Studies in Social Sciences, Philosophy and History of Ideas – serie

At first glance, no two experiences could be further apart than genocide and music. Yet real, live culture usually goes beyond rational divisions. It is now fairly commonly known that art is not absent from the sites of mass killings. Both victims and prosecutors engage in artistic activities in prisons and camps, as well as at other places where genocides take place. What is the music of genocide? Can the experience of ultimate terror be expressed in music? How does music reflect on genocide? How do we perceive music after genocide? What is music and what is silence in a world marked by mass killings? Is post-genocidal silence really possible or appropriate? The goal of the volume is to reveal and, maybe even to some extent, resolve the most profound dilemma that was expressed by Theodor W. Adorno when he asked «whether it is even permissible for someone who accidentally escaped and by all rights ought to have been murdered, to go on living after Auschwitz.» It is not for the sake of pure curiosity that the relation between music and genocide is examined. In a sense we are all survivors who accidentally escaped genocide. It might have happened to us. It may still happen.

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.

The book contains analyses and interpretations of multidimensional perspectives in philosophical, economical and psychological research on imagination. The authors analyse Russian (N. Bierdiajew) and French philosophy and anthropology (G. Bachelard, G. Durand), German conceptions (I. Kant's, F. Baader's, F. Schiller 's or Heideggerian interpretations) of the role of imagination in art, science and sociopolitical domains. Image and imagination play the main role in the contemporary social world. It is investigated by psychology, sociology and political sciences, and many subdisciplines of philosophy have their own traditions in approaches to image and imagination problem. The authors try to integrate the results of these research efforts.

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.

The book is a journal that presents narrations and factual accounts of events covering 144 days the author spent during the Third Scientific Expedition of the Polish Academy of Sciences to the Arctowski Station on King George Island (South Shetland Islands). The observations comprise events and behaviors in daily life situations of a team of Polish polar explorers. A valuable source of knowledge for empirical psychology on the behavior of people in extreme conditions, the book describes symptoms that form the winter-over syndrome. The “winter-over syndrome” may be predicted by analogous effects of space isolation, especially in long-term space missions, like an expedition to Mars. Hence, this book is an important scientific and civilizational event in the era of space exploration.

The book is a scientific monograph, based on a natural experiment on cognitive, emotional and social functioning during the year-long isolation of 21 winter hounds at the Henryk Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station. The conducted research was of a specimen and sociometric nature. The results presented in the book are unique in the literature on the subject due to the longitudinal nature of the research conducted, together with its high frequency (every two weeks). Moreover, the social isolation was total in its character, due to the large limitation of connectivity with the outside world, which could be considered analogous to future long-term space missions.

The book Audio Documentary: A Sociological Perspective offers a unique analysis that significantly contributes to the development of knowledge within the audial paradigm. It is a thorough scholarly study of a phenomenon exceptional in the Polish radio tradition– the audio documentary (prof. Małgorzata Bogunia-Borowska, review) The work provides an insightful analysis of the audio documentary as a medium of cultural values and a vehicle for the transmission of social memory. It also delves deeply into the context of production and the structural composition of the documentary. All the crucial elements of its construction are examined and problematized in the book. It constitutes a valuable contribution to sociology, communication studies, and media scholarship (prof. Krzysztof Konecki, review)

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.

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.

The way sociology frames the relation between formality and informality is not only complex and multifaceted, but has also evolved over time. This volume offers contributions by international authors that illustrate distinct types of theoretical framings and present various sites of inquiry. It proposes a typology comprising: the sociology of informally embedded formality, the sociology of formally embedded informality, the sociology of the interaction between formality and informality and the sociology of the emergence and transformation of formality and informality.