In the paper I try to reconstruct the main theoretical assumptions underlying Paul Veyne’s vision of the ancient world that are to be found in his book L’empire gréco-romain. First of all, recalling the opposition between two ways of making the past intelligible: “explication” versus “explicitation”, I show how the French historian uses that second type of historical analyse to reveal some ancient phenomena (i.e. “democracy”, “imperialism”, “soul”, “faith”) in their original and singular forms. Then, I pass to the question of causality and genesis in history. It seems that in Veyne’s book we can distinguish three different “models” of becoming: 1) “time of a project”, 2) “epigenesis” and 3) “discourse effectiveness”. All these fi ndings lead me to the conclusion that Veyne’s writing of history is essentially “essayistic”.

The purpose of this article is to point out the historical reasons why W.V. Quine’s article Two Dogmas of Empiricism should be read not as an attempt to criticize the characteristic theses of logical positivism, but as an attempt to reject the conceptual analysis based on the unclear concepts such as ‘analytical’, ‘synonymous’ and ‘meaning’. Instead of the conceptual analysis, Quine proposed the methods of explication and paraphrase. These two methods are useful for clarifying and simplifying the conceptual apparatus in which scientific knowledge is formulated.

The subject of the presented article is Bulgarian, Polish and Russian emotive verbs, treated in perspective of syntactic valence. The author examines the grammatical forms of propositional argument in the sentences with emotive verbs that represent pre- dicate-argument structure P (x, q). All forms are divided into several types: observance, compression and splitting. The author shows that in this area we have to deal with analog reflection of propositional structure, or more or less compression of proposition argument, or its dismemberment and doubling syntactic position. The author takes into account the regularity of the implementation of each grammatical form, quoting the relevant quantitative data.