This paper is the first part of the research on Wisława Szymborska’s reflections and considerations—in poetic form—on knowledge, science, and the scientific worldview. These aspects of Szymborska’s work are presented on the wide background of the philosophical threads in her poetry.

This paper is the first part of the research on Wisława Szymborska’s reflections and considerations, included in her poetry, on knowledge, science, and the scientific worldview. These aspects of Szymborska’s work are presented the wide background of the philosophical threads in her poetry.

In this paper we show how formal computer science concepts—such as encoding, algorithm or computability—can be interpreted philosophically, including ontologically and epistemologically. Such interpretations lead to questions and problems, the working solutions of which constitute some form of pre-philosophical worldview. In this work we focus on questions inspired by the IT distinction between digitality and analogicity, which has its mathematical origin in the mathematical distinction between discreteness and continuity. These include the following questions: 1) Is the deep structure of physical reality digital or analog, 2) does the human mind resemble a more digital or analog computational system, 3) does the answer to the second question give us a cognitively fruitful insight into the cognitive limitations of the mind? As a particularly important basis for the above questions, we consider the fact that the computational power (i.e., the range of solvable problems) of some types of analog computations is greater than that of digital computations.

This work is a contribution to understanding the philosophical dimension of the breakthrough that took place in the 20th century historical natural science as a result of the extrapolation of Darwin’s idea of evolution to the area of inanimate matter and the formulation on this basis of a number of theories of pre-biological chemical evolution. The revealed results are the inaccurate recognition of the philosophical foundations of the broadly understood science of evolution: on the one hand, for scientists-naturalists, and on the other, in a much broader, social dimension of their research.

The author develops a non‑literary, theistic Weltanschauung. It is based on the acceptance of the role of ‘did’ and ‘knows’ as non‑empirical conceptual (indefinable) ‘primes’. The basic argument of this paper is derived from a detailed linguistic observation of the idiosyncratic behaviour of the concepts ‘why’ and ‘because’ vis‑à‑vis other questioners and the functor ‘can’. The item ‘because’ presupposes a conjunction with a clause indicating an obligatorily altogether different state of affairs than one that is given in ‘a because ...’, as an expression patterned on * ‘a because a’ that constitutes a case of one of the most extreme linguistic deviances. Such a putative phrase cannot belong to any natural linguistic code, nor can it be its real product (that is no other than a quip in a purely perlocutionary utterance in J.L. Austin’s sense). Similarly, a generalized version of ‘did’ or ‘knows’ ( someone did / knows something without any specification) cannot be positioned in such a conjunction on pain of engaging in a destructive infinite regress, unless they are coupled with some further, different concept (i.e. a concept other than ‘did’ resp. ‘know’) in a concatenation with ‘because’. According to the author, this shows that precisely the two indicated concepts are conceptual ‘primes’, or the fundamental synthetic a priori’s whose denotata underlie the whole of the reality. The author tries to show that it is unacceptable to reduce Reality to a single and unique empirical universe conceived of as an effect of ‘doing’. He claims that Ockham’s idea of multiplicity of universes represents a logical necessity. But he rejects the mystical höheres in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as including „pure logic”, ethics and aesthetics. All the three areas, he claims, belong to the created natural realm of speaking beings. Reality, grasped by logic, is broader than that realm.

The normative system of Bogusław Wolniewicz (1927–2017) can be subsumed under three categories: (1) pessimism (fatalism, or ‘tychism’ in Wolniewicz’s terms), (2) moral determinism (‘non-meliorism’), (3) conservatism (‘right-hand orientation’). Ad (1) Wolniewicz was pessimistic in two ways: he believed human life to be tragic (fatalism) and was also convinced that most people are guided by bad instincts (dualism). Ad (2) Wolniewicz believed that moral character was biologically determined and immutable. But his strong position on this subject ignores the classical view of Aristotle or the Stoics for whom moral character (or conscience) was acquired by habit and shaped deliberately. Ad (3) I suggest that a good historical example of conservative tendency was Critias of Athens. His famous fragment of the Sisyphus contains the idea of a supremacy of laws over human passions, and reduces religion to a supportive role with respect to ethics and politics. Wolniewicz’s dualism of right-hand and left-hand orientation encourages me to distinguish between a right-wing and a left-wing perception of value. For a leftist, value is intensity of a chosen feature (progressive value), whereas for a rightist, value is an area of freedom between inacceptable extremities (modular value). On these premises I propose a simple model of axiological conflict between left-wing and right-wing citizens.

Specyfika podejścia Karla Jaspersa do sposobów poznania człowieka ujawniła się już w pierwszym okresie jego działalności, w pracach psychopatologicznych, w których rozumienie, uważane za metodę nauk humanistycznych, występowało łącznie z wyjaśnianiem – metodą stosowaną na gruncie nauk przyrodniczych. Stosunek Jaspersa do obu tych metod badawczych zmieniał się wraz z nasilaniem się jego wątpliwości co do możliwości naukowej wiedzy o człowieku. W pracach psychopatologicznych rozumienie i wyjaśnianie odnosiły się do dwóch aspektów choroby psychicznej i były uzupełniane o opis fenomenologiczny. Natomiast w psychologii światopoglądów rozumienie oddzieliło się od wyjaśniania i nabrało nowego znaczenia. Uznane zostało za podstawowy element ludzkiego świata. O ile psychologia rozumiejąca stosowana w pracach psychopatologicznych Jaspersa miała wiele wspólnego z socjologią rozumiejącą Maxa Webera, a rozumienie, stanowiące jej podstawową metodę, polegało na poszukiwaniu związków sensu w przeżyciach chorego człowieka, o tyle w psychologii światopoglądów rozumienie było bliższe tradycji jego ujmowania wywodzącej się od Wilhelma Diltheya. Ta zmiana wiązała się z ukierunkowaniem refleksji Jaspersa nad człowiekiem na wolność (egzystencję), której nie da się uprzedmiotowić.

Roman Ingarden was an eminent philosopher who worked in various fields of philosophy, especially in the areas of ontology, aesthetics and ethics. In addition to his systematic analyses, we find in his work remarkable statements regarding the nature of philosophy, its relation to science, or the specificity of its methods. These metaphilosophical remarks were formulated in systematic works as well as in texts of more disputable nature. In this paper Ingarden’s metaphilosophy is presented in the context of thought of Franz Brentano and Tadeusz Kotarbiński. It is also discussed against the background of metaphilosophical assumptions of the logical positivists from the Vienna Circle.