The purpose of the article is to present an interpretation in the light of which one can read a characteristic aspect of the understanding of being in Presocratic philosophy. The starting point is to emphasize the idea of ​​a place within the etymology of the verb “be”: “to be” generally means ‘to be in the world’. Then the world is characterized as something implicite existing (i.e. beyond the human mind) and having a “second plane”: order hidden behind phenomena. Attempts to understand it were called investigations into the nature (of “things”), which meant the real foundation of the world and its active source – something that internally constitutes all sensual objects, providing building materials, structures and laws of development. Against this background (interpretive context), the understanding of being is defined as an element of nature – something identifiable in a distributive way and always in connection with (dependent) with self-contained nature. This element can be understood in two ways: as an object accessible to the senses taken together with the constituting nature, e.g. concrete tree, or the very internal nature, e.g. fire (Heraclitus) or four basic elements (Empedocles) from which sensual objects originate or consist.

Positivist philosophy is focused on the problem of science and especially on its cognitive results and applications. We can say that Polish intellectual circles of this era glorified science. In her article, Barbara Szotek presents this phenomenon through the figure of Aleksander Świętochowski, the most famous representative and ideologist of scientific positivism. His works best illustrate the evolution of positivist views on science and its social role.

In this article, I attempt to analyze some of the contexts of the language of being after Heidegger’s “turn” (Kehre), a clearly discernible change in his philosophy in the second half of the 1930s. Heidegger proposed a new concept to revealing being itself, namely its “event‑enowning” (Ereignis). The key to this understanding of being is that now language becomes “the house” of being. Heidegger combined this with the “joint” (fugue) function. Language as a fugue joins with being itself, and therefore constantly follows and touches upon the boundary of silence. Silence is the ultimate complement of language and constantly limits it, because what is said only reveals a part of being, while the rest remains hidden and “expresses” silence, as it is in the case of a fugue, where the main motif of the theme “escapes” into silence. In the text, I first consider the fugue of being, then the language of being as its expression, in order to consider the problem of saying further, and finally analyze the limit of language, i.e. the way to silence.

In his article, Jakub Lampart addresses the social, cultural, and historical functions of various forms of knowledge (and of science in particular) as they can be reconstructed on the basis of the few descriptive remarks found in Paul Feyerabend’s works in the three periods of his scholarly career: moderate, transitional, and radical. Lampart interprets Feyerabend’s views on the relationship between knowledge and society as influenced by the following: the early concepts of Karl Popper (in the moderate period), some of the theses of Benjamin L. Whorf and the late Ludwig Wittgenstein (in the radical period). The article also contains: a) a juxtaposition of Feyerabend’s views with the theories of these thinkers; (b) an attempt to explain Feyerabend’s use of the term “ideology”; (c) a description of two trends characterizing different systems of knowledge: isolation and interaction; d) a description of the two types of ideal members of a given tradition: rationalists and pragmatists.

Theories of discursive integration form a group of theories that see the principles responsible for the integration of experience data (apperception) in the practices and schemes of discourse. These theories indicate that the use of language unites and organizes experience data. Their main assumption can be expressed as follows: this integration does not inhere in objects and cannot be derived from them; hence this integration cannot be secondarily expressed in language, but results exclusively from the use of language (or discourse). In this article, Witold Marzęda gives an overview of narrativist theories, script theories, Gazzaniga and Dennett’s models, which refer to evolutionary psychology, and the theories of Lakoff and Johnson – all these being theories of discursive integration. Marzęda’s main objective is to formulate a paradox, which consists in a trap of self-referentiality into which these theories fall: they postulate some general properties of discourse, which, firstly, do not have to become at once the properties of individual models and which, secondly, do not admit of falsification.