The text is devoted to the reconstruction of Wolniewicz’s philosophical views presented by him in the first volume of his Philosophy and Values. The philosophical tradition to which Wolniewicz admitted allegiance and the results of his analyzes in the field of methodology, philosophy of religion, anthropology and philosophy of politics are discussed. Some methodological problems are raised, such as theoretical criteria (including the semantic criterion) of theoreticity, philosophy as theory, philosophical styles, parapsychology as a pseudo-theory, mystified observation and the rule of rationality. Within philosophy of religion the author analyses Wolniewicz’s thesis that the foundation of religion resides in the fear of death. From anthropological problems, Wolniewicz’s views on relations of anthropology to axiology are presented, as well as the relationship between meliorism and pejorism (with particular emphasis on the so-called epiphany of the devil), abortion and murder, transplantations and ‘(neo)cannibalism.’ Within philosophy of politics the author undertakes to carefully reconstruct Wolniewicz’s attempts to distinguish between such oppositions as democracy and democratism, evolution and revolution, fanaticism and tolerance. Finally the author argues that Wolniewicz was one of the most outstanding contemporary Polish philosophers even though he points to some gaps in his arguments.
The term “cause” is ubiquitous in life and science. It is surprising how, generally speaking, the existing all-purpose dictionaries, and even «professional» ones, are clumsy in their attempts to define “cause” and its derivative terms. We urgently need a more satisfactory definition of these words, along the following lines: an acting of object x on object y is the cause of the change in object y, when at the same time object x acts on object y, object y changes, and if something of the type of object x acts on an object of the type of object y, then object y changes. When expanding the proposed definition, I consider, among others: (a) traditional counterarguments aimed at the existence of cause-effect relation, (b) the question of necessity as a component of the notion of causality, (c) the notion of acting on something and the circumstances of its occurrence, (d) the essence of change, and (e) the causality principle. In addition, I sketch the relation of the reconstructed notion of causality to the notions of motivation, perpetration, and the act of creation (in arts and in Catholicism).
Bogusław Wolniewicz’s book Things and facts, although it is essentially devoted to the interpretation of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, also has a substantive layer in which Wolniewicz raises very important problems in the fields of methodology, semiotics and metaphysics, such as: (a) the problem of clarity of philosophical texts and its relation to simplicity and brevity, as well as to thoroughness and suggestiveness; (b) the problem of semantic correlation types; (c) the problem of analysis, interpretation and definition; (d) the problems of modality, negative facts, absolute monism and coherentionism; (e) the problem of abstraction and moral-praxeological antinomy. The author of the paper reconstructs Wolniewicz’s views on these matters.
Professor Jerzy Pelc was the creator and long-time manager of the Department of Logical Semiotics, University of Warsaw. He also founded the Polish Society of Semiotics. He published six own books, among others Studies in Functional Logical Semiotics of Natural Language (1971; in English); he edited also dozens of volumes of Semiotic Studies and Library of Semiotic Thought. As Kotarbiński, his master, and Twardowski, the master of his master, Professor Pelc was a radical rationalist. This radical rationalism has linked him to atheism, anti-communism, a distance to politics, and a frown on the falsehood of public life. He was a great patriot – in his life and in his work. He considered himself a successor of the Lvov-Warsaw School tradition. In the field of metaphysics, Professor Pelc combined theoretical minimalism with anti-rationalist attitudes, including the postulate of precision and the requirement of criticism. The main field of his interest was logical – and broader: theoretical – semiotics. He advocated and largely developed the functional concept of signs. To traditional paradigms of research: historical, teleological, causal and prognostic ones – Professor Pelc has added a semiotic paradigm, determined by the question “What does it mean that p?”. Referring to the interdisciplinary fashion for interdisciplinary research, he conducted an analysis of the notion of INTERDISCIPLINARITY. In ontology, he analyzed the notions of OBJECT and CAUSALITY. In his approach, aesthetics was treated form a semiotic point of view: he sought mainly ways to logically rewrite its terminology. In particular, he reconstructed the main aesthetic notions: FORM and IDEOLOGY (of literary works), THEME, MOTIVE, METAPHOR and (literary) FICTION – as well as semiotic notions essential to the description of literary arts, namely the notions of ASSERTION and INTENSIONALITY. In the field of ethics, Professor Pelc declared himself as an advocate of the ideal of trustworthy guardian, which he took over from his teacher, Kotarbiński. In metaethics, he analyzed the notions of NORM, EVALUATION and HUMANITY. A master of Polish: beautiful Polish – he was certainly a true humanist.