Wojciech Sady, Wittgenstein on Thought and World

The aim of this paper is to criticize several widely accepted interpretations Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Against some of them author argues that, firstly, the idea of isomorphism between language structures and the world is questionable and, in a significant sense, impossible; secondly, he claims that early Wittgenstein’s philosophy is focused not so much on the language-world relation but rather on the thought-world relation.

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Shoshana Ronen, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche on Ethics

I consider ethics to be the essence and the end of the philosophy of both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. While in Nietzsche’s case this statement is quite obvious, especially in the light of his Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, one may think, mistakenly in my opinion, that Wittgenstein thought was very little related to ethical problems for they were for him a part of the domain which one must be silent about. I argue that the aim of Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is a sort of secular salvation. I call it salvation having in mind some the ideas common to both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein for whom the concepts of freeing, releasing, healing and overcoming oneself, as well as of removing misunderstandings, were main aims of their philosophies. It is a salvation because both philosophers strove for a change in human life, a revolution within the self, and they evidently did not accept our ‘being in the world’ as it is. In conclusion I argue that Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are philosophers who aimed to define the good available to humans, and the life worthy of humanity.

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Katarzyna Gurczyńska, Soul-Body Relation in late Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophy

The article is an attempt toward a reconstruction Wittgenstein’s solution of psychophysical problem. According to authoress, Wittgenstein rejects traditional dualistic conception of man as composed of soul and body, and he perceived the human as a psycho-physic whole. Knowledge about such a whole is a primary knowledge, and it is embedded in our reactions toward phenomena like sorrow, anger, joy, etc. According to this analysis, the soul-body distinction is to be seen as a secondary corollary resulting from the interpretation of experience.

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Dawid Karaś, Philosophical Games With Animals: A Case Study

The paper is a critical reconstruction of the Michael P.T. Leahy’s argumentation as presented in his Against Liberation. Putting Animals in Perspective. According to Leahy, animals – in contrast to linguistically self-conscious people – are ontologically lower forms of being (i.e. primitive beings) which may, for this reason, be freely used by man within currently existing social practices. Leahy supports his position by exploring psychological concepts formulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein who was criticized by philosophical advocates of “animal liberation” for making linguistic competence an essential condition of sentience. I agree with Leahy that at least some of these accusations against Wittgenstein are unfounded. Simultaneously, however, I argue that Leahy’s employment of Wittgenstein in defense of his own position is not fully consistent. In this context I claim that Leahy is both unreliable and excessively sanguine in his description of contemporary forms of animal exploitation and animal suffering related to it.

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Krzysztof Chodasewicz, The Problem of Animal Consciousness

The subject of this article is the problem of animal consciousness. Our folk interpretations and explanations of animal behaviour appeal to conscious mental states like e.g. fear or anger. Scholars, however, do not agree as to whether animals do in fact have conscious mental states similar to humans. According to Shettleworth, one may distinguish three positions in relation to this problem: (1) radical opponents of the concept of animal consciousness who claim that animal are not conscious in any interesting sense; (2) sceptics who believe that some species probably do have consciousness yet it cannot be subject to scientific investigations due to subjective nature of conscious mental states; (3) cognitive ethologists who believe that most species are potentially conscious and the central task for behavioural biologists is the investigation of the nature of their consciousness (pace Griffin); cognitive ethologists argue that their claims are supported by four arguments connected with (1) gradual evolution; (2) flexible and complex behaviour; (3) animal communication, and (4) neurophysiological similarity. These arguments have to face strong philosophical counter-arguments, especially the one from multiple realizability and the zombie hypothesis. In response, a new methodological approach is proposed to avoid these difficulties. It is based on Morgan’s Canon, interpreted here as a kind of zoo-psychological Ockham’s razor.

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Paweł Okołowski, Free will in Lucretius’ and Lem’s materialism

In this paper the author argues that the philosophy of Stanisław Lem is a form of neo-Lucretianism, and he considers Lem as the Lucretius of the 20th century. The article demonstrates some parallel strains in their views on free will. The problem of free will presents insurmountable difficulties within all philosophical perspectives. The approaches which accept free will are considered indeterminist; examples of this approach are the conceptions of Epicurus, St. Augustine, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Berdyaev or Jaspers. Stanisław Lem, who thought of himself as a materialist, wished to be considered as an indeterminist as well. According to him, the source of human free will is the social nature of human; he believed that the human cannot exist without a community. Our metaphysical and moral freedom consists in choosing a system of preferences, i.e. a set of autonomous values, from among the different systems persisting in a society. The author argues that at this point Lem’s naturalism reaches its limits.

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Adam Piekarski, Problem of Method in Bergson’s Philosophy

The article discusses Henri Bergson’s views concerning the philosophical method. He points out to some problems connected with distinctions introduced by Bergson between intellect and intuition, and between science and metaphysics. The problems with these distinctions made themselves tangible especially in the context of the question concerning the status of scientific knowledge and the possibility of cooperation between philosophy and science. Author argues that Bergson favoured methodological pluralism and that his position is closer to empiricism than to intuitionism.

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Bartłomiej Skrzypulec, Is Fichte’s Idealism an Example of Dummett’s Antirealism?

The aim of paper is to consider some similarities and differences between Fichte’s doctrine of idealism and Dummett’s conception of semantic antirealism. While Fichte built his idealistic view in the classical way as a metaphysical doctrine, Dummet sought to ground the fundamental distinction between realistic and antirealistic theories in alternative semantic conceptions of truth conditions. The main question of the paper is whether it is possible to interpret Fichte’s metaphysical doctrine as an anti-realist one according to the criteria proposed by Dummett. To order to answer such a question one has to consider a set of interrelated issues; among them (1) is Fichte’s doctrine based upon an assumption of a reality determining the truth values of sentences; (2) does it accept facts the cognition of which exceeds the epistemic abilities of the subject; (3) does it allow for the existence of facts which are ontologically unrelated to subject. In Fichte’s view a subject consist of elements such as “the I”, “the Absolute I”, “the Non-I”, “the empirical I” which are related to each other in a complex way. Within the analytical philosophy the concept of the subject is much simpler and its meaning is usually confined to the meaning of the “empirical I” in Fichte’s terminology.

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Paweł Jarnicki, Metaphors in Discourse About Intertextuality

The author analyses conceptual metaphors characteristic of one of the literary theories, the theory of intertextuality, employing the methods of cognitive linguistics, i.e. the cognitive theory of metaphor. He claims that the tools of this conception enable one to describe the idea of paradigm-change; in this context author considers the role of metaphor in science. By interpreting synonyms as different realizations of various Idealized Cognitive Models, he shows that the change of metaphors employed in talking about ‘what happens between texts’ (inter-text) leads to evolutionary change from ‘influentology’ to ‘intertextuality’, a transformation closely related to the change of the subject of history of literature. The change of metaphors transforms the focus of literary theory (as well as of literary history); its focus moves from the author to the reader, and from the act of creation to the act of reception. Within this perspective writing is no longer a creatio ex nihilo but an innovative re-creation of ‘what has already been read’. This change enables one to capture some paradoxical inversions, like the one which demonstrates how a subsequent texts influence texts prior to them.

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Marcin Wróbel, The Jesuit and Secular Astronomers 133

The story of the conflict between the Church and science in 17th century is frequently focused on the tragic cases of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, two great scientists and free-thinking truth- fighters who became victims of the inquisitorial trials. Against this background the author provides an evidence that Galileo was a widely respected person, enjoying the fame of the greatest living scientist of the time, with greatest scientific and astronomical achievements to his credit, among them the invention of telescope, discovery of Sun-spots, as well as discovery of the satellites of the Jupiter; he also enjoyed the protection of his powerful friend and supporter Cosma Medici. Author claims that his conflict with the Church authorities was, to significant extent, caused by his personal attitude toward the Church. Galileo thought that he can afford openly to contest the writings of Jesuits, the Church intellectual elite of the time. He did so by publishing impolite articles and polemics, harshly criticizing Jesuit astronomers and their scientific works. In so doing he prejudiced them against himself. As a result, he was accused of blasphemy and was eventually put to trial. The author recounts some details of both Galileo’s trials and argues that a more modest style of argument would be much more conducive to the establishment of the Copernican cosmology than the one Galileo actually employed. In this context the example of Johannes Kepler is worth reminding: having bowed his head before the authorities of the Church, he succeeded where Galileo failed; he managed to persuade the world that Copernican point of view in cosmology is legitimate one without falling into a trouble with the Inquisition.

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TRANSLATIONS

151–271

REVIEWS

273–280