The aim of this paper is to present the idea of violence in Nietzsche’s work, seen as a basic principle that organizes and unites different elements of his philosophy. Violence is one of its crucial categories, which he exploits in his descriptions and analyses of metaphysical, historical and social-cultural reality. In what follows, I shall examine different meanings and renditions of violence in Nietzsche, both in their negative as well as positive aspects. I shall start from an attempt to locate (...) Nietzsche’s understanding of violence within the Western philosophical tradition. Then, I will discuss it in the light of the evolution of Nietzsche’s work. By analyzing the positive and constructive meaning of violence, I shall be able to conclude the essay by emphasizing that in Nietzsche’s political project violence acquires a spiritual and sublime nature. (shrink)

L'article analyse l'interprétation deconstructive de la pensée de F. Nietzsche, qui a été presentée par Sarah Kofman sous l'influence de Jacques Derrida et à la base de sa critique de la tradition logocentrique. Kofman discerne deux périodes dans l'evolution de la philosophie de Nietzsche. Dans la premier Nietzsche part de la notion de la métaphore, qui detruit la possibilité du langage rationelle et objectif, mais qui se rapport symboliquement à l'essence dionysiaque du monde. Dans la seconde Nietzsche développe la notion (...) de l'interprétation: la volonté de puissance n'est que l'interprétation, "la hypothèse interprétative" qui fonde la possibilité de l'interprétation en général. À la fin de l'article j'analyse les difficultés concernant l'interprétation presentée par Kofman. (shrink)

Die ewige Wiederkehr gehört zu den meist unklaren Fragen in der Philosophie von Friedrich Nietzsche. Die Idee der ewigen Wiederkunft wird von mir als ein integraler Teil seiner Philosophie angesehen, da meines Erachtens ist das die grundsätzliche Kategorie, die das Ganze jener Philosophie begreifen laßt. Am Beispiel konkreter Interpretationen werden dann genannt und kritisch betrachtet drei Interpretationsweisen der Idee der ewigen Wiederkehr, die sich in der Geschichte der Rezeption der Philosophie Nietzsches finden lassen: die ewige Wiederkehr im stoischen Sinne als (...) Wiederkehr der "identischen Fälle, die ewige Wiederkunft im ethischen Sinne als Postulat der Wirkung und die ewige Wiederkunft im dionysischen Sinne - als Prinzip und Charakteristik des Werdens. Ich spreche für die "dionysische" Interpretation aus, da sie mit den Voraussetzungen und mit der ursprünglichen Fassung der Philosophie von F. Nietzsche am meisten übereinstimmt. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest ukazanie wpływu Kantowskiej koncepcji wolności i zła na myśl Schellinga z tzw. pisma o wolności. W pierwszej części przedstawiam trudności wyjaśnienia zła jako kategorii moralnej na gruncie koncepcji wolności ujętej jako racjonalna autonomia i przedstawionej w Uzasadnieniu metafizyki moralności i Krytyce praktycznego rozumu: Kant utożsamia wolność z posłuszeństwem prawu moralnemu i tym samym nie jest w stanie ugruntować możliwości samego wyboru dobra i zła, jak również osobowego i jednostkowego charakteru wolności człowieka jako zmysłowo-rozumnej całości. Następnie pokazuję niesatysfakcjonującą (...) próbę rozwiązania tych trudności w Religii w obrębie rozumu, w której, na gruncie teorii maksym, podejmuje on problem możliwości zła jako aktu wolności: Kant nie jest w stanie określić statusu skłonności do zła jako pozaempirycznej podstawy zła, jak i tegoż powszechności. W drugiej części omawiam Schellinga oryginalną koncepcję wolności, która ukazuje jej osobowy i jednostkowy charakter na gruncie nowej ontologii ja jako bytu swobodnie się samookreślającego. Koncepcja ta pozwoliła mu podjąć próbę rozwiązania przejętego od Kanta problemu zła. (shrink)

Moim celem jest przedstawienie nazistowskich interpretacji myśli Nietzschego oraz interpretacji Lukacsa – oskarżającej ją o protofaszyzm. Następnie omawiam znane interpretacje z lat czterdziestych i pięćdziesiątych ubiegłego wieku, które broiły Nietzschego, choć wskazywały na pewne dwuznaczności jego myśli. Na końcu przedstawiam własne stanowisko, wskazując na bezpodstawność oskarżeń wobec Nietzschego, którego utopijny projekt był oparty na elitystycznej idei aktywności kulturotwórczej.

Przedmiotem artykułu jest problem wolności w myśli Kirkegaarda i Nietzschego, zwłaszcza ich krytyka wolności jako liberum arbitirum w historycznym kontekście dominacji tzw. wolności politycznych. Można dostrzec zadziwiające podobieństwo między obu myślicielami pytającymi o egzystencjalne znaczenie i funkcje apoteozy wolności politycznych mających zagwarantować wolność wyboru: w ich absolutyzacji obaj widzą wyraz słabości duchowej człowieka nowoczesnego, jego niezdolności do autonomii i samokształtowania. W nacisku na wolność negatywną, rozumianą jako usuwanie wszelkich przeszkód i ograniczeń dla wolności wyboru, obaj dostrzegają usprawiedliwienie niezdolności jednostki do (...) ugruntowania wolności pozytywnej. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie związków między kulturowym doświadczeniem nowoczesności a powstaniem egzystencjalizmu. Egzystencjalizm stanowi bowiem teoretyczno-ontologiczną artykulację wielu zjawisk zarówno świata nowoczesnego, jak i historiozoficznego schematu nowoczesności, będącego postacią jego samorozumienia.

Perceptual experience usually comes with “phenomenal force”, a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non‐inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic role of phenomenal force. Drawing on Bayesian modeling in cognitive science, I argue that the sense of reality that accompanies conscious vision can be viewed as epistemically appraisable in light (...) of its rational etiology. (shrink)

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition , brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in (...) the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system. (shrink)

The article presents possible applications of Paul Ricoeur’s theory in interpretation of legal texts and legally relevant human action. One should notice that Paul Ricoeur developed a comprehensive interpretation theory of two seemingly distant phenomena: literary texts and human action. When interrelating these issues, it becomes possible, on the basis of Ricoeur’s work, to construct a unified theory of the interpretation of legal texts and of legally relevant human action. What is provided by this theory for jurisprudence is the possibility (...) of formulating a comprehensive theory of application of law, well established in the ontology of the recipient of the legal text. It should be emphasised that the resulting benefits, outlined in the article become particularly noticeable when set against the background of the methodological weaknesses of legal positivism, concerning both the interpretation of law and a syllogistic model of its application. (shrink)

This paper centers around the notion that internal, mental representations are grounded in structural similarity, i.e., that they are so-called S-representations. We show how S-representations may be causally relevant and argue that they are distinct from mere detectors. First, using the neomechanist theory of explanation and the interventionist account of causal relevance, we provide a precise interpretation of the claim that in S-representations, structural similarity serves as a “fuel of success”, i.e., a relation that is exploitable for the representation using (...) system. Then, we discuss crucial differences between S-representations and indicators or detectors, showing that—contrary to claims made in the literature—there is an important theoretical distinction to be drawn between the two. (shrink)

[K. Marciniak, Pro Cicerone poeta. Poezja Marka Tulliusza Cycerona na przestrzeni stuleci, Warszawa 2008].

The aim of this paper is to provide a logically accurate and technologically sound taxonomy of artifact functions. To this end, I review one of the recent proposals of such taxonomy: the Reconciled Functional Basis. Since it turns out that this taxonomy involves some serious shortcomings, I attempt to refine it with the help of the conceptual framework of DOLCE, which is a foundational ontology in Knowledge Representation research.

Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has - at least according to some - a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind, not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive phenomenon meet to count as a representational explanation in the first place. The aim of this article is to propose a solution to this latter problem. (...) I will assume that representational explanations should be construed as a form of mechanistic explanations and proceed by proposing a general sketch of a functional architecture of a representational cognitive mechanism. According to the view on offer here, representational mechanisms are mechanisms that meet four conditions: the structural resemblance condition, the action-guidance condition, the decouplability condition, and the error-detection condition. (shrink)

Modernity and What Has Been Lost comes out of a conference held at the Jagiellonian University in Krakw̤, Poland, on June 4-5, 2009 that sought to identify Leo Strauss's intellectual background in re: the repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation). The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, or (...) abhorrent to those who love the search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen "the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns," and refers to the esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries. Strauss binds the concept of natural right with the question of maintenance of conditions for philosophizing, and it probably seems to him that such defense of philosophy is the highest task in our times. However, one must be well aware that philosophizing always means a perilous way of life. Indeed, it may be destructive of the city (polis) itself as far as the city exists due to some crucial beliefs the philosopher might put in doubt. Reflecting on those issues, Strauss engaged in several highly important debates with his contemporaries, in an open way with, e.g., Carl Schmitt, Karl Lw̲ith and Alexandre Kojv̈e, and more tacitly with Martin Heidegger"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

No more than a few years ago could open an article concerning neurophenomenology with a statement describing recent rediscovery of the problem of consciousness by the cognitive sciences and pointing to the fact that right now, explaining conscious experience in neuroscientific or computational terms poses the greatest challenge for those sciences. Today however, constatations of this sort start to sound like trivial descriptions of a universally recognized state of affairs. The question of “how the water of the physical brain is (...) turned into a wine of consciousness” is now among the mainstream problems of cognitive science. (shrink)

The paper contains an attempt at formulating the project of logic comprised in Jan Łukasiewicz's article „On determinism” and a construction of a logic which would realise this project. Such a logic consists of three consequence-operations build upon a four-element algebra. The values of the algebra have been defined by means of the following set of sentences: true and true today, true but not true today, false but not false today and false and false today. It turns out that only (...) one of the consequences is different from the classical consequence and all of them are logically two-valued. It is proved moreover, that the assumption that tautologies consists of sentences-forms which are „always” true today, results in the non-existence of such tautologies. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the arguments against the existence of artefacts, which were propounded by Mariusz Grygianiec in his book Identyczność i trwanie. I show that all of these arguments are inconclusive or are in the need of further elaboration. Therefore, I conclude that the the metaphysical thesis to the effect that artefacts do not exist remains unsupported.

TRADITION AS A COMMUNICATION SYSTEM. A PRAGMATIC APPROACH A context of my paper is the debate on reason, tradition and traditional communities, in which this moral and epistemological issues were discussed as a part of general socio-philosophical theory of modernity. In particular I intend to locate my considerations in the context of formal-pragmatic theory of modern communicative rationality developed by Jürgen Habermas and Robert Brandom. I will provide a competitive model of the rationality of tradition by applying a conceptual toolkit (...) of pragmatically oriented analysis to explain practices connected with vocabulary of tradition. I argue that tradition as a communication system has a fully rational structure. My main claim is that communicative structure of tradition has a rational structure of language game. This structure includes defined principles of communication for members of closed tradition-grounded community and rule of inclusion for potential new members. Firstly I consider closely internal principles of communication within the framework of tradition contrasting them shortly with normative-deontic rules of the postenlightenment idea of pragmatic communication discussed by Jürgen Habermas and Robert Brandom. After that I examine the rule of inclusion — the rule, which mediates between closed system of tradition-based community and his environment. (shrink)