Why Polish Philosophy Does Not Exist

Abstract

There are many hundreds of courses taught under the title "Continental Philosophy" (C.P.) each year in North-American universities. Such courses deal not with philosophy on the continent of Europe as a whole, however, but rather with a highly selective portion of Franco-German philosophy, centred above all around the person of Martin Heidegger. Around him is gathered a rotating crew of currently fashionable, primarily French thinkers, each successive generation of which claims itself the "end" of philosophy (or of "man," or of "reason," of "the subject," of "identity" etc.) as we know it. A sort of competition then exists to produce ever wilder and more dadaistic claims along these lines, a competition that bears comparison, in more than one respect, with the competition among Hollywood film directors to outdo each other in producing ever more shocking or brutal or inhuman films. The later Husserl, Heidegger's teacher, is sometimes taken account of in courses of this "Continental Philosophy"; not, however, Husserl's own teacher Brentano and not, for example, such important twentieth-century German philosophers as Ernst Cassirer or Nicolai Hartmann. French philosophers working in the tradition of Poincaré or Duhem or Bergson or Gilson are similarly ignored, as, of course, are Austrian or Scandinavian or Czech philosophers. What, then, is the moment of unity of this "Continental Philosophy"? What is it that Heidegger and Derrida and Luce Irigaray have in common, which distinguishes them from phenomenologists such as Reinach or Scheler or the famous Daubert? The answer, it seems, is: antipathy to science, or more generally, antipathy to learning and to scholarly activity, to all the normal bourgeois purposes of the Western university (and we note in passing that, as far as phenomenology is concerned, it was Heidegger who was responsible for terminating that previously

The Lvov–Warsaw School as a Source of Inspiration for Argumentation Theory

“…Although analytic philosophers discuss in details the formal-logical heritage of the LWS (see, e.g. Jadacki 2009;Smith 2006;Woleński 1989), some other achievements of the school are not sufficiently represented in the world's philosophy. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Woleński 2010b), apart from the achievements in mathematical logic, the LWS is scarcely known outside Poland as the broader philosophical enterprise:…”