Plotinus’s doctrine is based on henotheistic and emanative assumptions, and on this basis it develops its own methods of defining the One. This means, among other things, a transformation of the idea of the One, including its original, historically conditioned, content. In this context, the One can be conceived of only as the First, from which everything else emanates, so that in relation to it we can say that it has happened. If it exists, then it is a being in itself, and an index of itself.

The present study is an attempt to show the connection that takes place between a specific type of philosophising and the thinker’s attitude towards the world. The author claims that the method of philosophising depends in every case on the specific attitude towards the world that the philosopher assumes. This claim is being substantiated in the context of a dispute over the problem of the sources of Greek philosophy. The attitude of Greek philosophers is shown as a condition of the rise of the specific form of Greek rationality which produced the extraordinary phenomenon of Greek culture and philosophy.

The article aim at an analysis of the prologue (prooimion) of Parmenides’s poem. The statements that it includes, which are given a mythical and allegorical form, allow us to have a comprehensive view on the nature of the intellectual breakthrough that took place owing to that great Greek thinker. The terms used in the prologue (such as themis, noos. dike, ananke. moyra), while being characteristic of a mythical imagery, contain profound philosophical insights which permanently changed the status of the philosophical inquiry by the first lovers of wisdom. The distinction between truth and judgement, together with the philosophical characteristics of these notions, crowns the whole prologue, and represents a decisive quantum leap in thinking giving rise to strictly ontological inquiries.

The aim of the present article is a reconstruction of Zeno of Elea’s philosophical programme, based in Plato’s testimony, which is meant to contribute to our better understanding not only of Zeno’s argument, but also of Plato’s Parmenides. The author, owing to his making use of a suggestion contained in the dialogue, is able to collect Zeno’s paradoxes according to one interpretative key, so that they form a succession of coherently combined arguments, each of which refutes one by one the possible ways of understanding plurality. As a result, the traditional distinction into the paradoxes of movement and of plurality is undermined. Moreover, in the light of the interpretation put forward here, some of the attempts to avoid the said paradoxes - particularly the ones proposed by Aristotle - turn out to be inadequate.

According to Protagoras: „Man is the measure of all things, of those which exist, in that they exist, and of those which do not exist, in that they do not exist”. Usually, the interpretation of this is limited to its gnosiological or axiological aspects, but it is possible to interpret it by emphasising that the object to which the said measure should be applied is the existence or non-existence of things. In this sense, Protagoras’s statement describes man as the measure of being, and the whole problem is transposed to a metaphysical plane. According to Znaniecki, man is both the centre, measure, and principle and the centre, measure, and principle of himself - thus the Polish philosopher returns to Protagoras's thesis that man is the measure if everything. Znaniecki claims that no order exists, and in this sense no reality, that would not be man’s work, including man himself. Individuals as creators are not subjugated to anything. It is the creative individuals that constitute, both for reality and for themselves as elements of that reality) what is and either would not be what it is, or would not be what it is.

The purpose of the prior philosophy is to examine being as being. The latter takes multiple forms owing to the categories of actuality vs. possibility, and truth vs. falsehood. Each of these interpretations of being shows some of it. but they together disguise it under the multiplicity of possible descriptions. Being as truth, however, is singled out, which means that, for the sake of this interpretation, other senses of being will form a unity of its understanding. The dianoetic truth, indirectly connected with being thought of according to the categories, has, however, its basis in the noetic truth, that is in one that elicits no contradictory statement. In this way. it is from the noetic truth that the dianoetic one is derived, that is one that lends itself to interpretation according to the categories, and expresses the essential and contingent, possible and actual being. The ultimate possibility of understanding the multiple being with reference to unity is based then on the noetic interpretation of being as what is. In this way, the categories applied to substance can be understood both in an ontic way (as schemes of being), and in a logical way (as schemes of predication), because such distinctions are only the results of an analysis of the original ontological unity of the categorial synthesis the source of which is in the noetic cognition.

The article contains reflections concerning the zones of thymos and fronesis in Ovid’s oeuvre. To carry out an analysis of those two zones is necessary to show that they exemplify the process, and eventually also the effect which J. Banka calls ,.the mutation of a change of sense”. This type of mutation leads to a change of the real ontology into a virtual one. Owing to our analysis of this kind of transformation we arrive at a new understanding of Ovid’s work, we reveal its transcendental and metaphysical nature. The purpose of publishing this study was to present an attempt at a practical application of this kind of methodology.

A theory of meaning plays an important role in the Stoic philosophy of language. This is because meaning, side by side with sound, representation, and extralinguistic reality is one of the basic ideas describing the relations that the linguistic sign develops. Meaning is what can be expressed with the help of language, the internal content of the linguistic signs, a certain ideal (not in the Platonic sense of the word) bodiless object which is described and revealed with the intermediary of language, but which exists, nevertheless, outside language. It corresponds to Frege's Sinn or Saussure’s category of the signified. The Stoics distinguished between the full meaning, such as the meaning of sentences, that is both of judgements and. for example, of questions, requests, or orders, on the one hand, and the incomplete meaning, such as the meaning of particular words, of predicates, or of declinable words. Formal logic is part of the theory of full meaning. This discipline makes use of many different sciences and arts which belong to linguistics, philosophy, and logic, and which comprise both a typically grammatical information and a more theoretical, philosophical and logical, competence.

The present article shows the beginning of the controversy about the real difference between essence and existence. The controversy started with the declaration of Giles of Rome, who was the first to describe the difference between essence and existence as an inter rem et rem difference. In this way, he brought a bout a reification of essence and existence, which deviated completely from the views of Thomas Aquinas, for whom essence and existence form a compositum in a complex type of being, combining with each other according, to the principle of actuality and potentiality. Existence becomes thus an actualisation of essence, with the latter remaining towards the former in the relation of potentiality.
Later, a very acute controversy erupted over the problem of the real difference in which its advocates often cited the views of Giles of Rome.

The present article shows the philosophy of the 17th c. Platonists in Cambridge through their main interest, namely the problem of atheism and „atheistic motifs” in the texts. This is why the philosophical reflection of the English Platonists is so clearly dominated by the spirit of apologetics. Atheism was, however, for Cudworth and other Cambridge Platonists not only a question pertaining to purely philosophical controversies. The English Platonists, who, at the same time, were Anglican clergymen, perceived atheism also a threat to the social order, for the atheistic, or nearly atheistic, concept of the state, such as the one put forward by T. Hobbes, undermined from their point of view, the very foundation of the public order which they saw in the religiously motivated morality and individual conscience. A description and analysis of atheism is therefore the most important of the Cambridge philosophers’ achievements.

The present article shows the metaphysic of a philosopher whose influence greatly helped to overcome the non-metaphysical, and anti metaphysical attitude of the analytic philosophy. Strawson claims that the task of philosophy cannot be reduced to removing linguistic misunderstandings, but rather includes task of dealing, in a positive sense, with traditional metaphysical problems. Strawson’s contribution to metaphysics consists in his having determined the conditions and criteria of being an individual entity, his combining of existence with individual being, and in his showing the links between indivudual and general beings. It should be added that, within the limits of his understanding of metaphysics, he accepts the claims of metaphysical and epistemological realsim.

Recentivity understood as a capacity to be here and now is an attribute of philosophy: a doctrine, conception, or idea of whatever kind may become actualised in the future (i.e. in another „here and now”) in specific social conditions. And the more open a given doctrine is, the more recentivisty it becomes. Inertiality is also an attribute of philosophy, and it manifests itself in the capacity to retain certain philosophical doctrines and ideas in the memory of subsequent generations. Philosophy is a discipline with the highest degree of inertivity, and therefore it is the most historical. As opposed to the sciences, it cannot be practised without referring to history, i.e. without a possibility of repetitions. Both attributes - recentivity and inertiality - belong to the essence of philosophy and of its functioning.

In the present article, the author breaks with the traditional understanding of the term „matter”, questioning the ancient claim that matter possesses some „ready-made” attributes. According to the author, the opposite is the case. Matter has no „ready-made” (i.e. inalienable) attributes - they all depend on the energetic context in which a given fragment of matter can be found. This means that the said attributes of matter are unlimited.

The present article has shown the possible „appearances” of the world and the laws that govern their being seen in so many different ways. The whole discipline that examines objects in this way has been called here „the geometry of the overview". Only some of the statements contained in the article have their philosophical precursors. Most of them, such as the principle of half-seeing, of laevorotatory (or dextrorotatory) seeing, or the principle of trilateral seeing, are derived from the author’s own observations, and she is the author of both their names and their description. It seems that the study of the world in the suggested context is by no means complete and requires further specifications.

In the present paper, the author refers to the principle of contradiction formulated by Jan Lukasiewicz, according to whom this principle „is the only defence against errors and lies”. The author presents a certain method of analysing conversations which takes into account the intuitions that provided the foundations for the said principle. In the situation where the sender of a message uses two syntactically contradictory statements, it is not suggested that the receiver should try to surmise the sender’s intentions and infer from this a judgement. The suggested approach is contrasted with Grice’s theory of conversational implicatures, which, by means of making use of conversational maxims, admits semantically contradictory utterances.
The main claims the author makes in his paper are the following:
1. For the interlocutors to observe the principle of contradiction if the conversation is focused on transmitting truthful information is one of the essential criteria of the sensibility of such a conversation, and, because the suggested approach does not take into account the interlocutors’ intentions, any mistake that has been made can be exposed.
2. Any analysis of the way the colloquial language is used should take into account the subjectivity of the action of expressing judgements through a sentence and of inferring a judgement from a sentence.
3. One of the adequate tools in a formal and logical analysis of a colloquial conversation is provided by the versions of the dialogic logic formulated and developed by Ch. Hamblin, and J. Mackenzie with the help of which we can study such problems which the standard logic cannot resolve in a satisfactory way.

The author of the present article draws the reader’s attention to the fact that all theories and research methods have their place on the list of assumptions known as axioms, theses, or simply assumptions. In this way the area of science is invaded by conventionalism, scientific relativism, that is by the so called background. These are the weakest points of every science.

The notion of fate is ambiguous. In various cultures it is associated with various interpretations.As a rule, the fate is often identified with what influences the course of man’s life but is beyond his control. The human fate is also the experience of being. Philosophy provides a possibility of reflecting on the experience of the experience of being perceived in this way. In each case a philosophical interpretation of fate will be an attempt at understanding the human mode of existence.
Reflecting on fate, we have first to notice that man as an individual being always finds himself in some kind of situation. At the same time, as a being man unites within himself some activity related to the surrounding world and a possibility of its realisation. As an active being he is first of all a thinking being, that is he consciously pursues his activity. It is consciousness then that determines in the first place man’s mode of existence in the world. This means also that, being faced with particular events, he can assume an active or a passive attitude. In other words, he can either submit to his fate, or he can undertake actions aimed at changing the course of events. One of the theoretical propositions concerning man’s position towards his fate is the anatelic thinking, that is a kind of thinking which is geared on going beyond one's limitations, and one the creation of one’s self. It is assumed here that, regardless of whether tha fate favours such self-creation or not, the sense of any activity consists in creating the conditions in which the realisation of a conscious existence, and, by the same token, a full existence of man as consciousness, becomes possible.

The subject of the present article is Gottfried Martin’s interpretation of Kant’s philosophy. The significance of this insight into the thought of the Königsberg philosopher consists in its taking the historical context of that thought as much as possible into consideration. Martin’s interpretation is distinguished by its attempt at obtaining a synthetic view on Kant’s philosophy, and, at the same time, at showing it in the context of the development of philosophy as such. Martin, when dealing with the problem of the continuity of philosophy, the problem of transcendentalism, and of the thing-in-itself, does not exclude any interpretation, but only tries to demonstrate their limitations. Thus, in a dispute with other views, an interpretation of Kant’s philosophy that certainly may be regarded as one of the most significant in th the 20th c. philosophy is arrived at.

The concept of „intellectual property”, in its modern sense, was formed in the 18th c. It is derived directly from the philosophy of subject (or, more precisely, from Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophy), from the conceptualisation of that subject’s status as „the author", and from recognising his work as a „commodity" in the commodity exchange. The legal distinction in question served then the purpose of establishing the normative and legal foundations of the copyright, which postulated a substantial connection between the book and the person of its creator. The critics, however, of modern institutions have completely demolished the above scheme. It is particularly the representatives of post-structuralism that defend the idea of a radical separation between the subject and the work. The present article attempts to answer the question: is plagiarism still possible in a world of ideas in which all possibility of identifying the work's origin, of distinguishing between a copy and the original, disappears? The theses advanced by Kante and Fichte and concerning the nature of the book have been here compared with Foucault’s position which denies the subject’s function as the author. Further on. the concept of responsibility for the text been cited as an idea that does not have to be seen from Kant's ontological perspective, and an attempt has been made to restore the subject to the environment of its work, and to show that the post-modern concept of the author remains
impracticable.

In the present article, another of the author's studies on Girard, she analyses the mechanism of the scapegoat (scapegoating), which not only underlies sacrificial rituals, but also provides the foundations of the civilising function of the sacred, making it possible to organise the life of a given community, and to channel the most destructive type of violence and transform it into a factor that strengthens the communal ties. This happens at the cost of a substitutive victim selected on the basis sacrificial signs and stereotypes, that is accusations of having broken a taboo. The aim of the ritual then is not so much to establish a contact with the godhead, but rather to construct and sustain the social life of a given group, particularly if the community in question has not developed an objective legal system that could prevent outbreaks of violence disrupting its integrity. The article concludes with an attempt to systematise René Girard’s views on the basis of the mechanism of the scapegoating in the development of cultural forms.

Józef Bańka, the inventor of the ethics of straightforward thinking, envisages a possibility of its "Christian form”. The author, inspired by the above suggestion, makes a successful attempt to overcome the antinomy between the category of „now” as it appears in the straightforward thinking, and the Christian notion of "eternity”. This is achieved on the basis of Wilfrid Stinissen’s concept of "Christian time”. Stinissen. a friend of Claudel, is a Belgian philosopher and a member of one of religious orders.

The present article relates the discussion about the definition of aesthetics and the concepts used in it. The author presents the views of, mainly Anglo-Saxon, thinkers, such as Clive Bell, Morris Weitz, Timothy Binkley, and Robert J. Matthews. The problems and controversies connected with the subject of the article are considered in the context of an aesthetic argumentation.

The subject of the article is the position of Feliks Koneczny (1862-1949), a Polish historian and a philosopher of history, towards the methods of pursuing a philosophy of history. A presentation of his stance was preceded by a short outline of the situation in the philosophy of history at the turn of the 20th c. with a special emphasis on the innovative trends that arose at that time and the proponents of which strove to revise the traditional methods of historical research. The author touches on Koneczny’s views on the problem of the usefulness of the conservative methods of studying history in constructing historical and philosophic syntheses. He also analyses the said scholar’s attitude towards both the inductive and deductive method, and presents Koneczny’s proposal for a methodological compromise.

The problem of the psychophysical unity of man is one of the most essentia] questions of philosophical anthropology. This peculiar unity of the soul and body is still an enigma for philosophers. While analysing various theories of man’s condition, we notice above all that the human being eludes all kinds of definitions that try to circumscribe him. Man transcends nature and creates a new world, a new reality around himself and in himself, but at no particular moment is he able to say where the line should be drawn between his animal nature and the self-imposed humanity. The problem of the origin of man has also been taken up by Erazm Majewski. The said thinker argues that the way to the so called „superiority” does not necessarily lead through great transformations. It can be connected with conservatism and so it looks also in the case of man's features. Mediocrity then, conservatism, and lack of specialisation of the genus Homo laid, according to Majewski, the foundations for man’s severing his ties with the animal world. The development of man is not a development of an organism, for a cardinal feature of a human being is a certain lock of equilibrium between his physical and psychic aspects. This disequilibrium, however, turns out to be, according to Majewski, unacceptable from a scientific point of view. An equilibrium is maintained, in fact, but it escaped people’s notice, because it was sought in man conceived of a complete biomechanism. The human body alone, however, is not enough for the human psyche, it fails to satisfy all human needs. Nevertheless, in Majewski’s opinion, there is, after all, a state of equilibrium because man has supplemented his innate physicality with artificial tools.

In the past we had to do with many different cultures and religions. Christopher Dawson tries to unite them to form, in this way, a coherent view of reality. Being one on the most outstanding representatives of cultural studies at the beginning of the 20th c. he shared the conviction the civilisation of the West was undergoing a deep crisis. Dawson, having analysed a vast research material, provides his own explanation of the state of the contemporary culture, defining it as a crisis of the idea of progress. He strives to find a way out of this quandary, and, following strictly the idea of the tight connection between culture and religion, he comes across the idea of rechristianisation”. He unmasks, at the same time, the illusions Europe fell prey to during the last two centuries. His criticism of the idea of progress thought of as a kind of religion is not, however, only an attempt to reject what he perceived as evil. This criticism was based on that idea’s having failed to fulfil in practice the expectations associated with it. The deficiency of certain elements necessary in culture brought about a state of crisis, and now hawe to find the causes of that crisis and the ways to overcome it. Of foremost importance in this process are the moral carried by religions. Starting then with the origin of culture, Dawson characterises its development, transformations, and the threats it faces, and finally arrives at some constructive conclusions.

The article contrasts two approaches to ethics. The communal approach emphasises the social origin and functions of the ethical culture (cf. MacIntyre), while the individualist approach underlines the role of an individual as an ethical subject (cf. Bauman, Baňka). The author point to the importance of the dynamics and vitality of the communal ethics. The individualist ethics he perceives as developing the individual’s sensitivity, while, however, isolating him from the social and communal life.

Of foremost importance for Lévi-Strauss is his distinction, coming from Saussure, into langue (which belongs to the domain of the reversible time) and parole, i.e. individual speech (pertaining to the zone of the irreversible time). He divides scientific research into synchronic, or placed outside time, and diachronic, that is placed within time, or, in other words, historical. An important notion for him is structure, which is non-temporal, placed outside our consciousness. The concept of myth, in his philosophy, refers to a kind of narrative in which everything may happen. It is defined as a certain temporal system who has the features of reversible and irreversible time.

The present article is directly inspired by the author’s reading of Jakub S. Banka’s study „The ontological possibility of verity - "adaequatio". A philocryptological analysis, and it gains its full dialogic sense only in the context of the aforesaid study. The author draws the reader’s attention to two matters connected with the philocryptological analysis; firstly, to the danger of a historicist selection and périodisation of the history of philosophy, and secondly, to the one-sidedness of the metaphysical (or meta-physical) interpretation of the category of being. Pointing to the significant analogies between the idea of philocryptology and the hermeneutic phenomenology, the author emphasises the need for taking into account the results of Husserl's transcendental research, and of Heidegger’s ontological analyses. This seems particularly necessary when we focus, on the one hand, on the connection between the Parmenidcan identity and Kantian transcendental object, and the difference between the ancient Greek unity of sivai and voeiv and the scholastic relation between esse and essentia, on the other. It es exactly the phenomenological experience that shows us that the original truth cannot be described either in an exclusively logical (essentialist), or in an exclusively metaphysical (existential) discourse. The author, while realising the importance of the problems raised by philocryptology, expresses, at the same time, his apprehension lest by uttering the aletheic truth philocryptology should by any chance ,,remove” the philocrypticity of being, which, in consequence, may lead to a repetition of the conclusion of the Hegelian idealist speculation in which the transcendental being seems - from the point of view of a unifying synthesis of thinking of thinking - to be merely an appearance, a „pure nothingness”.