Studies in Philosophy, Culture and Contemporary Society – serie

In various European countries the two world wars are remembered in very different ways, although everywhere one can find monuments which serve as material objectification of the memory of war. However, such objectifications not only determine certain patterns of remembrance and a specific perception of the past: they also contribute to local and/or national identity and create the basis for attitudes toward the other participants of war. As it happens, instruments of memory live their own life and the meanings they attach to particular events may be changed by historical and political processes. The question remaining in the background of this publication is whether we can «make Europeans» without European collective memory transgressing national perspectives. The memory of war, which inevitably shows the overall absurdity and tragedy of war no matter where and against whom fought, may be the primary candidate for such Europeanization.

This book is a result of studies on psychoanalysis, politics, and art. The topics in this book range from populism, the limits of the political, identity, melancholy, the peculiarity of psychoanalytical interpretation to the connection of theatre and politics. Psychoanalysis is a form of practicing personal truth, which needs to be one’s own and which is not a result of anonymous discourse. Politics is the practice of being with others; it is the cultivation of antagonistic relations with others. Art is the practice aiming at giving one’s life the mark of something unique, it is the very practice of life.

The guiding theme of the book is a traditional institution of Tajik culture: mahalla – neighborhood. For centuries it has sustained the existence of Tajik culture, and in times of the greatest religious persecution in the USSR it has helped Islam to survive. In this book the author does not limit himself to the description of mahalla and the explanation of its social functions; a significant part of the book is constituted by a comparison of mahalla with the concept of civil society existing in contemporary Western culture. For this reason, the book examines differences between Eastern and Western cultures, in which the specificity of the first is collectivism, and the second individualism. The author’s considerations are based on two pillars: firstly, he has great knowledge on theoretical literature and field studies while secondly an important role has been played by the fact that he has spent a large part of his life as a resident of mahalla in Tajikistan before beginning his studies in the West. This very fact has allowed him to meet Western civil society as an observer. Precisely, the experience of living in these different societies permits the author to formulate his own opinions and conclusions, sometimes surprising to the reader.

This book discusses the viability of «importing» the middle class to Poland. The 1990s were a step forward in the formation of the Polish middle class and, systematically yet barely discernible in daily life, the process was triggered by an increase in consumption and affluence. However, the changes of attitudes, life goals and value systems distinct for the Western middle class are ambiguous and rather slow in Poland. They ensue mainly from the changes in new social structures and the behavioral rationality of consumers. It appears that the middle class in Poland will not emerge as an exact copy of the original middle class – rather, it will be its contextually modified variant, affected by Polish cultural traditions.

Prestige examines whether social prestige is still an important axis of the stratification hierarchy. It appears that prestige has lost some of the close connection with social position it had in estates societies. Prestige distribution patterns have changed and individualized gradations emerged, while agreement in the occupational prestige in Poland is lower than in the West and still declining. However, low consensus in occupational prestige rankings does not entail a disintegration of respect norms as such: personal prestige is still a relevant factor in designing life strategies and people do care about respect. This volume presents empirical evidence that all social classes recognize the motivational, integrative and satisfying functions of prestige.

If philosophy has limits, what lies beyond them? One answer is literature. In this study, rather than seeing literature as a source of illustrations of philosophical themes, the author considers both philosophy and literature as sometimes competing but often complementary ways of making sense of and conveying the character of ethical experience. She does so through an analysis of ideas about language, experience and ethics in the philosophy of Nietzsche, and of the way in which these themes are worked out and elaborated in the writings of Robert Musil and the Turkish novelist Oğuz Atay.

Privatising Capital examines the historical development of Poland’s public sector and its welfare state. Their infrastructure, services and employees add up to a form of public capital, upon which the vast majority of society is dependent. The book describes the ongoing attempts to financialise and commodify this public capital and examines how this occurs in the areas of health, education and pensions. It also analyses the impact of public capital on the ideas and opinions of the population and how it affects contemporary ideologies and politics in Poland.

This book refers to the question of cultural normativity. The texts of the book present the diverse profiles of cultural normativity: from philosophical assumptions and indications relating to the sources of axiology and normativity in general to analyses of selected examples of social practices and the reconstruction of declared or presupposed kinds of cultural normativity. The authors evaluate the distinction between normativity and normativeness as a state of norms, they describe the relationships between cultural normativity and ethics. This issue is particularly important with regard to the 20th-century criticism of essentialism, the primacy of the culturalist position in humanities and the importance of the concept of difference in social sciences.

This book illustrates the applicability of the seminal and controversial metaphor of the «invisible hand» in modern sociological theory. It shows that sociologists have long been part of a field mainly associated with economists and political philosophers. Though unlike the framing that builds directly on Adam Smith, sociological theory focuses on undesirable and perverse outcomes. Furthermore, the sociological angle favors the explanation of invisible hand-like mechanisms as contingent upon social structures and broader processes. Thus, it goes beyond its classical formulation in terms of interdependence, interaction and aggregation of individual actions.This book gathers contributions of remarkable authors who are linked directly either with the invisible hand metaphor, with the spontaneous order phenomenon or with the unintended consequences issue and aims to describe the traditional and contemporary applicability of the sociological framing of the invisible hand for social sciences.

This book revisits psychology’s appropriation of natural scientific methods. The author argues that, in order to overcome ongoing methodological debates in psychology, it is necessary to confront the problem of formalisation contained in the appropriation of methods of natural science. By doing so, the subject matter of psychology – the human being – and questions about the meaning of human existence can be brought to the centre of the discipline. Drawing on Garfinkel, Sacks, Edwards and Potter, the author sees ethnomethodologically informed qualitative methods, which stem from phenomenology, as a possible alternative to statistical methods, but ultimately finds these methods to be just another method of formalisation.She returns to Husserlian phenomenology as a way to critique the centrality of method in psychology and shows that the adoption of natural scientific methods in psychology is part of the larger push to formalise and objectify all aspects of human existence.

This book aims to provide empirical evidence regarding the consequences of changes in European societies, focussing on migration and related phenomena of discrimination and xenophobia. The comparative analyses cover all countries of the European Social Survey in the period 2002–2014. They reveal that native members of so-called vulnerable groups, such as the unemployed, retired, permanently sick or disabled and the elderly, were more likely to experience threats and to exhibit anti-immigration attitudes. The contributors further examine social openness defined in terms of marital homogamy, social trust in the context of legitimization and social conditions of sleeplessness. A final methodological section presents the results of a mixed mode experiment involving the face-to-face mode.

This book focuses on the question of relationality. Despite the numerous motifs introduced to the discourse pertaining to Margaret S. Archer’s concept, we notice that some often reappear. What frequently appears is the concept of agency, closely related to the matter of the subject’s reflexivity. We also include papers that refer to methodological dilemmas. However, all collected texts directly consider the essence of the concept of the human person and society in reaction to the ontology of the person proposed by Archer. The common thread and horizon of these elaborations is Archer’s concept and Pierpaolo Donati’s relational sociology. Thus, this publication seeks to gain broader public and open new research perspectives in sociology.

This volume explores the various ‘labyrinths’ of Leibniz’s philosophy, that is, hard-to-solve problems in which the human mind becomes entangled. Although the Hanoverian explicitly distinguished two such labyrinths (freedom and continuum), one may notice that in his theory there are more intricate issues the thinker can resolve with the help of the ‘Ariadne’s thread’ – a certain principle to be followed by the reflecting mind. In the perspective of the mazes of theodicy, consciousness and absolute and relative differences, the authors try to unravel issues such as: the etymology of ‘theodicée’, the concepts of freedom and metaphysical evil, the reception of monadology by Olivier Sacks, the understanding of ‘panpsychism’, the similarity between jurisprudence and theology, and many others.

Explore the intricate tapestry of memory and heritage in Eastern Europe with this compelling collection of scholarly articles. From the politicization of historical events in post-communist Hungary to the dynamics of urban cultural policy in Polish cities, these essays offer diverse perspectives on commemorating pivotal moments and figures. Delve into the complexities of memory politics, from the manipulation of historical narratives for political agendas to the challenges of maintaining national identity in diaspora communities. Gain valuable insights into the multifaceted nature of heritage and memory, and the importance of embracing complexity in understanding the history and politics of Eastern Europe. This book is essential reading for scholars, students, and anyone interested in exploring the rich cultural landscape of the region.

The Forgotten Genius of Physics, a work on Marian Smoluchowski is a popular science book aimed at introducing the outstanding physicist and philosopher to a wider audience. It contains many biographical elements, using memoir materials that describe Smoluchowski as a teacher, scientist, mountaineer and family man, which were published in large numbers after the physicist’s unexpected death.In the last years of his life, Smoluchowski devoted much attention to the problem of randomness. His research laid the foundation for a new branch of mathematics - statistical physics. He is considered the creator of the discipline dealing with the application of probability theory to research in physics. Ironically, one could say that Smoluchowski’s death was a coincidence. During a trip to the Ojców region, he bathed in the small Pra˛tnica river. On the same day, sewage was released into the river from an Austrian army camp upstream, causing bacteriological contamination. This led to a severe attack of dysentery and prematurely ended the scientist’s life.

This book contains a phenomenological description of subjectivity present in relation as a phenomena of person understood as a human being. An essay describe “parts” of humanity of human being, what gives a full picture of the Other, someone different than I am – the figure of You. Understanding that context refers us to the issue of humanity.

In this book, the author presents his observations and thoughts related to academic life in Poland and in Western countries. For over 50 years, he was its participant, going from a student at Adam Mickiewicz University to a full professor. In this book, he refers to those problems that have appeared in academic life in recent decades. However, not only to them, because they were related in various ways to those that have existed since the establishment of the first academies. In each case, he treated it as a voice in discussions on the tasks of the academic community and the possibilities of their implementation in specific social realities.

Every generation has a historical event which changes its thinking compared to those before them. But was COVID such a historical event? Has the COVID generation been born or have we reached a latent, multi-outcome state? Although the pandemic and the heightened social reflection associated with it have subsided, its scientific, particularly sociological, lessons are far from complete. Within the framework of current generational logic in sociology, a key question arises: how did young people experience and navigate the three years defined by COVID, and will today's youth cohorts organically form a distinct generation? The authors are youth researchers from several social sciences. The uniqueness of their research lies partly in its content: while it focuses on the Hungarian context, no comparable comprehensive study is known in the social sciences. It is also unique in methodology, employing a combination of focus groups, big data-based social listening techniques, and surveys.

Marian Smoluchowski is the most frequently cited Polish scientist – Web of Science estimates the number of citations of his works in the period from 1894 to 2014 at 7,235 (Maria Curie-Skłodowska was cited 1,582 times during the same period). Equations relating to the theory of stochastic processes are regularly cited, and Smoluchowski’s continuity equation is used in descriptions of sedimentation and coagulation processes. His research on Brownian motion contributed to the triumph of atomistic theory in physics. Thanks to their use, Richard Zsigmondy, Jean Perrin, and Theodor Svedberg received the Nobel Prize in 1925–1926. The book presents the Polish physicist’s contribution to science and philosophy, especially the philosophy of nature. Smoluchowski’s research on cause and chance led to the introduction of probability calculus into physics. His theory of the criterion of usefulness answers the questions of how science develops and how we verify hypotheses and theories. He proves that usefulness is a universal category and applies to all aspects of human functioning in the natural world.