Contrary to the prevailing methodological consensus, this article defines autopoiesis as a synonym of autocreation, or, more precisely, discursive identity construction. The latter refers to a literary ‘existential project’ which assumes that the sense of the self, or sameness, is the product of multiple, mostly discursive, interactions. They are the tex-ture of complex cultural processes which result in the determination by an individual of what he/she would like to be or what he/she would like be perceived. This construction of the self is in a state of ongoing contextualization within two distinct identity dis-courses, the discourse of individual uniqueness (founded on the sense of one’s body) and the discourse of collective participation (as defined by politics). The article argues that the two-dimensional contextualization is essentially historical and defines a broadly understood modernity. By examining the work of Gustave Flaubert the article shows how the oscillation between these two poles shapes the image of the modern writer created by Flaubert himself.

The aim of this paper is to discuss possible connections between the categories of mind and life. Some authors argue that life and mind are closely connected or even are two sides of the same phenomenon. I analyze and examine this thesis in the light of different approaches to defining life: the metabolic approach (which stresses the importance of self-maintenance and self-making) and the evolutionary approach (which focuses on evolution by natural selection). The first way of defining life is Maturana and Varela' conception of autopoiesis, the second is Korzeniewski's cybernetic definition of life and van Hateren's modified Darwinian definition of life. Especially interesting is the possibility of connecting mind and life in the evolutionary framework. The text does not provide exact results, but rather it proposes possible modes of thinking of the relation of these two categories.

The article presents conclusions from research on changes in the practice of creating knowledge in the social sciences and humanities, resulting from research cooperation with the socio-economic environment. The research focused primarily on the impact of such collaboration on the advancement of scientific knowledge in these fields. The theoretical framework adopted in the analysis is the concept of science as an autopoietic, social system, derived from the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann (presented in his Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 1990).
According to the results of the study, the cooperation of the science system with other social subsystems in its environment significantly affects both the practices of creating knowledge and its ultimate character. Such knowledge, under certain conditions, can become an element of scientific communication, but there are some limitations that are associated with differentthat rationalities of cooperating subsystems. An important barrier is the subordination of the research process to the needs of external systems, which, combined with the high selectivity of the science system, means that knowledge generated in cooperation, mainly of an operational nature, is not accepted by the science system. However, there is a great potential for this type of practice because the knowledge thus generated, after an appropriate translation into the system code of science and embedding it in its wider context, can significantly enrich it, among others, with otherwise inaccessible empirical data and different points of view that may become a basis for further scientific research. Research shows that for many representatives of the social sciences and humanities this potential is effectively used.