Przegląd Filozoficzny. Nowa Seria

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Bertrand Russell depicts the relation of mysticism to three other areas of human activity: philosophy, science, and religion, and thus: its special role. In his essay Mysticism and Logic (1914), Russell defines mystical thinking as beliefs in (1) the existence of special insight, (2) the unity of all things, (3) the unreality of time, and (4) the effacement of the boundaries between good and evil. Although he considers full mysticism – as a belief about the ontic structure of the world – to be erroneous – as a life attitude he attributes to it an element of wisdom that is lacking in other areas of human intellectual activity. Mysticism proves wrong also at the epistemological level, i.e. as a certain test of truth. But in its spirit of inquiry, it contains something that science also benefits from, and from which, therefore, scientific philosophy should take its cue. What additionally gives mysticism its value is the claim of impartial contemplation which gives rise to an attitude of love towards the whole world. Significantly, it was the combination of the best features of mystical thinking with scientific thinking and method which gave rise to Russell’s advocacy of scientific philosophy. In light of this, I argue that according to Russell mysticism is not an exclusively religious phenomenon, which is demonstrated, among other things, by the fact that he attributes two aspects of mysticism to the field of mathematics.

The idea of emergence in its complex scientific sense was first formulated by the proponents of British emergentism. Emergentism in this perspective was an ontology of evolutionary processes in a broad sense, encompassing the relationships between various levels of existence. However, with the growing popularity of this trend, more and more critical voices against this theory began to appear. This article reviews and compares the critical arguments against British emergentism. Works by Stephen C. Pepper, Charles Baylis and Walter Terence Stace, who pointed to the impossibility of explaining emergent novelty from the perspective of a mechanistic view of the world, are discussed.

The main purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the approach to ambiguity presented in Tadeusz Pawłowski’s work Tworzenie pojęć w naukach humanistycznych („Creating concepts in the humanities”) (1986), to systematize and analyze this conception. Due to the fact that Pawłowski was a student of Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Janina Kotarbińska, and that he dealt with methodological issues concerning the language of science (and scientific philosophy), the background of my considerations is the tradition of the Lvov‑Warsaw School. In the article I also formulate some remarks on Pawłowski’s conception, as well as some other observations on ambiguity.

According to Paweł Okołowski, Bogusław Wolniewicz made a conversion: he abandoned Marxism and adopted Christianity. This author undertakes to restablish how true this claim may be. In his own opinion, Wolniewicz accepted social theory of Karl Marx (Marxism in the strict sense) all his life, although he definitely rejected the idea of communism. This author defines Wolniewicz’s position as ‘Christianism’ rather than ‘Christianity’, because Wolniewicz admitted that Christianity was the basis of the Western civilization in public life. Despite this approach to the issue of faith, he was not – as far as we can say – a religious person in the traditional sense of the term.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the concept of the digital Leviathan as it appears in literature in the middle field between philosophy of technology and social philosophy. The digital Leviathan, beyond the obvious reference to the classic Hobbesian concept, is a continuation of what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt called ‘the Empire’ and Benjamin Bratton named ‘the Stack’. The key insight, as I argue in this paper, is to look at this digital Leviathan as an ongoing construction process, and therefore in a processual way that allows us to extract important characteristics of this global techno‑political construct. In this text, I point out that the development of the digital Leviathan is centrifugal and devoid of a top‑down plan indicating the target effects or its final shape, which results from its subordination to J.F. Lyotard’s performativity criterion, as well as its totalizing feature. It is also manifested by the fact that its expansion involves us all. I also point out how the digital Leviathan can be a deadly final achievement on the way from Reason, through rationality, to the madness of rationalization. I discuss the consequences that the development of Leviathan has on our ability to think in general, and in particular on the conceptualization of Leviathan itself. I also associate it with an attempt to criticize the utopian mode of thinking, accepting the conditions of ‘non‑place’ (in accordance with the thought of Negri and Hardt), which, following M. Heidegger, detaches us from the place and location that should be the basis of thinking.