This article is a review of Ethan Kleinberg’s Haunting History. For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford, 2017). I focus on three issues related to that work. These are: historians’ attitude towards the deconstruction; the idea of ontological realism and its critique; the role of young historians in modern academia. This text is based not only on the book reviewed but also on its different analyses and ways it was used in other research. In the conclusion, I present how Haunting History can be used as an emancipatory tool by scholars who are starting their academic careers now.

Baudelaire’s Catholicism seems difficult to interpret, therefore some authors declare the poet a Satanist. In my opinion, this is rather problematic to call Charles Baudelaire a Satanist. It is very debatable and doubtful, but there are several reasons for this. In the collection of poetry entitled “Les Fleurs du mal” (“The Flowers of Evil”), Baudelaire gave a voice to the Devil many times. He wrote a scandalous poem “Litanies de Satan” (“The Litany of Satan”). In fact, Satan tempts us and leads us, after all he is closer to man that God! Was Baudelaire a Satanist? It is question to be answered.

The problem of research undertaken in the article concerns the adaptation of traditional models of calculating the cost of capital to the specifics of mining companies. Solutions known from the literature do not give reasonable results. This is due to the uniqueness of the activities of mining companies, in which case we are dealing with a lack of reference to the typical market situations. The aim of this article is to identify solutions that allow rational and reliable results to be obtained. One of the proposals is a modified Fama-French method. The article was tested by calculating the cost of capital in the largest Polish mining enterprises. The problem of calculation of the cost of capital is particularly important in the area of assessing the effectiveness of investment projects. The cost of capital is used as the discount rate in dynamic measures of performance, such as NPV.

An interesting fact in the intellectual history of the fin-de-siècle and first three decades of the 20th century is that the crisis of modernity was understood in categories of sex and gender. In spite of the differences dividing the German intellectual trend of cultural pessimism, the conservative revolution, and Fascist thinking, all these paradigms are linked by the characteristic conviction that ‘modernity’, being the consequence of the French Revolution, was ruled by the ‘feminine principle’. This principle was supposed to represent what is anti-military, anti-state, and anti-cultural at the same time. Variations on the theory of male bonding (Männerbund) were the intellectual reaction to that ‘feminine principle’. The intellectual patterns described here find their continuation in contemporary conservative thought.

This paper examines the discursive means by which authors of scientific texts in the humanities and social sciences take a critical stance on the theses of their colleagues. Focusing on controversy rather than polemics, and using a corpus in French and English borrowed from Language Science, translation and didactics, the paper presents rhetorical figures and linguistic structures that maintain conversational propriety despite the emotionality of disagreement.

This article analyses the disorder in functioning of will by the example of characters from a few texts of French symbolism. On the basis of experimental psychology research described in Les Maladies de la volonté of Th. Ribot, there are discussed the example of people which unfulfilled or obsessive desires point to weakening of will due to the lack or excess of impulse. So next to the characters of aboulic individuals created by T. de Wyzewa i J. de Tinan, in the texts of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and M. Schwob we can see people pursuing at any cost the achievement of power, or the confirmation of oneself uniqueness.

The purpose of the present article is a contrastive analysis of the verbs and verbal forms expressing the spatial situation in the Pericope Adulterae from the point of view of their translations into Polish and French starting from the original Greek biblical text. The author presents the general context of the pericope, its controversial place in the Gospel of John as well as its construction and its linguistic specificities. Starting from the original text of this biblical passage, then are listed the Greek verbs which express a spatial situation and are subjected to the analysis from the point of view of their forms and their meaning. According to the Polish and French translations chosen from this evangelical episode, the author proceeds to the comparison of the proposed equivalents and presents the comments which ensue. The analysis of translations demonstrates that some of the equivalents are analogous for two or all of the three languages, and some are typical only to one of the three languages.

Gaston Milhaud (1858–1918) was a French modern philosopher, who, having started from mathematics, came to philosophy (especially epistemology) and history of science. His works on the history of science were devoted to Greek science and modern science. Milhaud in his papers claimed that important concepts and principles of science (in different disciplines) result from decisions that simultaneously transcend both experience and logic. He emphasized the role of free creation and activity of the mind. The author discusses central problems of Milhaud’s thought, especially the problem of the relationship between science and philosophy.

I give arguments supporting the claim that one of the most prominent methodological results of French conventionalism – rejection of the possibility of a crucial experiment in mature empirical sciences – was formulated simultaneously by Pierre Duhem and Gaston Milhaud in 1894. Thus, I attempt to question the standard approach in philosophy and methodology of science, which attributes the said result exclusively to Duhem. I am building my case of Milhaud’s true contribution to the debate on the rejection of the existence of the experimentum crucis, made in his PhD thesis Essai sur les conditions et les limites de la certitude logique.

The first part of the paper concentrates on the motive of desire, strictly related to the concept of will, in two stories from Les Ombres sanglantes [The Bloody Shadows] (1820) by J. P. R. Cuisin. Afterwards, the theme of power, considered firstly in the physical aspect and then in its supernatural dimension, is analyzed in further four stories. The article concludes with thoughts on the literary objectives of Cuisin’s book and on its potentially caricatural side.