This article shows that the question of “Historical Thinking and the Human” demands expanding the field of the philosophy of history. What I propose is to investigate the issue from two perspectives: firstly, by positioning it in the broader philosophical context, one that increasingly transcends the boundaries of the humanities to enter the realm of the life sciences; and secondly, by drawing on a wider range of analytical material than has usually been the case in classic works in the philosophy (...) of history. I will critically reflect upon history’s anthropocentric biases, highlighting the need to develop an alternative to history. My thinking is aligned, on the one hand, with notions of the agency of images that have emerged from art criticism and visual culture studies, and, on the other hand, with the idea of theriomorphism, which I explore in terms of new animism, new totemism and philosophical ethology. In my analysis of works by the South African artist Nandipha Mntambo, I argue that a future-oriented redefinition of the human should transcend the limited categories that have emerged within the framework of history understood as a Eurocentric approach to the past rooted in Greco-Judaic-Christian tradition. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 217-240, April 2024.

Epistemology, confronted with a rapid development of individual branches of science, has been pressed to establish its own status and position as well as to define its relation with science. The multiple perspectives on this issue can be grouped into two major positions: integrism (postulates a close co-existence between epistemology and science) and separatism (argues in favour of a full independence of science and epistemology).In the paper I analyse the two views and try to prove that the debate between integrism (...) and separatism cannot be resolved, as the two approaches belong to different and incompatible philosophical traditions: analytical and transcendental. In the article these issues are examined, and arguments in favour of the separatist view are offered. It is argued for the clear separation of epistemology from science. (shrink)

Spór między antropologią naturalistyczną a antynaturalistyczną, w którym każda partia usiłuje wyjaśnić osobliwość człowieka wychodząc z opozycji natura - kultura (człowiek jako byt do natury sprowadzony albo naturze przeciwstawny) jest zasadniczo nierozwiązywalny. Kulturalizm (stanowisko autorki) zakłada realność bytu jako pewnej całości, tzn. realność społeczno-historycznej obiektywności, w której opozycja miedzy naturą a kulturą zostaje zniesiona.

В кінці 2000 р. була заснована Асоціація литовських, українсь­ких істориків. Організова­ний Асоціацією цикл конференцій Чин Святого Василія Великого став важливим стимулом для формування нових центрів україністики, крім вже існуючих: діюча у Вільнюсі парафія Пре­святої Трійці ; Громада українців м.Вільнюса. Такими центрами укра­їністики, що прославляють отців василіян, стали середня школа м. Базильонай, католицька середня школа “Аушра” м.Рєтавас і “Садиба Рейніса” в м.Скапішкіс. Вищезгадані містечка розташовані на різній відстані від Вільнюса: Базильонай - 208 км; Рєтавас - 242 км; Скапішкіс - 162 км. (...) Містечка знаходяться в різних місцевостях Литви: Базильонай - в північній частині Литви; Рєтавас - в Жємайтії; Скапішкіс - в Східній частині Литви. (shrink)

Textbooks have played the leading role in academic education for centuries and their form has evolved, adapting to the needs of students, teachers and technological possibilities. Advances in technology have caused educators to look for new sources of knowledge development, which students could use inside and outside the classroom. Today’s sophisticated learning tools range from virtual environments to interactive multimedia resources, which can be called e-textbooks. Different types of new educational materials that go beyond printed books are now used to (...) support the academic curriculum, with the most interesting ones exemplified in this article to show their value in medical and life sciences education. Certain interesting attempts by Polish publishers at applying technology to support both self-paced and tutor-paced student learning in the medical profession and related areas are presented. The data was collected through a review of literature, discussions with e-learning specialists and medical students, as well as an analysis of examples of good practices. The article also discusses the results of a countrywide survey on the use of e-textbooks to enhance medical education. The research investigates the targeted academic staff’s attitudes towards the use of e-textbooks, the limitations of their implementation, and the character of e-resources currently used by Polish higher education medical institutions. (shrink)

This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a " things." This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is "real," where "regaining" the object is conceived as a means for re-establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between the (...) organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin Heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to Bruno Latour's idea of the agency of things and object-oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics. To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person in Argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the "contradictory" or anomalous status of the present-absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present-absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ Algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square. (shrink)

Projections for replacement rate achievable from two mandatory pillars of the pension system indicate a significant reduction in retirement income compared to regular professional activity. The designers of the new philosophy of retirement have made an assumption that all three pillars will play equivalent role in providing retirement income. They have also assumed that the participants of the pension system will be kept informed about the height of the expected benefits derived from the first pillar and the amount of funds (...) raised in the second pillar. Forecast of low (unsatisfactory) benefits from a compulsory part of the system is supposed to persuade people to make informed decisions aimed at increasing retirement income. (shrink)

A crisis of our age that is usually identified with the loss of the sacred was one of the causes of the fall into irony in the nineteenth century. In the case of historians, as Hayden White has shown in Metahistory, this irony was caused by a "bitterness" stemming from the failure of reality to fulfill their expectations. An ironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural decline. A current stage of irony manifests itself (...) in a doubt as to the capacity of language to grasp reality. Thus we live in a "prison house of language." An intellectual parlor-game produces "second-hand knowledge" that cannot satisfy the needs of post-postmodern men and women still looking for another metanarrative. Therefore, the main purpose of this essay is to answer the question: how can we go beyond irony?This text is a "post-postmodern post mortem to postmodernism." I am grateful to postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos. I need order. I miss metanarrative.In trying to break with some modern/postmodern "principles" and retain within my discourse the premodernist perspective, I follow the current trend in the humanities. We observe at present the breakdown of methodology and the rise of a more poetic approach in the human sciences. Evidence of this phenomenon is the more autobiographical form of writing in anthropology and a more literary style in historical writing . This trend is associated with a revaluation of the subjective aspects of research. Perhaps, and I would welcome it, it also could be identified with a reappearance of a Collingwoodian idea of history as human self-knowledge, knowledge about human nature, knowledge about "what it is to be a man . . . what it is to be the kind of man you are . . . and what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is.". (shrink)

One way of showing respect for human dignity is providing people with a suitable level of income security. This respect can be manifested by establishing a certain financial minimum that will allow people to function independently in society and use the opportunities offered by civilisation. The awareness of the above gives special meaning to the level of incomes obtained by the elderly. The fact that pensions are the primary resource for the population to meet its financial needs makes the pension (...) insurance solutions particularly important, especially the formula used for calculating the amount of a future pension. Its final amount will affect the pensioner’s standard of living, enabling them to enjoy the same quality of life they had in the period of economic activity or gradually causing impoverishment. The levels of future pensions depend on factors related to the systemic solutions, but pensioner’s personal characteristics also exert strong influence on their amounts. With the responsibility for having decent incomes after retirement being transferred to the insured themselves, it has become necessary to promote pension awareness (the knowledge of how the new system works) that translates into pension prudence prompting people to reduce voluntarily their current consumption in favour of future consumption. The public need to understand that the income replacement rate will be high only for few of the insured persons, i.e. those boasting high earnings and long, unbroken periods of economic activity. People with poorer records of economic activity will draw lower pensions that will not always allow them to live decent lives after retirement. (shrink)

The subject matter of the study is an analysis of the social consequences of increasing the retirement age of women up to 67 years. The discussion on the change in the retirement age is usually focused on its economic and financial aspects, hence a deeper scientific analysis is needed in relation to the social repercussions of this operation. The main subjects of the study are as follows: maintenance of equality tendencies in relation to the principles of social justice, changes in (...) the social structure manifested especially on the labour market, social expectations as to employment security for those approaching retirement and development of flexible forms of working, development of incentives encouraging employers to keep current staff or hire new employees of older age, and changes in social roles. (shrink)

Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 2003. ISBN 0226317919 (cloth), 208 pp.

Produced in honor of White's eightieth birthday, _Re-Figuring Hayden White_ testifies to the lasting importance of White's innovative work, which firmly reintegrates historical studies with literature and the humanities. The book is a major reconsideration of the historian's contributions and influence by an international group of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. Individual essays address the key concepts of White's intellectual career, including tropes, narrative, figuralism, and the historical sublime while exploring the place of White's work in the philosophy (...) of history, postmodernism, and ethics. They also discuss his role as historian and teacher and apply his ideas to specific historical events. (shrink)

Les sœurs Papin, auteures d’un fait divers tragique qui a sidéré la France en 1933, ont inspiré, voire fasciné, hommes de lettres, cinéastes, psychanalystes. Christine et Léa Papin seraient dépositaires des traumatismes familiaux inter et transgénérationnels non transformés et clivés. Séparées dans la petite enfance, placées par leur mère comme domestiques chez la famille Lancelin, elles reproduiraient entre elles le lien d’interdépendance symbiotique instaurée auparavant avec elle. Le retour du vécu traumatique clivé et l’ébranlement de la symbiose consécutif à la (...) rupture d’avec celle-ci seraient à l’origine du passage à l’acte criminel sauvage perpétré par les sœurs sur leurs patronnes. (shrink)

Global social, ecological and economic crises are contributing to the need for meaningfulness in different spheres of life, including work, as an increasing concern to employees. However, the current understanding of meaningfulness is bound by its normativity and thus does not meet the uncertainty present in today’s work. We utilize the Levinasian concept of “the Other” to provide a non-normative conceptualization of meaningfulness in the context of corporate volunteering (CV) and empirically explore work meaningfulness in CV projects in Poland and (...) Finland. We find work meaningfulness to arise from proximity to the Other and the otherness of the Other. Our study contributes to the discussion on meaningful work in the fields of business ethics and management studies through a non-normative reconceptualization of meaningfulness. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to place Czesław Miłosz in the tradition of Gnosticism and Manichaeism, to recall the Nobel Prize winner’s literary fascinations which have especially influenced his poetry, as well as to show a possible way of interpretation of his works. The starting point for further discussion is the question posed by the Rev Józef Sadzik in Wstęp (the Preface) to Ziemia Ulro (The Land of Ulro): “co stało się z kulturą europejską w jej «romantycznym przesileniu»” (What has (...) become of European culture at the time of its «Romantic turning-point»), when, generally speaking, the spiritual and material elements separated? In the time when western civilization openly turned against its Christian roots, each artist connected with this cultural tradition was made to make choices. At that time Miłosz took to analysing the motif of unde malum (Where does evil come from?) and had a number of lectures on Dostojewski at the University of California. This led him to the philosophy of Mani, who is widely regarded as the founder of Manichaeism. A volume of poems with the title Hymn o Perle (A Hymn to the Pearl), published by Miłosz in 1982, which, as the poet explains, directly alludes to the apocrypha of Gnostic origin, seems to support this supposition. The next stage consisted in the fusion of the two threads, that is to say, the Manichaean and the Gnostic motifs. The poet finds elements of Manichaeism and gnosis in works by Emanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, Adam Mickiewicz and his relative Oskar Miłosz. Czesław Miłosz seems to me to be the next link in the chain of the same philosophical and religions movement. (shrink)

Dialectical contradictions influence organizational processes in distinct ways and create a unique dynamics in terms of leadership process in entrepreneurialorganizations. We integrate research from charismatic, transformational, and organizational literature, as well as entrepreneurship literature, to create a generalized model of entrepreneurial leadership that is descriptively robust and conceptually distinct from existing concepts. We focus specifically on visionary, transformational, and motivational contradictions of entrepreneurial leadership and conclude by discussing the implications of organizational reconciliation of these three contradictions for leadership research and (...) practice. (shrink)

Background:Women's health has received renewed attention in the last few years including health rehabilitation options for women affected by breast cancer. Dancing has often been regarded as one attractive option for supporting women's well-being and health, but research with women recovering from breast cancer is still in its infancy. Dancing with Health is multi-site pilot study that aimed to evaluate a dance programme for women in recovery from breast cancer across five European countries.Methods:A standardized 32 h dance protocol introduced a (...) range of Latin American dances presented within a sports and exercise framework with influences from dance movement therapy. Fifty-four women (M age 53.51; SD 7.99) participated in the study who had a breast cancer diagnosis 6 weeks, no indication of metastasis, or scheduled surgery/chemotherapy/radiation treatment for the duration of the intervention. Primary outcome data was collected for anthropometric and fitness measures next to cancer-related quality of life.T-tests and Wilcoxon signed ranked tests were used to establish differences pre and post intervention. Cohen's d was also calculated to determine the effect size of the intervention.Results:Statistically significant changes were found for: (i) weight, right and left forearm circumference and hip; (ii) 6 min walking, right and left handgrip, sit-to-stand and sit-and-reach; (iii) the EORTC-QLQ C30 summary score as well as the subscales of emotional and social functioning and symptoms. In all cases the direction of change was positive, while Cohen's d calculated showed that the effect of the intervention for these parameters ranged from intermediate to large.Conclusion:Changes on the above anthropometric, fitness and quality of life measures suggest that the intervention was of value to the participating women recovering from breast cancer. Results also advocate collaborative efforts across countries to further research. (shrink)

Ewa Domańska, Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland) and Stanford University (USA), historian of historiography and methodologist of history, formulated interesting comments about the state of humanities and social sciences. The development of interdisciplinary research causes the interpenetration of different disciplines. Although this kind of research is promising, inspiring as well as influencing the development of science, careless research may cause some threats in the longer term. According to Domańska, the lack of qualifications and reliability (...) in this area (especially in the area of theory and methodology) undermines the authonomy of the main disciplines and decline in the professionalism of research. This led the author to create the project, which aims to defend the independence of the threatened disciplines as well as their ‘re-professionalisation’. It can be achieved by strongly emphasizing the role of theory in science; a strong embeddement of a discipline in the theory. Domańska’s concept can be a recipe, which is a dichotomic project. Firstly, it supposes a ‘practical methodology’, which is a constructing of the theory thanks to empirical research material. Secondly, it supposes a ‘virtue epistemology’, which is the ethical aspect of the researcher’s attitude and his work. The aim of the paper is to discuss Domańska’s project and underline the originality of her concept in the context of economic and social sciences. The economic history is a specific discipline which develops at the crossroad of history and economics. It lets me put forward the thesis that Domańska’s suggestions are relevant to the research of economic history. I will show what cognitive chances are the result of the ontology of economic history. I will question what the possible threats are for the main disciplines (history and economics) as a result of the lack of professionalism in the interdisciplinary research of the economic past, and ask if Domańska’s project is attractive for the economic history research thanks to the strong setting in the ‘practical methodology’ in the theory. I also ask what the role of new theoretical approaches in that area is, and whether it is possible to formulate innovatory conceptions in the economic history. Finally, I question the role of ‘virtue epistemology’ or the ethical aspect of an economic historian’s work. (shrink)

The main purpose of the article is to analyze the statements of philosophical Ukrainian Studies about the anthropological specifics of Ukrainian philosophical thought by means of historicalphilosophical cultural-predicative analysis. The research methodology was determined primarily by the concept of cultural attribution and translation in the dialogue of languages of historical cultures of the Poznań Methodological School (J. Topolski, W. Wrzosek, E. Domańska) and the culturological approach in historical-philosophical Ukrainian Studies (V. Horskyi, S. Rudenko). The statements of the language of (...) historical and philosophical Ukrainian studies are analyzed by means of historicalphilosophical cultural-predicative analysis. The latter is a specific humanities research strategy, which we propose as a means of studying the communicative specifics and syntactic correctness of the language of historical-philosophical theory. The study of communicative specifics takes place from the perspective of modernized versions of metaphysical, phenomenological, and dialectical logic. The first is understood as the logic of transcendental metaphysics, the second as the logic of immanent metaphysics, and the third as the logic of procedural metaphysics. Such an approach provides a qualitative and comprehensive understanding of the analyzed statements. The statements of the language of the historical-philosophical theory are generalized in its names, depending on the perspective of one of the three versions of the logic of philosophical reasoning. The offered historical-philosophical cultural-predicative analysis of communicative specifics and the syntactic correctness of the Ukrainian historical-philosophical theory statements opens new dimensions in research of the anthropological specifics of Ukrainian philosophy. (shrink)

The article follows dynamic changes and evolutions in the history of research theories in the field of humanities. It begins with an analysis of studies on group identity, and drawing from ideas by Ewa Domanska, it employs the metaphor of the see as the space in which one can navigate for new themes and ideas. A special importance is attached to the concept of autobiography, especially in reference to the researcher’s life and experience. Boleslaw Prus’s The Doll and its critical (...) reception offers a good case study to illustrate this approach of analysis which draws on private lives of interpreters and critics. The influence of autobiography on literary theory is analysed using Susan Faludi’s Backlash and In the Darkroom. (shrink)