O tym, jak Polacy postrzegają swoją wolność, mówi prof. dr hab. Krystyna Skarżyńska z Instytutu Psychologii PAN.

O tym, jak normatywne treści wynikające z przepisów Konstytucji RP dotyczących wolności badań naukowych i ogłaszania ich wyników oraz autonomii szkół wyższych wypadają w konfrontacji z obowiązującymi przepisami prawa, w szczególności przepisami ustawy z dnia 20 lipca 2018 roku – Prawo o szkolnictwie wyższym i nauce.

The article aims to depict Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the human condition. It presents the main ideas of Sartre’s anthropological reflection (the man as an entity that is absolutely free, lonely, and doomed to experience the absurdity of the status of an ‘in-the-world-being’). Although Sartre’s thoughts have been criticized by the ‘philosophers of dialogue’, his anthropology still seems to express appropriately the complexity of the human condition in the context of everlasting and fundamental queries about the purpose and the sense of individual existence.

The main aim of the essay is to examine three philosophical narrations. One of them, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, clearly inspired the other two, that is: Marx’s reflections in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the interpretation of the Odyssey in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Whereas Hegel’s dialectic opens a perspective of mutual recognition of individuals, permanently codified in their fundamental rights, the two remaining narrations lead to totally different conclusions. According to young Marx, the subjects not only do not recognize themselves mutually but even, under the influence of economic relationships, treat each other with disregard. Also in Adorno and Horkehimer’s view the labor processes, which according to Hegel led towards the freedom of individuals, distort interpersonal relations and strengthen the growing coercion. At the end, the proposal of Jürgen Habermas is taken into consideration. He argues that communication acts instead of labor processes are the real emancipating factor.

This article is an attempt to look at how individual freedom is realized in the world of consumption. Consumer freedom understood as a social relationship – and not for example as a gift received from God and the ability to make independent choices between good and evil according to one’s free will – is not a given once and for all. In the case of consumer freedom, some people have this type of freedom, while others are deprived of it, which often results in moral evil. Freedom in a world where ‘a menu replaces the Decalogue’ is first and foremost a freedom to consume, a freedom of those who have the appropriate material means to make use of them. Therefore, it is not a gift given once and for all, but it requires from us – free consumers – constant activity in acquiring funds that allow us to meet the needs of ownership. It only pretends to be accompanied by freedom of choice but in fact is not. Freedom in the world of consumption is implemented mainly in the sphere of everyday life practice and it does not constitute the implementation of any lofty philosophical ideas. It is an impoverished form without proper theoretical foundation. The problem is whether in the world of consumption there is any freedom at all. Unfortunately, most often we only have an illusion of freedom, because choosing to participate in it (more or less consciously), we agree to its prevailing rights. One of the most important rights in the domain of consumption implying is freedom of consumption, or ironically speaking, the free-dom to choose between Coca Cola and Pepsi. But even in its narrow application consumer freedom does not seem to realize any moral good. It is true that various attempts are being made to codify the ethical activity of consumers, traders, producers, etc., but this has nothing to do with the real moral dimension of actions, concerning instead instrumental and performative aspects of those actions by sustaining unreflective choice automatisms.

The author of the article is aimed at reconstructing the concept of academic freedom as a base of university existence, regarding both its didactic and research function. The author takes into account various definitions of academic freedom and analyzes areas and dimensions, especially its institutional (university) and individual (professor) level. He reconstructs also controversies which are exposed in discussions on academic freedom and arguments regarding its limitations. He considers the phenomenon of actuarial policy and various forms of academic competition. He puts question: does the concept of academic freedom can be still vivid in the time of growing commercialization of didactits and research functions of contemporary university as well as its growing dependance on economy and politics?

W miarę wzrostu technologicznego i naukowego zaawansowania współczesnych społeczeństw przyszłość coraz częściej definiowana jest w kategoriach różnych wariantów nieuniknionej synergii człowieka i maszyny. W tym wyobrażeniu ciało człowieka wydaje się jedynie tymczasowym wehikułem, który nie stanowi bynajmniej naszej natury. Cielesność (being flesh) stanowi jedynie etap na drodze nieuchronnego postępu technonauki, który miałby zapewnić człowiekowi wolność morfologiczną. Taką przynajmniej optykę, czy też wizję przyszłości, tworzy transhumanizm. Artykuł jest próbą odczytania, w jaki sposób w transhumanistycznej narracji ciało biologiczne podlega problematyzacji, a także prześledzenia, jak w tym kontekście wymogi technonauki i dostępne możliwości technologicznych interwencji zmieniają i narzucają sposoby rozumienia oraz definiowania ciała. W tym świetle wolność morfologiczna staje się dyscyplinującym imperatywem, a propozycje wyzwolenia z biologii, czy nawet przybrania krzemowych ciał (silicon bodies), zostają dyskursywnie wykreowane jako szanse, a z szans stają się koniecznościami.

Skąd się biorą ludzie kwestionujący metodologię naukową i osiągnięcia nauki? Wysuwane przez nich argumenty są prymitywne i oderwane od faktów, a jednak cieszą się rosnącym zainteresowaniem, a nawet poparciem społeczeństwa.

The article traces Bertrand Russell’s interest in anarchist thought. I take his The Roads to Freedom as the main reference point, because that was the book where Russell applied himself most consistently to the study of the ideas put forward by anarchist thinkers. Those ideas – as he points out – undertake to conceive more imaginatively a better ordering of the human society than one finds in ʻthe destructive and cruel chaos in which mankind has hitherto existed’. He emphasizes that across the ages individuals had to face harsh conditions in which state ensnared them. The conflict between freedom and enslavement was the most important aspect of that condition. Bertrand Russell i anarchizm 513

In the article I present and criticize the view of classical compatibilism on freedom, i.e. the view according to which free subjects and free actions can exist in the world ruled by universal, exceptionless causality. I claim that compatibilism does not solve the problem of freedom and determinism, but avoids and disregards it. Compatibilism pretends to accomplish the task by playing with semantic tricks that create a misleading impression of ‛compatibility’.

In his philosophical commentary to the thought of Karl Marx, Leszek Kołakowski refers to his assimilation of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy. He pays particular attention to the swinging of Hegel’s theory ‘the right side up’ and standing him on a pair of feet instead of the head. Marx undertook the difficult task of ensuring a unity of man in a way quite different from the attempts made by either Kant or Hegel. They all wanted to abolish the contingency in human life, but in Marx’s thought the abolishing of the contingency is nothing else but a subjecting of a human being to his/her own existence. A man is no longer dependent on alienated forces that he has created himself, neither is he dependent on an anonymous society. Taking clue from Kołakowski we can say that exteriorisation of natural forces has replaced exteriorisation of consciousness and the Absolute Being of man is realized in his/her actual being.

The purpose of the article is to present, analyze and evaluate the concept of freedom in Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992). First, I point out the main determinants of his understanding of freedom (with the emphasis on the fact that freedom means the absence of arbitral coercion towards the individual by other people), then I present Hayek’s arguments for his definition of freedom, as well as for his conviction that freedom is what should be absolutely valued and what is worth defending. An attempt is made to evaluate those ideas in terms of their relevance and convincingness – both in relation to Hayek’s analyses of notion of freedom as well as his normative statements.

The article aims to briefly present Peter Strawson’s view expressed in his seminal article Freedom and Resentment (1962). We start with certain remarks on the position of the article among other works by Strawson and on reasons of its vast popularity manifested by many modern authors interested in the issues of responsibility or free will. Next, we move on to the issue of interpretation of the central thought of Strawson’s work. To do this, we present the most common interpretation, which at the first glance seems to express the core of Strawson’s view in a fairly convincing way. Then we adopt a slightly different perspective on the main line of reasoning in the article in question and in this context we try to interpret its general message. We argue that the main topic of the article is the philosophical issue of punishment. For this is the problem which – if we are right – is the proper object of the debate between an optimist who is also a compatibilist and a pessimist who is also a libertarian.

Freedom and Resentment (1962), written by Peter Frederick Strawson, is one of the most influential papers in 20th century investigations regarding the problem of free will. An interesting criticism of that work was proposed by his son, Galen Strawson, who analyzed and rejected his father’s view, called the theory of reactive attitudes. In my paper I reconstruct the views of Peter Strawson and present counterarguments put forward by Galen Strawson. In the summary I suggest, following Robert Kane, that the disagreement may reflect some important changes in analytic philosophy.

Published for the fi rst time in 1721, Persian Letters has been relatively underestimated as a source of knowledge about Montesquieu’s philosophy of liberty. This paper analyses one of the main story lines of the novel, namely the relations between Usbek, the Persian traveller, and the wives remaining in his seraglio. It is demonstrated that these wives are in fact the fi gures of subjects — the fl attering and scheming subject of an absolute ruler, the law-abiding subject of a monarch, and the rebel who questions the very legitimacy of the lord’s authority. It is also demonstrated that the story of the seraglio wives’ rebellion explains why subjects rebel and how the rulers who abuse their power lose it.

The problem of freedom features prominently in many great novels, and Don Quixote, as any attentive reader will know, is no exception. Cervantes was deeply concerned with that issue, and, what is also known, he had an abiding interest in Erasmianism, a set of beliefs and attitudes espoused by his tutor Juan López de Hoyos. The Erasmian connect-ion can be traced back not to the writer's biography but also to various points in his work. This article examines Cervantes' handling of the theme of freedom in Don Quixote in such a way that each of the issues can be taken up for further, in-depth analysis. They range from religion and society in Renaissance Spain, the role of women and their pursuit of emancipation, the vogue for transgression of literary norms and conventions, excessive wealth and social inequalities to the Erasmian affirmation of free will. All of these problems are presented here just in outline. Detailed and exhaustive analyses will, hope-fully, follow in the future.

The subject of this article is an analysis of the earliest of Karl Marx’s articles, Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction. The essence of his views presented in that article was to protest against the restriction of the right to free expression of opinions by journalists. Marx pointed out that the new Prussian Censorship Instruction only seemed to liberalize censorship, but in fact in many aspects tightened the rules, for example, reinforced those that pertained to religious criticism. He thought that the Prussian Censorship Instruction was not an enactment of law, because by limiting freedom, lawmakers acted against the essence of the press, law and state. Marx thought that a press law was needed to guarantee freedom of the press and that censorship should be abolished entirely.

Wolność i Lud [ Freedom and the People] was the press organ of the agrarian People’s Party Freedom (SL-W) published in London in 1948–1949 and 1953–1954. The periodical, which eventually appeared at monthly intervals, propagated the key ideas of the political programme of the SW-L, kept track of the life of the Polish émigré community and commented on world affairs. It provided regular coverage of the developments in Poland, especially with regard to in agriculture, social transformation processes and culture.

Henryk Elzenberg odcisnął swe piętno na polskiej powojennej myśli politycznej – stał się symbolem intelektualnej i duchowej konsekwencji, co uczyniło zen filozofa czasów trudnych. To o nim Adam Michnik pisał w latach 80. jako o filozofie na „czas głazowładztwa”. Wprawdzie w dorobku autora Kłopotu z istnieniem aktywność intelektualna przybierała różną formę, ewoluowała, zmieniając się pod wpływem dziejowych wydarzeń. Konstrukcje teoretyczne zanurzone w klimacie Młodej Polski znacznie różniły się od tych z okresu międzywojennego, tamte zaś – od zapisek czynionych w czasie drugiej wojny światowej i po niej. Elzenberg niezwykle żywo reagował na zmieniający się wokół niego świat, a myśl teoretyczna podążała za historycznymi wydarzeniami, usiłując ogarnąć je, ukazać w szerszej perspektywie i opisać językiem filozofii. Jednak podstawowym przekonaniom oraz intuicjom ich autor pozostał wierny. Przechodząc kolejne fazy – od aktywnego politycznego zaangażowania, przez indywidualizm i okres aktywności teoretycznej, do wewnętrznej emigracji – pozostał wierny swym głównym twierdzeniom, iż zbiorowość, polityka, ale także jednostka stają się wartościowe nie przez prosty fakt egzystencji, ale dzięki odniesieniu do idei oraz wartości.

In this article, I am trying to enquire briefly into a certain issue that was, in a way, the hallmark of Andrzej Walicki’s worldview. The issue concerns his interpretation of freedom, and above all, his preference for negative freedom („freedom from”), which epitomized liberalism, against the concept of positive freedom („freedom to”), which for Walicki was a systemic and pernicious encumbrance in Marxism. However, in his later works, Walicki nuanced his opinions and paid more attention to the weaknesses of liberalism arising from its inability to absorb some aspects of positive freedom associated with contemporary ideas inspired by Marxism.

Considering responsibility as a key anthropological category, Roman Ingarden stresses that it could only be inquired through the lens of a subject that is perceived personally, and not as a ‘pure I’. On the one hand, responsibility determines the nature of personal existence, and on the other hand, personal existence constitutes a space for interrogating about any meanings of the concept of responsibility. What remains problematic, however, is an alternative outlined by Ingarden, which implies that perception of a personal subject must be conducted within either of two perspectives – one that refers to a substantial model of personal subject, or the other that relates to acts of actualising the subject, which unfold in the stream of consciousness. It seems possible to go beyond this contradiction and reconcile the two perspectives – which the modern philosophy of dialogue proposes to do. Ingarden emphasises that the analysis of the concept of responsibility should not be limited to the realm of morality. However, all four scenarios that the philosopher uses as research fields to scrutinise the concept point, or at least imply the necessity of including aesthetic issues. Furthermore, the four fields of analysis – when somebody 1) bears responsibility, 2) takes responsibility, 3) is held responsible, and 4) acts responsibly – should not be perceived as isolated from one another. The link between them is man, who appears as a person in certain situations, while in others, his personal status is unrevealed, although it still remains within a firm horizon of situations and meanings examined herein. Moreover, regardless of the polarisation of the research fields highlighted by Ingarden, moral context constitutes a permanent space of reference for a human person, who not only asks for the sense (meanings) of responsibility, but also determines his/her personal existence through meanings and with their help.

In the article I present a concise view of the conservative image of the world, inspired by the works of Roger Scruton. His vision starts as a moral and political project, but then goes on to turn into a theory of culture, education and aesthetic experience. Although the project was originally intended as devoid of any religious justification, it is possible to see religion as a complement or an equivalent to the conservative attitude, as it is expressed in private life. Religious language can be understood as a useful, personal, symbolic expression of the conservative attitude to life. Scruton also undertook to defend the humane face of philosophy, by which I mean his conviction that philosophy should resist reductive tendencies of natural science, and instead should strive to develop better understanding of the essential works of art and literature known in the Western canon.

The paper’s authors undertake the reflection on the stages of the evolution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s views on the Church and its role as it is played in the lives of its singular members and in the context of the Reformation’s ethical heritage. One can distinguish among three stages of the Bonhoefferian ecclesiology, deepening his vision of the Church. As far as the first one is considered, the Church is defined as the spiritual community of believers, outside of which salvation is impossible. At the second stage the German theologian accentuates the sinfulness of man as a member of the Church. Its recognition constitutes the basis for the transformation that can take place in the human individual due to accepting Christ into oneself. The third stage is stepping into the world of „before-final” matters in the full responsibility for the choices made by particular members of the ecclesial community. The Church, as Bonhoeffer saw it, was supposed to support itself on strong pillars: on freedom, personal responsibility, imitating Christ, neighbourly love, on sacraments and Gospel. In this aspect Bonhoeffer was the faithful continuator of the Reformation program.