If the characterization of avant-garde proposed once by Henri Saint Simon, and later maintained by Daniel Bell as well as Lidia Burska in the book entitled Awangarda i inne złudzenia. O pokoleniu ‘68 w Polsce (“The avant-garde and other illusions. On the ’68 generation in Poland”) is adopted, the philosophical revisionism inside Polish Marxism (the Warsaw school of the history of ideas) may be considered a phenomenon analogous to the artistic avant-garde which gained prominence in the middle of the 1950s. In Burska’s understanding, the significant trait of avant-garde is effective impact on the state of consciousness, stances and choices of the public. This essential factor highlights the connection between avant-garde and revisionism, due to the fact that, as it was commonly believed in Poland, the Warsaw school played a major role in the formation of the Polish post-war humanities. The purpose of the paper is to propose an understanding of the impact exerted by the Warsaw school of the history of ideas. In relation to this problem, the author refers to the testimonies of people who constituted that milieu, and he focuses on some topics from the hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer (the concept of the efficacy of history; the concept of application) and from the philosophy of H.R. Jauss (the concept of the horizon of expectations).

The article offers a critical insight into the social history of ideas as a research trend that has been dynamically developing within French academic circles since 2010. Methodologically, the social history of ideas attempts to apply sociological tools to study the diffusion and embedding of political ideas within specific groups. After presenting the general directions of this trend's development, the author focuses on its critics, offering their own reflections on the difficulties one might encounter when applying its principles to research on Central‑Eastern Europe. To tackle this task, the author provides a methodological exercise to verify the extent to which the principles of social history of ideas can be applied to the study of (semi)peripheral ideas. In conclusion, the author emphasises the invigorating nature and critical tasks that social history of ideas can fulfill within Polish historiography as well.

This article is devoted to the presentation of the philosophical contacts between Andrzej Walicki and his contemporary Russian philosophers. On the basis of already published texts as well as archived correspondence, Walicki’s relations with Sergei Hessen and Dmitry Chizhevsky, and especially with Fr. Georges Florovsky, are discussed. Walicki and Russian thinkers deliberated about historiosophy, the history of Russian philosophy and even theology. In spite of their different perspectives (Florovsky was the founder of the so‑called neo‑Patristic synthesis, which had an exclusively historical significance for Walicki), they played a significant role in popularizing Russian thought in the West, especially in the USA.

The main aim of the following article is to juxtapose two methodological perspectives, influential in the field of the widely understood history of ideas, that is to say, the Cambridge School with the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte. Presenting both opportunities and pitfalls that may result from applying these perspectives, I sketch the propositions to overcome possible shallows. In concluding remarks, I draw potential challenges for the history of ideas in Poland.

This article examines the problems facing a comparative study of the reception of the idea of revolution in some selected writings of G.W.F. Hegel and Joachim Lelewel. Paying due attention to the specificity of the philosophical and historical approach, the article analyses the similarities and differences in Hegel's and Lelewel's appraisals of the revolutionary legacy. It also brings to light a misrepresentation of Lelewel's take on the subject in the German translation of his writings. That said, Hegel's thought remains of vital importance for both Lelewel, who is not convinced by it, and his translator H.J. Handschuch, who eagerly embraces it.