The article examines the theoretical discussions on the dualism of “form” and “content” in literature and art that took place in Soviet Ukraine in the mid-1920s. The subject is considered in the context of the development of two competitive approaches of study of literature and art — Russian formalism and Marxism. The problem is observed through the comparison of ethical and ideological positions of the modernists and Marxists in Russia and Ukraine in the 1920s.
Focusing on the period of unprecedented infl uence of popular science in Yugoslavia following the Second World War, the article examines a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches to linking science and Marxist philosophy of science against the backdrop of the dramatic political and cultural changes that were taking place in early socialist Yugoslavia.
This paper addresses the public discussions among Polish scholars and social scientists which took place following the Second World War. The debate on the sociological and historical genealogy of the Polish intelligentsia started with the publication of a lecture given by the sociologist Józef Chałasiński. Covering this debate, the paper shows the way in which the literary and publicist stereotypes came to be a research question for the Social Sciences and Humanities.
This article deals with the three discursive strategies which were used by French intellectuals for establishing their attitudes towards the political sphere on the basis of different ‘truth speeches’. This paper states that the notion of truth, which represents a certain relation between reality and the knowledge, played a special role in the debates between French intellectuals over their social and political vocation in the 20th century — from the Dreyfus Affair to contemporary media debates.
Units of measurement appear as media of social confl ict in Witold Kula’s seminal study on metrication. Given the current discussions around political epistemology, Kula’s treatment of metrology is telling. He turns the supposedly neutral auxiliary science of weights and measures into a matter of concern. The reception of his concepts in the West is outlined (history of historical metrology, the Annales school, and the history of science), and the potential of this social history of measurement in times of accelerated data production is evaluated.
Published for the fi rst time in 1721, Persian Letters has been relatively underestimated as a source of knowledge about Montesquieu’s philosophy of liberty. This paper analyses one of the main story lines of the novel, namely the relations between Usbek, the Persian traveller, and the wives remaining in his seraglio. It is demonstrated that these wives are in fact the fi gures of subjects — the fl attering and scheming subject of an absolute ruler, the law-abiding subject of a monarch, and the rebel who questions the very legitimacy of the lord’s authority. It is also demonstrated that the story of the seraglio wives’ rebellion explains why subjects rebel and how the rulers who abuse their power lose it.
The article discusses Stefan Kiełsznia’s collection within the theoretical framework of Gillian Rose’s concept concerning analysis of visual materials. Questions regarding the composition and contents of the photographs as well as the historical and social circumstances of their origin, together with the place of the series within Stefan Kiełsznia’s oeuvre, are juxtaposed with issues regarding perception of these images as documents of the non-existent Jewish quarter.
Early modern Spain witnessed the birth of a new social group — veterans — many of whom described their services in the form of autobiographies. Its authors reveal themselves through a narrator and self-created “me” that represents their struggle to break social barriers. On the other hand, their grief and isolation may also stem from war-infl icted trauma. This paper analyses the autobiography of Alonso de Contreras, focusing on this duality in narration, that may explain the severe situation of early modern veterans.
The paper considers the idea of history as a science of Józef Kazimierz Plebański (1831–1897), the Warsaw historian and Polish student of Leopold von Ranke. In my article, I analyse assignments that Plebański set as history, the place of history in science in general, the problem of objectivity in history, and other major issues related to the study of the past in the thought of Plebański.
Created in the distant past, attitudes and patterns of thinking have caused the mentality of contemporary Poles. The collective memory about the greatness delusions of old-time nobilities and the traumas suffered in the annexed territories today infl uence their thinking and behaviours as well national self-evaluation.
This article concerns the mutual expanding and enriching influence of the social history and historical demographics research issues, visible in popular historiography, at least since the end of the 20th century. The author uses selected achievements of international historiography as a backdrop for a presentation of the main achievements of Polish historical demographers, who conducted modern studies into the forms and living patterns in the territory of Poland ranging from the late mediaeval times up to the 20th century, on a larger scale than ever in the past. The article highlights the presence of new sociocultural and demographic issues such as areas of solitary females, location and significance of the elderly, occurrence of the life cycle servants phenomenon in the Old-Polish society.
The article presents the author’s perspective on the achievements of Polish historiography in the field of economic, social and historical demography of the pre-industrial period. It also suggests new directions of research that would relate to trends, methods and theories prevalent in world historiography.
The University of Krakow was founded twice, in 1364 and 1400. The jubilees of these two foundations were celebrated in 1864, 1900, 1964, 2000 and 2014. The paper present the role of university jubilees in the development of critical studies on the history of the University of Krakow until the end of the 18th century. The author analyses both the achievements and weaknesses of Polish university historiography, and shows the perspectives for its future development.
The paper aims to propose a method of historical investigation of emotions in the past. The author rethinks the phenomenon of empathy as a potential research tool for grasping the emotions of past events’ agents. He provides a psychology-based defi nition and an overview of historiographic traditions associated with empathy. He discusses limitations regarding validity (accuracy) and intersubjective control of empathy. Subsequently, the author proposes how to overcome these limitations.
The main aim of the following article is to juxtapose two methodological perspectives, influential in the field of the widely understood history of ideas, that is to say, the Cambridge School with the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte. Presenting both opportunities and pitfalls that may result from applying these perspectives, I sketch the propositions to overcome possible shallows. In concluding remarks, I draw potential challenges for the history of ideas in Poland.
The article attempts to comprehend the event and eventfulness as a category of contemporary scientific and philosophical analysis. Trying to understand the causes of the modern “renaissance” of the event and the specifics of its use in historical science, the author turns to the reflections of twentieth-century philosophers, who interpreted the event as a break in historical time, as an event that is associated with a sudden and unexpected shift of the semantic field and therefore actualized the role of the subject, able to coordinate this shift in his experience, in consciousness and memory. It has been noted that marking the event as historical is defined not only by the scale of the research (spatial and temporal) but also by being part of a certain culture of memory, a certain tradition. Understanding of this fact made historians and philosophers introduce into the dictionary of the modern humanist one more concept — eventfulness — which fixes in its contents the refusal to consider the sequence of events as unambiguous compulsory causality (the linear concept of time), replacing it with cause-effect event series (event temporality). In other words, an event, its experience and conceptualization are increasingly beginning to be understood as a focus, in which different levels of temporalization embodying different human experiences, including the experience and actions of historians, are actualized. All this gives grounds for criticism of the opposition of event and structural history characteristic of traditional historiography. As the analysis shows, despite the fact that events and structures belong to different orders of temporality, structures, on the one hand, manifest and are comprehended through events, on the other hand, make it possible for an event to exist, to identify it as such, to allow it to take place.
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