Towards a Universal Civilization - Böcker

This volume is devoted to the person and work of Leszek Kołakowski, who died in July 2009. At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, Leszek Kołakowski belonged to a group of young intellectuals actively supporting on the «ideological front» and in the University of Warsaw the new political agendas of Marxist provenance introduced in Poland. But already in 1955-56, he came to the fore of a movement of philosophical revisionists radically questioning the validity of these Marxist prescriptions. This resulted in his expulsion from the Communist Party in the early 1960s, then from the University and finally from Poland after the «March events» in 1968. Presented in this volume are, on the one hand, texts drawing up a historical balance sheet of theoretical achievements of Leszek Kołakowski (articles by Andrzej Walicki and Andrew Targowski), and, on the other, essays devoted to certain aspects of his philosophical position (articles by Marcin Król, Zofia Rosińska, Janusz Dobieszewski, Witold Mackiewicz and Janusz Kuczyński). Also presented in this volume are some occasional essays sketching a portrait of Leszek Kołakowski (by Marek J. Siemek, Karol Toeplitz and Jerzy Szacki). The book is closed with an extensive bibliography.

This book deals with correspondence truth, and offers an explanation of correspondence as a symbolization of reality. The author analyses those basic elements of known correspondence truth theories which are the cause of their inadequacy. She focuses on the theories which try to modify the strongest classical theories and shows that these theories are unable to free themselves from seeing correspondence as copying (mirroring). The book presents a «symbolic» correspondence truth theory claiming that correspondence is a specific kind of symbolisation in a Cassirer-close sense, and correspondence truth is neither a copy, nor any other imitation of reality, but its symbol.

One of the most difficult problems challenging the human mind is knowledge of the world in its human, natural, and supra-natural dimensions: what is the nature of this multidimensional reality? How do we know and verify the truth of our knowledge claims of this reality? A contemporary Polish philosopher, Malgorzata Czarnocka, has advanced one of the most comprehensive and insightful studies of the cognitive act and the conditions under which it takes place. The proposition explicated in this book is that Czarnocka’s analysis of perception functions as a model of explanation in our attempt to know the nature of the being that underlies the universe. This analysis becomes the basis of the author’s discussion of symbolic truth as a model of explanation and its other applications.