The author argues in favor of a claim concerning a version of radical skepticism that he calls ‘dubitative’. Unlike the radical skepticism once described by Jan Woleński that consists in the skeptic’s total refraining from making any definite statements, ‘dubitative skepticism’ consists in the skeptic’s expression of his/her doubt as regards to whatever he/she is presented with, including his/her own putative statements. ‘Doubt’ equals ‘lack of having a justification’ for a given definitive statement. This attitude is incontrovertibly possible for both a relevant p and a not-p. But ‘doubt about having a justification for p’ is incompatible with ‘doubt about not having a justification for p’. Whatever choice is made in the end, it is contained in the skeptic’s actual statement to the effect that he/she has knowledge concerning something, i.e. a knowledge that concerns his/her state of mind plus the knowledge that he/she has expressed it in the statement itself (and so on, ad infinitum). This extirpates radicalism from the skepticism of a dubitative skeptic, who, as it appears, by no means denounces any commitment to making a statement or to having knowledge. The article closes with an appropriate formal argument expressed in standard terms.

In the article I discuss Roger Scruton’s opposition between utopian optimism and anti- -utopian pessimism. I show how it connects with the concepts of politics of faith and politics of skepticism introduced by Michael Oakeshott. Then I explain the relationship between the attitude of skeptical moderation and philosophical realism.

The aim of this article is to show that philosophy of Blaise Pascal can be interpreted as defeating skepticism not by supernatural intuition but by pragmatic reasoning. For this purpose, I present in the article: (1) the geometrical method as the best available method for justifying statements, (2) circumstances that make human reason fallible, (3) the defense against skepticism pointing out that besides reasoning we still have intuitive knowledge of first principles, (4) remarks indicating that intuition cannot be a source of certainty, (5) the resulting contradictions are not problematic for Pascal because they serve the apologetic purpose of his work, and that the skeptical arguments presented do not prevent rational action.

Bertrand Russell is known primarily as a logician, philosopher of mathematics, and analytical philosopher. However, a significant part of his life was devoted to world peace: he was an active pacifist from 1901 until his death. This article shows him in this role. Russell’s pacifist activities included not only participation in demonstrations and organizations, but also educational activities. He dealt with issues of education as a theorist and a practitioner. He organized his educational endeavour round the question of how to educate a pacifist and at the same time help her/him remain a free and creative woman/man.

In the collection of articles by Peter Strawson published in his Analysis and metaphysics the author defines his meta-philosophical position by offering two analogies, relating respectively to philosophy conceived as therapy and to philosophy construed as a grammar of thought. These analogies, if they are viewed in a perspective invoked by reflections on ‘the human condition’ – admittedly, a style of investigation fairly remote form analytic research – open several interesting questions and raise puzzling uncertainties. If we follow some implications of these queries, the general position of Strawson in contemporary philosophy becomes more convincing; it fits quite comfortably in the ‘mainstream philosophy’, and highlights some leading topics in the eternal philosophical agenda.

The subject of the article is the assessment of the way of presentation of the issue of realism and idealism in the Controversy over the Existence of the World by R. Ingarden. First, the author of this paper offers his own systematization of the issue of ‘realism – idealism’, then he goes on to show Ingarden’s position. The modern opposition ‘realism – idealism’ can be divided into three main areas: (1) the problem of the existence of the so‑called ‘constitutive a priori’, (2) the problem of the argumentative transgression of the immanence of consciousness (the so‑called ‘bridge problem’), (3) the problem of the causal genesis of the image of the world at the disposal of human cognitive subjects (skeptical hypotheses). The author undertakes to show that the Controversy over the Existence of the World takes as a starting point only a specific interpretation of the issue of realism and idealism: the interpretation contained in the writings of E. Husserl, while omitting the fundamental issue of the nature of time and space, and is limited thereby to the interpretation of realism and idealism from the point of view of the question of the existence qualified as constitutive a priori.

For Peter F. Strawson, transcendental arguments were an important part of his philosophical method, referred to as a connective analysis. Both Strawson and his critical commentators have devoted a lot of effort to determining the nature, scope and purpose of those arguments. In this text, I intend, first of all, to reconstruct and characterize the basic elements of transcendental argumentation, specifying its general form, features and purpose. Secondly, I reconstruct some of the most representative examples of this argumentation. Thirdly, I refer to the basic objections against transcendental arguments formulated in the literature. Finally, I point to a few peculiarities in those arguments, commonly omitted by commentators and interpreters. The overall message of the paper is moderately positive: transcendental arguments are a legitimate way of reasoning in philosophy, and in particular, they constitute a comprehensible and well-founded part of Strawson’s connective analysis.

P.F. Strawson and J.L. Austin approach the problem of other minds from different perspectives. Peter Strawson looks at this problem from the perspective of descriptive metaphysics, which largely disregards the concrete situations in which we use mental language. John Austin, on the other hand, believes that to understand what is happening in such situations holds the key to solving the former problem. However, as it turns out, the considerations of both authors in the key fragments rely on similar observations. In addition, Austin’s perspective, which looks at the language from the point of view of its usage, makes it possible to formulate an answer to the Strawson’s critics. This does not exclude the possibility of agreeing with Strawson on the primacy of the reference function of language, if we understand it properly. Ultimately, Strawson and Austin’s approaches do not compete, but complement each other.