Roczniki Filozoficzne

The subject of this paper is the scope and nature of duties to help others which Thomas Aquinas believes to belong to the subclass of acts of beneficence he calls eleemosyna. I consider to what extent and under which circumstances, according to his account, aid lent to people in need of support is obligatory, merely praiseworthy or even improper. In particular, I try to establish how much of our personal resources (possessions, well-being, or free time), on Aquinas’s view, we should sacrifice for others, provided they need our support.

We swoim wczesnym, nieukończonym eseju zatytułowanym Johannes Climacus albo De omnibus dubitandum est Søren Kierkegaard wdaje się w polemikę z Heglowską interpretacją metodycznego Kartezjańskiego wątpienia. Kierkegaard kwestionuje filozoficzny absolutyzm Kartezjańskiego sceptycyzmu i jego metodologiczny uniwersalizm. Po raz pierwszy w pismach Kierkegaarda sfera spekulacji (myślenia) zostaje skonfrontowana z osobistym zaangażowaniem (wolą). Kierkegaard nigdy nie opublikował tego dzieła (wydano je pośmiertnie) i nigdy więcej nie odniósł się bezpośrednio do Kartezjusza w tej samej formie. Pozostały jednak pewne tematy i wątki: zwątpienie (przeciwstawione rozpaczy) i pseudonim (Johannes Climacus) używany podczas pisania tego wczesnego eseju.

Artykuł omawia ekologiczny wymiar myśli Johna Milbanka w kontekście narastającego kryzysu klimatycznego. W tym celu, koncepcja ekologii integralnej poddana zostaje interpretacji w duchu Milbankowskiego integralizmu, który odrzuca pojęcie „czystej natury” jako przejawu sekularyzmu i domaga się teologicznego ugruntowania dyskursu środowiskowego. Taka perspektywa pozwala na dostrzeżenie ograniczeń nowoczesnego sposobu myślenia, uwikłanego w metafory „podboju natury” oraz „powrotu do natury”. Jako alternatywa, zaproponowana zostaje koncepcja „kenotycznego antropocentryzmu”, na gruncie którego człowiek jako zwierzę rozumne, społeczne, twórcze i religijne niejako przekracza swoją własną naturę, będąc powołanym do zjednoczenia z Bogiem. Takie podejście z jednej strony głosi ontologiczną wyższość człowieka nad innymi stworzeniami, z drugiej zaś przypomina o jego roli opiekuna — a nie właściciela — Ziemi. Istotnie różni się ono zatem od „skromnego antropocentryzmu” Clive’a Hamiltona, którego wezwanie do troski o środowisko opiera się ostatecznie na arbitralnej wolności i imperatywie przerwania. Bliżej mu raczej do (anty)antropocentryzmu Bruno Latoura, uwypuklającego rolę człowieka jako politycznego reprezentanta milczących Ziemian — rzek, gór czy zwierząt. Według Milbanka, silna hierarchia ontologiczna, odrzucana przez Latoura, jest jednak niezbędna, co sprawia, że pozostaje on mniej wrażliwy na materialny wymiar zmiany klimatycznej. Co więcej, wojowniczy antysekularyzm Milbanka może stanowić przeszkodę w niezwykle potrzebnej szerszej dyskusji na temat kryzysu ekologicznego, nawet jeśli jego krytyka nowoczesności jest trudno do zignorowania.

Artykuł przedstawia fundamentalny anarchokapitalistyczny argument przeciw państwu i rozważa minarchistyczne odpowiedzi na tak sformułowaną krytykę tej instytucji. Identyfikuje trzy i tylko trzy logicznie możliwe sposoby podważenia anarchokapitalistycznej argumentacji, dowodząc, że w związku z przesłankami, z których wychodzi teoria minarchistyczna, żaden z tych sposobów nie jest jej dostępny (co nie oznacza, że nie jest on dostępny filozofiom politycznym wychodzącym z innych przesłanek). Zarys analizy przedstawiony w artykule sugeruje, iż minarchistyczny program badawczy jest nieprzekonujący teoretycznie, a nawet wątpliwy logicznie (pomimo swej możliwej atrakcyjności politycznej).

The argument from hiddenness developed by John L. Schellenberg is one of the most discussed philosophical arguments for atheism. It assumes that there is a conflict between the existence of a perfectly loving God and the existence of nonresistant nonbelief. In his recent book titled Hiddenness and the Incarnation. A Theistic Response to John L. Schellenberg’s Argument for Divine Nonexistence (2020), Marek Dobrzeniecki presents a novel defence against the hiddenness argument, employing the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the Son of God. In my paper, I argue that this defence fails. It is based on an incorrect claim that the Incarnation makes God hidden to humans. This allows one to formulate a new problem of hiddenness, related to the fact that there are nonresistant human beings who do not accept the divinity of Christ. The problem of hiddenness as described by Schellenberg forms an essential part of this new problem.

The article seeks to elucidate the sense of Aristotle’s proairesis on the basis of selected fragments of the translation and commentary by Sebastian Petrycy of Pilzno. Petrycy renders proairesis as “choice or undertaking”. The author shows that the expression is used for a reason and demonstrates that proairesis in the full sense of the word creates: (1) undertaking in the sense of designating the goal to be achieved; (2a) own choice in the sense of a preferential choice, that is, choosing one course of action rather than another; (2b) own choice in the sense of the decision about proceeding with accepted course of action; (3) undertaking in the sense of starting (and continuing) the action leading to the achieving of the designated goal. In so doing, the author proves that Aristotle’s proairesis, according to Sebastian Petrycy of Pilzno, is constituted by “choice” and “undertaking” which are its features or elements. Furthermore, he shows that the activity of proairesis does not end before the action because it does overlap with action, at least in the sense that it starts the action.

Studies conducted by political philosophers focus typically on the normative dimension. Grounded in decisions concerning the understanding of the world, sometimes with the participation of a personal God, and of man as a part of it, they lay the foundations of the order constituting an analogue of the cosmos, or the result of God’s will or evolution, or the effect of decisions made consciously by the ruling or those who legitimize them. The second dimension is of less interest to philosophers, as opposed to lawyers and political scientists who are interested also in political philosophy. This dimension has an institutional value and is connected with the investigation of “mechanisms” enabling the achievement of normative order. My considerations will involve various propositions in the two dimensions, made by two Polish authors from the 17th century.

The article presents twentieth-century Polish philosophical discussions of rationality, especially in the cognitive context. Discussed are diverse viewpoints, from those presented by Kazimierz Twardowski, the Lvov–Warsaw School founded by him to those of post-war thinkers: Leszek Kołakowski and Marian Przełęcki. In the second part, three systematic issues concerning the rationality of beliefs are discussed and analyzed: the problem of their binary nature, rationality criteria, and the issue of justifying the choice of rationality.

Concepts have always been one of the most important objects of philosophical investigations. A special contribution to the theory of conceptual analysis was made by the representatives of the Lvov–Warsaw School, representing the Polish branch of analytic philosophy. Philosophical research in this school was governed by the postulate of clarity of thought and speech. Analysis and improvement of concepts and the existing philosophical language as the carriers of these concepts naturally expressed the methodological program proposed by the founder of the School, Kazimierz Twardowski. In the article, the procedure of reconstructing concepts is presented as it was commonly applied in Twardowski’s School. Although the differences between individual school members were sometimes significant (reflected e.g. in the psychologism–antipsychologism opposition), one may indicate some common elements of conceptual research. These are, first of all, the categorial element and the constructive element, because of which the procedure in question is called “reconstruction”. Two examples of the reconstruction of concepts are examined closer: Łukasiewicz’s work on the concept of cause and Tarski’s results concerning the conceptof truth.

Kotarbinski’s analysis of psychological sentences constitutes one of the main elements of his scientific programme known as reism in a semantic version. The program aimed to eliminate all expressions and grammatical forms that reify relations, properties, events and contents of mental acts from natural language. In order to eliminate the contents of mental acts and alleged intentional objects from semantics and ontology, Kotarbiński invented an original paraphrase of utterances of psychological sentences reducing them to pairs of logically independent utterances. In this paper, I briefly present Frege’s and Russell’s solutions of the problem of intentional contexts comprising psychological sentences; I also indicate the philosophical inspirations of Kotarbiński’s reism. The analysis of psychological sentences proposed by Kotarbiński not only solves the semantic problem of the lack of extensional substitutivity in psychological sentences, but also sheds additional light on his reistic ontology. In the end, I briefly compare Kotarbiński’s solution of psychological sentences with Donald Davidson’s apparently similar paratactic analysis and indicate that the differences between the two are the consequence of different versions of monism and different approaches to the problem of truth.

This article describes mutual contacts and shared ideas of two outstanding writers and philosophers, Bolesław Miciński and Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), who despite a significant age difference were close friends. The philosophical problems they raised relate to the interwar intellectual atmosphere in Poland and Europe as well as lively discussions among literary critics and avantgarde writers. Witkiewicz was the first Pole to become acquainted with psychoanalysis; he made it significantly more familiar to Miciński, although their interpretations of Freud’s theory clearly diverged. Miciński was also a strong supporter of the Pure Form theory and realized its propositions in his works. He was also an advocate of a scientific approach to literary criticism through its firm grounding in philosophy. Witkacy was also a patron of his aesthetic views which were most fully set forth in an unpublished thesis, Reality and its Deformation in Art (1937), written under Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s supervision. They were both strongly opposed to any reductionism in philosophy; they were opponents of Vienna Circle physicalism and the antimetaphysical approach of the Lvov–Warsaw school. In particular, Miciński saw the weakness of analytical thought and sought a more capacious form for philosophy. The final period of Miciński’s work shows a strong objection to totalitarianism and a mechanization of life which was also characteristic of Witkacy. For the author of A Portrait of Kant, Witkiewicz was surely a master of philosophy, but the question of how much was borrowed from the younger colleague by Witkacy, the author of The Shoemakers, remains open.

Starting with the systematization of Michael Heller’s thesis of the mathematicity of the Universe, the inquiry carried out in this article will be devoted to the presentation and the critical analysis of why the category theory can be designated as the most suitable mathematical environment to articulate this thesis. The key task will be to show what motivates Heller to introduce an ontologically pregnant concept of the field of categories and to equate it with the field of rationality. Finally, it will become more transparent in what sense Heller utilizes the concept of the philosophical apophatism in the context of the formalized physical theories. Heller shares his apophatic attitude with such prominent figures of the theoretical physics as Albert Einstein and Roger Penrose: physics does not say what reality is but it places a physicist on the road to reality.

Artykuł jest krytyczną dyskusją książki Torbjörna Tännsjö Setting Health-Care Priorities. Krytyka dotyczy głównie przyjętej w tej książce metody, ale też kilku nieuzasadnionych wniosków i przemyconych założeń.

Omawiam komentarze prof. Piotra Lichacza dotyczące mojej książki Setting Health-Care Priorities. What Ethical Theories Tell Us (New York: OUP, 2019). Bronię krytykowanego przezeń poglądu, że nasz opór przed rezygnacją z życia i wstrzymania marginalnego wydłużenia życia jest irracjonalny. Szeroko wyjaśniam używaną w tej książce metodologię, skłaniającą do oparcia naszego testowania teorii etycznych na zawartości naszych przemyślanych intuicji moralnych. W obronę biorę również związane z tą metodologią pojęcie psychoterapii kognitywnej.

The article contains a translation of Antonio degli Agli’s treatise On the Immortality of the Soul. The translation is preceded by an introduction in which its author explains the popularity of the issue of immortality in the fifteenth century, presents the figure of Antonio degli Agli, and shortly analyzes the content of the treatise. Agli was a clergyman of the Catholic Church and a humanist associated with the millieu of Florentine intellectuals gathered around the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Agli was a prolific author of philosophical, theological, literary and historical works, although only few of his texts have survived to our times. Among them is a relatively short treatise On the immortality of the soul, in which, with reference to certain biblical fragments and philosophical concepts, he argued that the human soul is necessarily eternal. The reasoning used here regards the metaphysics of light and the relationship of the human mind to its most perfect objects of cognition. The analysis of the content allows the conclusion that the arguments used in the treatise largely coincide with those found in Ficino’s opuscula theologica and Platonic Theology.

“Fenomenologia: natura, znaczenie, ograniczenia” is a translation of Bernard Lonergan’s “Phenomenology: nature, significance, limitations”. His twelfth lecture on phenomenology discusses its definition, subject, nature, significance, and connections with other sciences. It introduces the reader to the main concepts of this philosophical school and presents authors characterized by this way of thinking. The Canadian philosopher understands phenomenology as a study method where insight forms an essential part. It is worth noticing that the category of insight is central for the epistemology of Bernard J. F. Lonergan (1904–1984), a twentieth-century thinker and priest philosophizing at the juncture of phenomenology, Thomism, and hermeneutics. The text was translated by Dominika Dziurosz-Serafinowicz.

Autor omawia wybrane antynaturalistyczne argumenty z rozumu, proponowane przez takich myślicieli, jak Balfour, Haldane, Joad, Lewis, Taylor, Moreland, Plantinga, Reppert i Hasker. Jak utrzymuje, żaden z tych argumentów nie stanowi poważnego wyzwania dla naturalistów, którzy są zwolennikami teorii identyczności. Co więcej, twierdzi, że niektóre z nich nie stanowią nawet przekonujących wyzwań dla naturalizmu wziętego w ogólności. W końcowej części tekstu autor zwraca uwagę na pewne wyraźne różnice między antynaturalistycznymi argumentami Williama Haskera a pozostałymi argumentami omawianymi w artykule.