of the same basic process of comprehension. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that (...) calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making. (shrink)

Von Diltheys Konzeption der Geisteswissenschaften als dem philosophischen Bezugspunkt für Literatur und Geistesgeschichte aus zeigen sich Gesichtspunkte, die für aktuelle Fragestellungen wieder interessant sein können. In Diltheys erstem Entwurf stand die Absetzung der Geisteswissenschaften von der Naturwissenschaft im Mittelpunkt. Man kann die Unterschiede, die er hervorhebt, auch als positive Beschreibung der geisteswissenschaftlichen Arbeit auffassen: Geisteswissenschaften sind danach in ihrer Bestimmung auf naturwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen bezogen und für sie offen. Im Unterschied zur Methode der Naturwissenschaft stellen sie aber eine Vielzahl von Vorgehensweisen (...) dar, die im praktischen Leben einer Gesellschaft wurzeln. In diesem Zusammenhang kann man für heutige ›Humanities‹ zum Beispiel Diltheys Hinweise auf ›Verfahren‹ aufnehmen, die der ›Methode‹ in einem praxeologischen Sinne zugrunde liegen und vorausgehen. (shrink)

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating (...) from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought--she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aesthetics in Feminist PerspectiveJulie Van CampAesthetics in Feminist Perspective, edited by Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer; xv & 252 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.Has feminism been hijacked by one lock-step agenda, suppressing all dialogue and debate? Far from it, judging from this collection of seventeen essays on feminist aesthetics. The first such collection in English, it includes eleven essays previously published in Hypatia (...) (1990).This well-organized volume offers both broad theoretical considerations and applications to specific art forms, diverse methodological perspectives, and healthy debate among the contributors. The section on “The Nature of Art: Some Feminist Alternatives” considers feminist perspectives as alternatives to traditional concepts of art, motivated by considerations of the art of women. Skepticism abounds in the section on “Interpretation and Point of View” concerning a “universal” or “paradigmatic” female voice in literature, film, and visual art. “Philosophical and Critical Legacies” reveals diverse feminist readings of Kant, Nietzsche, Cartesian metaphysics, and postmodernism.Co-editor Hilde Hein proposes that aesthetics provides a promising road map for feminist philosophy and indeed philosophy generally. Aesthetics has learned to reject foundationalism and essentialism in favor of pluralism, a necessity in the face of the astonishing diversity and ever-changing landscape in contemporary art. This theoretical transition in aesthetics shows how philosophy could fruitfully shed the false security of essentialism to embrace the sometimes raucous pluralism of methods, races, cultures, and genders assaulting all humanities disciplines in recent decades. As co-editor Carolyn Korsmeyer notes, feminist scholarship challenges “the mask of universality and gender-neutrality” (p. vii). [End Page 178]The myth that feminist scholarship is merely thinly veiled political action, devoid of intellectual integrity, is shattered by this collection. Well-represented is the diversity of analytic and European methodologies that enrich contemporary philosophical dialogue. Many of the articles scrutinize the nature of “feminism” itself, as well as appropriate methodologies and questions. The interdisciplinarity of feminist research also is in welcome evidence, with seven essays by scholars from English, African-American studies, music, and psychology.Should feminist art and aesthetics be “nondominative”? Should it “endorse” female experience? Do proposals for “ideal” feminist artistic expression inadvertently retreat to the essentialism and uniformity that feminists have sought to dispel? Should feminists reject the tradition of “formalism” in favor of an approach that re-integrates art with the community and the concerns of daily life? This perspective is widespread today in postmodern thought, but feminist considerations bolster the case made elsewhere for the fall of the so-called elite object.Are there distinctive features that mark the work of female artists, such as group participation, rather than performances for passive audiences? This feature is pervasive in contemporary art, from the happenings of Andy Warhol in the 1960s to the “Messiah” sing-alongs popular for decades. Is feminist art marked by a melding of aesthetic and erotic elements? Surely that is also a trait of the art of most cultures, by men as well as women.These explorations reveal a paradox in today’s feminism. In highlighting female traits (such as the virtues of being caring and nondominating), are women being celebrated, liberated, and freed? Or are they frozen into roles which not all women consider their most important attributes as persons?Female artists and theorists deserve enormous credit for encouraging a re-thinking of the ways in which art is created and understood, but many other forces drive these developments as well. Indeed, some of the harshest critics of analytic philosophy are analytic philosophers steeped in that tradition, both male and female. It seems a pointless chicken-and-egg exercise to wonder if feminists caused this re-thinking or were one of several groups in a happy confluence of re-examination from various perspectives. Fortunately, the issue need not be resolved for scholars and students to appreciate this outstanding volume.Julie Van CampCalifornia State University, Long BeachCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Drawing from the group engagement model and the moral conviction literature, we propose that perceived leader ethical conviction moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee OCB as well as deviance. In a field study of employees from various industries and a scenario-based experiment, we revealed that both the positive relation between ethical leadership and employee OCB and the negative relation between ethical leadership and employee deviance are more pronounced when leaders are perceived to have weak rather than strong (...) ethical convictions. Further, we argued and showed that employees’ feelings of personal control and perceived voice opportunity mediated the interactive effect of ethical leadership and perceived leader ethical conviction on OCB and deviance. Implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The traditional German policy was to “push to the East”. After signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the Red Army entered the Polish territory on September 17.The German occupation was marked by terror and executions. A resistance movement was developed, and along a secret government and underground army came into being. It was organized by officers who were not taken prisoners of war and by main political parties. The German (...) retaliation—arrests, tortures, concentration camps—did not deter the Poles from joining the patriotic conspiracy.For about five years, the nation waited for a proper moment to fight the occupants. For the city of Warsaw, it seemed that the good time was the middle of the summer of 1944. The Germans were retreating on all fronts, and the Red Army was on the suburbs of Warsaw, on the right bank of the Vistula. It was expected that it would help the insurgents.The Uprising was intended to last a few days. It ended after more than two months, when the Home Army had no more bullets, and the population—no more food. An honorable surrender was signed with the Germans, by virtue of which the insurgents were treated as allied soldiers rather than bandits to be executed, as was the case at the beginning of the Uprising. (shrink)

Grzegorz Musiał’s late work is exemplary of the Modernist coupling of desire and death, which German Ritz linked to the way that homosexual sensibility has been encoded in Polish literary Modernism. This reading of Musiał is paradoxical at heart, as the writer’s literary output must also be ridden with tensions, because his clinging to a bygone aesthetic in order to render homosexual desire seems quaint in an era in which the idea of gay emancipation is widespread. Musiał’s literary alter (...) ego, who is realized as a fictional character and as the speaker in his poems, is a hybrid of an erudite homosexual male equipped with the classical sensibility and a devout Catholic, whose appreciation and outright enjoyment of church ritual is almost camp. Musiał attempts to pit this literary dummy against the usually younger homosexual men who, like a mob of the living dead, populate the underground world of night clubs and anonymous sex. (shrink)

Grzegorz Musiał’s late work is exemplary of the Modernist coupling of desire and death, which German Ritz linked to the way that homosexual sensibility has been encoded in Polish literary Modernism. This reading of Musiał is paradoxical at heart, as the writer’s literary output must also be ridden with tensions, because his clinging to a bygone aesthetic in order to render homosexual desire seems quaint in an era in which the idea of gay emancipation is widespread. Musiał’s literary alter (...) ego, who is realized as a fictional character and as the speaker in his poems, is a hybrid of an erudite homosexual male equipped with the classical sensibility and a devout Catholic, whose appreciation and outright enjoyment of church ritual is almost camp. Musiał attempts to pit this literary dummy against the usually younger homosexual men who, like a mob of the living dead, populate the underground world of night clubs and anonymous sex. (shrink)

In 1951–1952 a selected committee appointed by the US Congress investigated the circumstances of the so-called Katyn Crime. The reasons why the highest US legislative body undertook the issue hale to be sought in the international situation of the day, which was determined by the Korean War.The “Katyn Committee” was called up on September 18, 1951 by the House of Representatives of the 82nd Congress on the strength of Resolution 390. Sitting on it were Daniel L. Flood, Thaddeus M. Machrowicz, (...) George A. Dondero, Foster Furcolo, Alvin K. O’Konski, Timothy P. Sheenan and Ray J. Madden, who was also appointed its chairman. The committee began interrogating witnesses on October 11, 1951 and closed the interrogations on November 14, 1952. Simultaneously, the committee inspected 183 material exhibits pertaining to the Katyn event. In all the committee took down the testimonies of 81 main and about 200 secondary witnesses as well as about a hundred written testimonies and accounts.The committee’s final report to the House of Representatives clearly stated the responsibility of the Soviet NKVD for the 1940 massacre of around 15,000 Polish officers from POW camps in Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.In response to the committee’s proceedings the east bloc staged a propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting its work and upholding the so-called Katyn Lie—a 1943—originated false version of the events whereby the executions of the Polish officers had been carried out by the Germans in the latter half of 1941.The Soviet government took an official stand on the committee on February 29, 1952. It rejected all possibility of cooperation and underscored the Germans’ responsibility for the massacre. On March 1, 1952 the Polish government issued a statement condemning the committee and reiterating the false version of the Katyn incident. This statement appeared in the March 1 edition of the national daily Trybuna Ludu under the heading, The Polish nation indignantly condemns the cynical provocations of American imperialists, who are feeding on the tragic deaths of thousands of Polish citizens in Katyn.The main wave of attacks on the Madden Committee rolled through the Eastern European press in March, 1952. It was most intense in the Soviet Union and Poland, but also penetrated to other countries like Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In the USSR most of the related coverage was published in the communist party daily Pravda. In Poland articles attacking the Madden Committee and propagating the false version of the Katyn events appeared in all dailies and periodicals, including the party, military, youth, branch and satirical press. Especially avid in this respect were papers brought out by the Czytelnik publishers, notably Życie Warszawy. Also published was a deceitful book The Truth About Katyn by Boleslaw Wójcicki.Simultaneously to the press campaign against the Madden Committee the eastern countries launched broad scale repressions involving the prosecution, courts and intelligence services. (shrink)

This is a remarkable book for many reasons, not the least of which are the circumstances of its composition and its narrow escape from destruction. It was written during the war, between 1939 and 1943. "During the Warsaw Rising in August 1944," the author relates, "I managed to rescue the manuscript when my house was set on fire. While I was being marched to the regroupment camp it was seized by a German officer who was searching my suitcase. ‘A (...) work of scholarship?’ he shouted, ‘you won't be needing that. There’s no more Polish culture'. He threw the manuscript into the gutter. I took a chance and retrieved it, and in this way the work was saved." The purpose of the book is also somewhat remarkable in light of the dearth of other books on what is arguably the most important thing in life for any member of the human race. Finally, the work is remarkable for its bringing together so many different texts of so many different kinds, from literature, mythology, religion, philosophy, folklore, and biography, to research in the exact sciences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Gray ZonePatrick HenryThe Question of Jewish complicity during the Holocaust remains nuanced and troubling even if recent research has altered some earlier entrenched assumptions regarding its nature and extent. Hannah Arendt, for example, who saw the complicity of the Jewish Councils in the ghettos as part of the general "moral collapse" of the time, remarked famously that:Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost (...) without exception, cooperated in one way or another for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.1Thirty-eight years later, however, in Rethinking the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer points out that not only were the Jewish Councils "in many of the Polish and Lithuanian ghettos... not asked for and did not deliver lists of Jews," but also "many of the Soviet territories had no Judenräte and the destruction was even more efficient there than in Poland." Finally, as Bauer also reports, in many smaller places, the Judenräte refused to cooperate in any way whatsoever.2The Judenräte or Jewish Councils were Nazi-established executive committees throughout Occupied Europe at once fully responsible for the implementation of Nazi directives and in charge of the administration, labor, finances, cultural and health services, food supply, and policing of the Jewish community or ghetto. These councils were set up to force the Jews to do the work of the Nazis and to keep the Jews at odds with one another as the implementation of Nazi directives progressively and [End Page 150] inevitably undercut the councils' ability to provide for the basic physical needs of the Jewish community. How these councils acted under the pressure of deportation orders differed from ghetto to ghetto. For his part, although he speaks mainly about complicity in the camps, Primo Levi identifies a "gray zone" in the ghettos and the camps where some of the "privileged oppressed" became oppressors themselves, thereby blurring any simple all-encompassing distinction between victim and executioner.3IIn her "Postscript" to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt notes that in Israel in 1963 "the Jewish Establishment" was "bitterly divided on this issue" of the Jewish Councils.4 As the accounts of contemporaries attest, this division was already apparent in the Warsaw Ghetto more than twenty years earlier. There, Adam Czerniaków, a highly cultured 60 year-old Polish speaking Jewish engineer, neither a rabbi nor a believer, was the head of the 24 member Warsaw Jewish Council. He had many staunch supporters but others, particularly those involved in resistance movements, distrusted him and accused him of collaboration with the Nazis. In July 1942, he swallowed cyanide rather than sign the order to round up and deport all Jews, including children, from the ghetto.Emmanuel Ringelblum, whose extraordinary journal records events in Warsaw chronologically and meticulously from January 1940 to December 1942, notes that some considered Czerniaków "a martyr... honestly fulfilling his duty... an idol... [whose] word is command." Ringelblum himself, however, deemed him "incompetent" and "weak": "The suicide of Czerniaków—too late, a sign of weakness—should have called for resistance—a weak man."5 Janusz Korczak, on the other hand, who ran an orphanage in the ghetto for 200 children, was far more sympathetic toward Czerniaków, one of his close friends who also had a passionate interest in children's welfare. Korczak, whose diary, unlike Ringelblum's, is inward and abstract, does not speak openly about the Jewish Council. But Korczak was horrified by the death of children in the ghetto. Like Czerniaków, Korczak carried cyanide, but he chose not to take it. Unwilling to abandon his orphans and convinced of their individual dignity, he wanted to prepare them for their inevitable demise. To this end, just three weeks before they were all deported, Korczak had the children perform Tagore's The Post Office in the hope that they might thereby welcome death and not be afraid of it.6 Korczak's... (shrink)

This paper discusses the politics of remembering and the representation of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary art referring to the Lego Concentration Camp by Zbigniew Libera. The paper presents the ways in which Libera’s work challenges the traditional ways of representing the Holocaust and how it engages with issues such as the relation between atrocity and aesthetics. The associations brought to this mode of representation by the notions of game and toys and whether theatricality and play are in (...) dialogue with or violate the historical experience of the Holocaust is also discussed. The paper investigates the specificity of the Polish context in the way the Holocaust is approached and the reactions these artistic attempts raise in the public. Do the unconventional and shocking representations help understand the Holocaust or do they create the opposite effect of misguided and trivialised reading of history? (shrink)

In recent years interest in the thought of Kierkegaard has grown dramatically, and with it the body of secondary literature has expanded so quickly that it has become impossible for even the most conscientious scholar to keep pace. The problem of the explosion of secondary literature is made more acute by the fact that much of what is written about Kierkegaard appears in languages that most Kierkegaard scholars do not know. Kierkegaard has become a global phenomenon, and new (...) research traditions have emerged in different languages, countries, and regions. The present volume is dedicated to trying to help to resolve these two problems in Kierkegaard studies. Its purpose is, first, to provide book reviews of some of the leading monographic studies in the Kierkegaard secondary literature so as to assist the community of scholars to become familiar with the works that they have not read for themselves. The aim is thus to offer students and scholars of Kierkegaard a comprehensive survey of works that have played a more or less significant role in the research. Second, the present volume also tries to make accessible many works in the Kierkegaard secondary literature that are written in different languages and thus to give a glimpse into various and lesser-known research traditions. The six tomes of the present volume present reviews of works written in Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. (shrink)

First published in 1967, Polish Analytical Philosophy presents the first comprehensive study of Polish analytical philosophy that has been written in Polish or English, traces the origin of the Polish analytical movement, it's development in the period between the World Wars, and its decline after the Second World War. The book shows that although inspired by the British movement and in close touch with the Vienna circle, Polish philosophy acquired its own distinctive character. Analytical philosophy (...) in Poland was actively engaged in logic and language but tended rather to be interested in constructing philosophical doctrines which attempted to resolve traditional problems of ontology and epistemology. The author contrasts leading representatives of analytical philosophy in Britain and in Poland, and his study will be a valuable addition to the literature of the analytical trend in Europe. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to analyze the current trends of the development of Polish philosophy. It does not give a detailed description or systematization of Polish philosophy. The attention is focused on some vital issues: individuals, groupings, topics that determine its character and contribute to its native character and universal dimension. Polish culture follows an alternate pattern of development. Periods of idealistic vows, heroic deeds and great literature were followed by the time of “minimalism” restricted (...) to the world of facts and practicalities. At the times of cultural maximalism, philosophy accompanied literature (art) and tended to take the form of a world outlook, while in minimalistic phase it searched for connections with science and transformed into meta-science.The author believes that the period of scientific philosophy (the Lvov—Warsaw School of Philosophy) is over so it can be presumed that the future will belong to world outlook philosophy. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to analyze the current trends of the development of Polish philosophy. It does not give a detailed description or systematization of Polish philosophy. The attention is focused on some vital issues: individuals, groupings, topics that determine its character and contribute to its native character and universal dimension. Polish culture follows an alternate pattern of development. Periods of idealistic vows, heroic deeds and great literature were followed by the time of “minimalism” restricted (...) to the world of facts and practicalities. At the times of cultural maximalism, philosophy accompanied literature (art) and tended to take the form of a world outlook, while in minimalistic phase it searched for connections with science and transformed into meta-science.The author believes that the period of scientific philosophy (the Lvov—Warsaw School of Philosophy) is over so it can be presumed that the future will belong to world outlook philosophy. (shrink)

This collection uses Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" as a foundation from which to explore current topics related to camp. It recognizes Sontag's work as significant in spurring examination of the phenomenon but also limited in its descriptive rather than philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual nature.

The interwar decades in Poland (1918–1939) were characterized by plurality and diversity. The purpose of the paper Polish Universalism in the Interwar Period is to show the foundations of the socio-philosophical trend, which is universalism. In modern philosophy universalism was in permanent conflict with individualism, but in the interwar period the reality became more complicated. It was “collectivism”—the trend based on the cult of the State, nation, race, and class—that started to aspire to be called universalism. The author does (...) not classify these trends as universalist, and universalism itself criticized them. Different varieties of universalism can be found in the interwar period. The author indicates the literary-philosophical universalism of J.N. Miller, and the socio-conservative universalism of W.L. Jaworski, but she focuses on J. Braun’s conception of the universal subject and the idea of absolute union, and on Christian universalism,showing the importance of the emerging Polish personalism for universalist philosophy. In these proposals the author sees the germs of the later (2nd half of the 20th c.) conception of ecumenism, dialogue, and the primacy of person over things. (shrink)

The changes in the subject matter of philosophical aesthetics are accompanied today by changes in evaluation, degradation of the traditional notion of beauty and also rejection of the old rigid division between beauty and ugliness, causing the dissolution of the category divides—in the process anti-value often becomes a value understood as a formal criteria. In the artistic critique the rejection of absolutism in favor of pluralism and diversity is accompanied by the functioning of the old categories in their new meanings. (...) One form of such anti-values is represented by the phenomenon of camp. As a specific kind of a paradox-figure, camp unveils the relation between aesthetization and anaesthetization.The new aesthetics is a dual figure, demanding examination of its two contrary aspects: aesthetical and anaesthetical. Camp’s rejection of the existing hierarchy of values, its admiration of what is not obviously ugly rather than of what is definitely not beautiful, brings this phenomenon close to Wolfgang Welch’s trend of anaesthetics. In many ways camp appears to be a theoretical model of modern identity as well as a specific type of a sophisticated aesthetic game. (shrink)

The paper presents Polish culture from the X century to the present time inspected from a special perspective, namely that determined by the opposition universal-native. It is shown that in Poland the native, at times slightly modest artistic styles and forms as well as the more cosmopolitan and universal European trends always served the best-possible expression of the essence of the Polish people and their national traditions, unbrokenly preserved over ages.

Introduction -- Philosophy in the Middle Ages -- Polish philosophy in the Renaissance and Baroque -- Polish philosophy in the Enlightenment -- Polish philosophy of the Romantic era -- The philosophy of Polish positivism -- Polish philosophy in the age of modernism --Polish philosophy in the interwar period -- Polish philosophy after World War II -- A selection of post-war general literature on the subject -- Conclusion.

Describing the formation of the Polish community in Spain in the 1990s, the article focuses on the political changes in both countries: processes of democratization (and, in the case of Poland, the resulting economic transformation) and then the EU enlargement, which contributed to this new influx. Polish expatriates, though not very numerous in comparison with other immigrant communities in contemporary Spain, became quite visible, especially in some towns of the Region of Madrid. In general, they enjoy a good (...) reputation in the host country, but initially they used to work in the secondary labor sector, often illegally. The situation changed after Poland’s accession to the European Union and the resulting opening of the Spanish labor market for Polish citizens at the beginning of the new century. New Polish immigrants to Spain are young, qualified, innovative, and their purpose is not only to earn a living, but first and foremost to continuetheir studies and undergo professional training. Their mobility is increased owing to modern transportation facilities and communication systems. Individualists for the most part, they do not maintain intensive contacts with the earlier-established Polish community and its social networks and institutions. (shrink)

Islamic philosophy and Sufism evolved as distinct yet interpenetrating strands of Islamic thought and practice. Despite differences, they have shared a concern with the perfection of the soul through the development of character. In The Polished Mirror, Cyrus Ali Zargar studies the ways in which, through teaching and storytelling, pre-modern Muslims lived, negotiated, and cultivated virtues. Examining the writings of philosophers, ascetics, poets, and saints, he locates virtue ethics within a dynamic moral tradition."--Amazon.com.

The early 18th century saw the beginnings of Russian military occupation of Poland, followed by a secret agreement by the neighboring countries, meant to maintain a political status quo in the internal affairs of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Then, the dynamics of the economic transformations of the European continent led to a permanent economic deadlock, particularly in the regions with large agricultural areas, such as Poland. Five years from the turn of the 18th century the Polish polity disappeared from (...) the map of Europe for 123 years. Analyzing the relationships and causes of a number of phenomena related to Old Poland is made all the more difficult by some historical processes which blow some ritual events of limited importance out of proportion, such as theadoption of the Constitution of 3 May (1791; particularly due to its content being rather reactionary); these also glorify the past of the society and the state as a “golden myth” of social harmony in relationships obtaining within the classes and between them. (shrink)

Among the hundreds of sites that housed survivors of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden in the spring and summer of 1945, one of the largest was at the small village of Öreryd. Between June 1945 and September 1946, around a thousand Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors came to this site, where they were expected to stay only until they were well enough to return to their home countries or migrate elsewhere. This article contributes to filling a gap in (...) refugee history in Sweden, dealing with how survivors experienced Swedish refugee camps and shaped the refugee camp environment on their own terms. Thinking with Peter Gatrell’s framework of ‘refugeedom’, a wide range of sources have been examined for insight into how Polish survivors in the Öreryd refugee camp navigated the precarity and uncertainty of their existence as survivors and refugees in Sweden and endeavoured to shape their immediate and future lives. (shrink)

Political thought of the war and occupation period continued the ideological and program searches started already before 1939. The concept of democracy was mostly associated with the values such as individual freedom, civil rights, safety of citizens, society of the state; cooperation among nations in the fields of politics, economy and protection of peace. The author deals with topics like: democratic international order; democratic political order and economic system. The author concludes the article with a few synthesizing remarks.