Przegląd Filozoficzny. Nowa Seria

The article aims to depict Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the human condition. It presents the main ideas of Sartre’s anthropological reflection (the man as an entity that is absolutely free, lonely, and doomed to experience the absurdity of the status of an ‘in-the-world-being’). Although Sartre’s thoughts have been criticized by the ‘philosophers of dialogue’, his anthropology still seems to express appropriately the complexity of the human condition in the context of everlasting and fundamental queries about the purpose and the sense of individual existence.

The ethics of ‘theistic absolute morality’ (TAM), as any other ethical theory, must offer a definition of good, describe the connection between good and duty, and provide an effective guidance to human conduct. In the ethics of TAM we find, in my rendering of its claims, an irremediably unsuccessful definition of good, permanently loose connection between moral value and moral duty, and irreparably limited practical efficacy. It is not surprising that it has to be so, as it is a common condition of all ethical systems. The TAM ethics suffers, however, additionally from a unique conceptual trouble, but that is a story I have told elsewhere.

The article deals with two issues: (1) the research method of father Georges Florovsky used in his study entitled The Ways of Russian Theology (1937), which is regarded a classic in its genre, and (2) the practice of scientific research conducted with the use of this method. The article is supplemented with Florovsky’s opinions, expressed in letters to his brother Anton, a professor at the Charles University in Prague, concerning the scientific achievements of the authors and scholars whom he met with or whom he came to work with after his departure to the USA (1948). The content of this correspondence has remained hitherto unpublished.

In the paper I show why we should consider Stoicism as the historical source of St. Thomas’s distinction between ‘conscience’ and ‘synderesis’. I claim that the Stoic terms syntērēsis and syneidēsis became, through the ages, the Thomistic synderesis and conscientia. The Stoic syntērēsis meant ‘self-preservation’, and in all animals this ‘first instinct’ refers to the body. The man is the only creature, which, because of its ‘rational nature’, preserves not necessarily its body but rather its soul, i.e. a system of values. Such preservation of someone’s axiological integrity equals ‘salvation’, and thus assimilates Stoicism to Christianity. In the Stoic system, human values follow ‘the nature’ (or ‘the human nature’ in particular), and in Thomism, they follow ‘synderesis’, or the natural inclination toward the good. In both cases we find a natural instinct that transforms itself into a rational structure of conscience. I also argue that, thanks to the moral phenomena of ‘adaptation’ (oikeiōsis) and ‘advancement’ (teleiōsis), the Stoic ethics is not completely egocentric, but incorporates also social duties.

The article presents a critical analysis of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s thesis that Judaism and Kant’s practical philosophy represent antagonistic tendencies of thought. This opposition, according to Leibowitz, consists in the claim that Kantian ethics sees the supreme value in human being, while in Judaism such a view can amount only to a usurpation of God’s sovereignty by man. The aim of the article is to show that after an investigation into its substance, Kant’s moral theory turns out to resemble in the essential respects Leibowitz’s view concerning Judaism.

The aim of the paper is to assess the feminist potential of political liberalism, as the latter was defined by Charles Larmore and John Rawls. The analysis focuses on liberal feminism to determine whether it would be more convincing if it became politico-liberal feminism. This problem is addressed with reference to two authors – Martha C. Nussbaum and Susan Moller Okin – the former being an advocate and the latter a critic of the liberal feminism and political liberalism merger. It is argued that Okin’s worries about this combination are justified. However, the conclusion is that Okin’s criticism emphasises the necessity and possibility of the revision of political liberalism – as a possible background of liberal feminism and a general orientation in political philosophy.

In the article I present and criticize the view of classical compatibilism on freedom, i.e. the view according to which free subjects and free actions can exist in the world ruled by universal, exceptionless causality. I claim that compatibilism does not solve the problem of freedom and determinism, but avoids and disregards it. Compatibilism pretends to accomplish the task by playing with semantic tricks that create a misleading impression of ‛compatibility’.

The article deals with one of the most pressing topics in bioethics, namely the attitude to abortion. The author focuses on the interpretation of this practice as a kind of conflict between a woman and the fetus that she gestates (this conflict concerns women’s rights and duties to the fetus, its interests, and the moral status of the fetus in general). Considering several variants of arguments which protect women’s right to abortion (primarily utilitarian arguments based on analogy), the author tries to identify the structure of argumentation. Finally, she presents her own argument against the practice of terminating pregnancy.

This article discusses the problem of orphan manuscripts and writings in the collection of documents deposited with the Jagiellonian University. The author mentions the difficulties in the access to this heritage, due to the unclear status of these works. In this context she analyzes and presents biographies and views of all Jewish philosophers who received Ph.D. degree at the Jagiellonian University in the years 1918 through 1939, many of whom probably did not survive World War II.

If the characterization of avant-garde proposed once by Henri Saint Simon, and later maintained by Daniel Bell as well as Lidia Burska in the book entitled Awangarda i inne złudzenia. O pokoleniu ‘68 w Polsce (“The avant-garde and other illusions. On the ’68 generation in Poland”) is adopted, the philosophical revisionism inside Polish Marxism (the Warsaw school of the history of ideas) may be considered a phenomenon analogous to the artistic avant-garde which gained prominence in the middle of the 1950s. In Burska’s understanding, the significant trait of avant-garde is effective impact on the state of consciousness, stances and choices of the public. This essential factor highlights the connection between avant-garde and revisionism, due to the fact that, as it was commonly believed in Poland, the Warsaw school played a major role in the formation of the Polish post-war humanities. The purpose of the paper is to propose an understanding of the impact exerted by the Warsaw school of the history of ideas. In relation to this problem, the author refers to the testimonies of people who constituted that milieu, and he focuses on some topics from the hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer (the concept of the efficacy of history; the concept of application) and from the philosophy of H.R. Jauss (the concept of the horizon of expectations).