Wojciech Żełaniec

Lévy-Bruhl thought that the primitive mind could not really distinguish itself from the ‘collective mind’ of the community it was immersed in; the post-modern mind, by contrast, though arguably no less forcibly pressed into the Procrustean bed of various collective beliefs, is very well in the position to dissociate itself from the ‘us’ whose position it sometimes pretends to represent. Are such beliefs, then, really anyone’s beliefs or are they merely ‘make-believes’? Though Gilbert in her ‘Joint commitment’ does not explicitly address this question, I try to reconstruct, from the text of her book, her possible answer to it.

The paper deals with the problem of delimitation of regulative and constitutive rules. I argue that while regulative rules are and remain a genus of their own, they do have a constitutive import, because they (i) define new forms of behaviour (behaviour compliant with them), (ii) take constituted entities as “input”, (iii) redefine old forms of behaviour as such to which a deontic modality applies and (iv) help to carve out new possibilities of behaviour from a continuum of only potentially distinguishable possibilities.

I go through various arguments why the K-principle (aka Distributivity Axiom), O(p→q)→(Op→Oq), a cornerstone of all deontic logic as the latter is standardly conceived, is of little use for the logical analysis of real-life deontic discourse. It is empirically false, I argue. Then I proceed to the question why it is so attractive, and I submit the hypothesis that to blame is Kripke semantics, making use of the imagery of possible worlds, accepted as a de facto standard in deontic logic. This semantics, however, is not attuned to the needs of controlling real-life deontic discourse, as the latter is mostly about things entirely this-worldly. For this-worldly relations possibly founding the deontic modalities the K-principle stands poor chance of working, I argue.

The Polish philosopher Czesław Znamierowski (1888–1967) was perhaps not a pur sang phenomenologist; however, he was significantly inspired and influenced by Reinach’s A priori foundations of the civil law. In 1921, a few years before Gerda Walther, Edith Stein and Dietrich von Hildebrand, he started publishing articles and books on what he called “social ontology.” The social ontology which emerges from these writings, and which we sketch out in our essay, is remarkably similar to, and yet no less strikingly different from, the social ontologies of these phenomenological classics, the latter no doubt due to Znamierowski’s at times not quite accurate criticism of Reinach, but even more due to Znamierowski’s own acumen and unconfessedly phenomenological insightfulness. We explain his conceptual apparatus, his “social acts” and “social facts”, his “social bearing” and “social function”, and the rest of it; we also amply illustrate this with examples provided by Znamierowski himself and by ourselves. We try to show that Znamierowski in virtue of his method, the substance of his thought, and also his style, and not just in virtue of the influences he had absorbed, was a de facto phenomenologist, even though he did not call himself such. Last but not least, we attempt to demonstrate that Znamierowski’s social ontology is by and large correct and can be put to fruitful use even today, rather than be of merely historical interest.

Are there things that we must never do, no matter how untypical the circumstances and “unorthodox” our deontic ideas might be? In this essay I try to make evident that acts I call “pure sadist acts” satisfy this description. I discuss several examples of such acts and alert to their being not always easy to distinguish from certain others. Norms prohibiting such acts I call “true”, and I suggest that other, less suggestive, norms might also be (derivatively) true, if the pertinent acts stand in certain relations with the former ones. I incorporate some ideas from Hume, as well as from elementary model theory, to make mine clearer.

This essay is an assessment of Searle’s arguments for the derivability of an obligation from a fact set out in his 1964 and 1968. It draws on a number of authoritative authors both old and recent. It is not, nor does it attempt to be, an erudite review of the very large literature on the topic in question. Rather, it focuses on certain fine points of the Searlean derivation, points that, while striking, have largely gone unnoticed in the current literature. The bottom line is, not unexpectedly, that the derivability of obligations from facts is to remain a matter of debate for some time still—yet a debate to which Searle’s contribution can’t be overestimated.

This essay attempts to define a value (not «the» value) of what, in it, comes to be called an «eccentric». In a largely standardized and stereotyped society like ours of the present times, a society where a human being can be creative but only within certain predefined limits, diverse groups exert all kinds of pressure on an individual, and with growing geographical as well as social mobility these kinds of pressure, intertwined and superimposed, give rise to overdue stress and situations of psychological and maybe even metaphysical impossibility. One solution is a «no notice» attitude, in which all rules but a few selected ones are more or less dignifiedly flouted. Another solution is an attitude of an eccentric, close to, but not identical with, that of John Henry Newman’s «gentleman». I try to define this attitude and show one of its values: enabling us to evade too much social pressure without estranging us from society.

G.E.M. Anscombe znalazła w Etyce nikomachejskiej Arystotelesa pewną niekonsekwencję: Arystoteles zdaje się twierdzić, że cokolwiek wynika z namysłu, jest wyborem, i że słaby wolą może się skutecznie namyślać, ale i że — z drugiej strony — on nie wybiera. Anscombe znajduje rozwiązanie tej sprzeczności: Arystoteles powinien był, jej zdaniem, zaznaczyć, że by z namysłu wynikał wybór, to, ze względu na co się namyślamy, musiałby sam być przedmiotem uprzedniego wyboru. Badam to rozwiązanie i znajduję jego słabe strony, jak niebezpieczeństwo nieskończonego regresu, trudność prześledzenia genealogii wyborów i nieosiągalność pierwotnego celu. Pomimo to próbuję je ulepszyć, poddając pod dyskusję, czy tego rodzaju pierwotne wybory, jakich wymaga rozwiązanie Anscombe, nie są jednak czasem naprawdę podejmowane i czy ich cele nie są rozkładalne na takie, które można realistycznie mieć nadzieję osiągnąć.