In this article, I am examining the role of categorization in understanding. The problem arises from well-known distinction between explanation and understanding, which has been for a century pursued in hermeneutic tradition. Categorization belongs to explanatory endeavor and its role in understanding is unclear. In order to delimit the scope of inquiry I am focusing on the weakest kind of categorization, so called categorization ad hoc. I am examining the hypothesis to the effect that categorization plays its role in hermeneutic circle as some sort of preunderstanding. Eventually, however, I reject this hypothesis. It is because it leads to hermeneutic paradox: The notion of pre-understanding has a meaning only in the context of full-fledged understanding, which is an unattainable ideal. Such ideal cannot be used as a personal criterion of the quality of one’s understanding. There is a tension between the feeling of understanding and the scarcity of personal means to justify this feeling. I am suggesting that similar, albeit weaker effect occurs also in more elaborate, scientific categorizations. What is really wrong in the passage from categorization to understanding is some form of self-understanding: We do not know whether we understand better, or at all when we put some categorical order onto our experience. We do not seem to have the required meta-understanding.

W artykule konfrontuję koncepcję osoby Petera Strawsona z koncepcją osoby Paula Ricoeura, traktując je jako reprezentatywne ilustracje podejścia semantyczno-ontologicznego i pragmatyczno-egzystencjalnego (lub hermeneutycznego) zarazem do problemu języka i do problemu bytu zwanego osobą. Zaznaczam różnice między tymi podejściami, ale wskazuję także na ich punkty wspólne. Zgodnie z przedstawioną interpretacją, Ricoeur w swojej próbie przezwyciężenia ograniczeń semantycznej teorii osoby rozwija i uwypukla wątki, które w sposób marginalny były obecne już w teorii Strawsona, a skądinąd docenia znaczenie tych, które w tej teorii były pierwszoplanowe, chociaż je relatywizuje. Stosunek Ricoeura do Strawsona pokazuje złożoną relację między tzw. filozofią kontynentalną i tzw. filozofią analityczną.

The word ‘narrative’ is used unusually often in the social sciences. The basic aim of this article is to draw the attention of social researchers, particularly sociologists, to problems with narrative theory. Narratology constitutes an important source of inspiration for sociologists. There are many perspectives and analytical approaches to the theory of the narrative. In this article, it is viewed from the perspective of sociological thought inspired by phenomenology and hermeneutics. Narration should certainly not be perceived as synonymous with other notions, as it has its own history and meaning. The author points, however, to the possibility of a link, on sociological grounds, between narrative and life history (biography) as two different but mutually interacting ideas.

Among the big corpus of the commentaries over the Qur’an, one of the special developments was a genre of gloss (hāšiya). The study addresses main Ottoman glosses written to the Qur’anic commentaries, contextualizing it within the internal dimensions of the content transformations. It is argued that since the glosses were used as the textbooks in the Ottoman medrese, they could be considered as the “mainstream” Ottoman reading of the Qur’an. This reading was not merely one of the practices for approaching the Qur’an, but the kind of tradition with the related authorities and meaningful developments. The research covers these patterns of interpretations applied to the case of Āl ‘Imrān, 3: 7, showing the way of how the philology and theology interacted in the Ottoman tafsīr glosses.

The author examines Ways of Russian Theology in Georges Florovsky works in the light of contemporary trends in epistomology and a modern understanding of intelligibility. In the 20th century attemt were undertaken to develop a project of theology that would address the current intellectual demands and at the same time be in the service of faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Saviour. The currently prevailing concept of teology as an ongoing interpretation of the event of Jesus as Christ and Word of God revealed in history, recognizes an interdependece between the fundamental Christian experience (Tradition) and the historical experience of “here and now”

The paper examines the special historiographic evidence: the lost last book by the well-known Polish historian and methodologist Professor Jerzy Topolski entitled “Methodology of History at the Beginning of the 21st Century”. Only its working outline in the form of an extensive table of contents has survived, but this does not prevent the author from making interesting hypotheses as to its meaning.

The article highlights the significance of the first full English translation of Naqd al-Hitāb ad-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), one of the most characteristic and important works of the acclaimed Egyptian intellectual Nāsr Hāmid Abū Zayd (1943–2010). The work was firstly published in 1992 by Sīnā li-an-Našr in Cairo, coinciding with the beginning of the so-called Case of Abū Zayd (1992–1995), the campaign of Egyptian fundamentalists against the scholar. Abū Zayd’s critique of the dominant discourses and worldviews in the Arab world, created both by the Islamic fundamentalists and so-called Islamic left, has gained huge acclaim in the international academia but so far there has not been a full translation of the work into English (also taking into account the important role of the full German edition published by Chérifa Magdi and Navid Kermani in 1996). In 2018 Jonathan Wright’s translation was published by Yale University Press in the series “World Thought in Translation”. The edition was enriched by Carool Kersten’s scholarly introduction. The following article discusses the translation dilemma regarding Naqd… (e.g. problems with finding equivalents for Arabic semiotic and hermeneutical terminology utilised by the Egyptian scholar), giving examples of the choices made by the translator. Adding to it, the more general issues of the impact of Abū Zayd’s work on the contemporary rereading of Arab-Islamic turāt are analysed.