According to Paweł Okołowski, Bogusław Wolniewicz made a conversion: he abandoned Marxism and adopted Christianity. This author undertakes to restablish how true this claim may be. In his own opinion, Wolniewicz accepted social theory of Karl Marx (Marxism in the strict sense) all his life, although he definitely rejected the idea of communism. This author defines Wolniewicz’s position as ‘Christianism’ rather than ‘Christianity’, because Wolniewicz admitted that Christianity was the basis of the Western civilization in public life. Despite this approach to the issue of faith, he was not – as far as we can say – a religious person in the traditional sense of the term.

This paper sets out to characterise and analyse logical atomism of Bertrand Russell. Main tenets of that theory are described by reference to Russell’s lecture Facts and Propositions (1918) and to other publications by that author. The essential claims of Russell’s position are discussed and confronted with tenets of ontology of situations developed by Bogusław Wolniewicz, a position inspired by logical atomism of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The author argues that several of Russell’s theses on logical atomism can be interpreted in the light of Wolniewicz’s ontology of situations. Finally, some minor concluding remarks are offered that can help to develop an ontology conceived in the spirit of the ontology of logical atomism. 366 Janusz Kaczmarek

The concept of conscience is analyzed here in two different ways: the systematic and the historical-literary. As to the first, systematic perspective, I distinguish (in part 1) three levels of conscience and on every level I identify two opposite categories (conscience that is ‛individual’ versus ‛collective’; ‛emotional’ versus ‛intellectual’; ‛motivating ex ante’ versus ‛evaluating ex post’). In the second, historical-literary perspective, I analyze two literary cases of fictional characters usually thought of as being guided or affected by conscience. The first case is the ancient Greek tragedy and here I offer (in part 2) a comment on the Sophoclean Antigone and the Euripidean Orestes presenting them both as dramas that contain an exemplary formulation of the phenomenon of conscience. Although Antigone and Orestes express their main principles of action in apparently different words, I suggest (in part 3) the two poetical visions of conscience are equally based upon a highly emotional behavior called pathos by the Greek. Thereby I provide a reason, why ancient philosophers created a new concept of conscience intended as an alternative to the poetical vision of human behavior. The new philosophical concept of conscience was based upon an axiological behavior called ethos. I also coin (in part 4) a concept of the ‛community of conscience’ where I distinguish four ‛aspects of solidarity’ in conscience, namely, somebody’s own self, a group of significant persons, a group of the same moral principles, and a sameness of life. In the end I turn (in part 5) to a historical-literary case in Joseph Conrad’s last novel The Rover (1923), which provoked a lively discussion among Polish authors and seems useful as an illustration of several levels of ‛solidarity of conscience’.

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.

Bogusław Wolniewicz, inspired by his formal ontology of situations, has put forward a question on semilattices with a unit (A question about joinsemilattices, Bulletin of the Section of Logic 19/3, 1990). The present paper is entirely devoted to this problem in the formulation given by Wolniewicz. First, the meaning of the question is analyzed and its lattice-theoretical and Boolean algebraic contents are exhibited. Second, set-theoretical and topological counterparts of the question are formulated and commented upon.