Katarzyna Filutowska

The paper focuses on the issue of truth-telling in non-fictional narratives of (in)justice. Based on examples of rape narratives, domestic abuse narratives, human trafficking narratives and asylum seeker narratives, I examine the various difficulties in telling the truth in such stories, particularly those related to various culturally conditioned ideas of how the world works, which at the same time form the basis of, among other things, legal discourse and officials’ decision-making processes. I will also demonstrate that such culturally conditioned ideas, which are the basis of official discourse, can be considered within the category of both the social imaginary of the just world in the Taylorian sense of the term, and the social master narrative, which in the case of stories of (in)justice is often based on the just world hypothesis.

This paper focuses on the origins of Polish Romanticism as born partially out of German idealist philosophy. I examine the influence exerted by the ideas of the most significant thinkers, such as Kant, Fichte and Schelling on both professors and students living in Vilnius at the beginning of the nineteenth century (particularly Jan Śniadecki, Józef Gołuchowski and Adam Mickiewicz). As an adherent of Enlightenment and empirical epistemology Śniadecki was critical towards Kant as well as Romantic poetics. On the contrary, in the works of young Gołuchowski, who was well acquainted with German ideas, there are frequent references to Kant, Fichte, and Schelling’s philosophy of life. The same ideas—such as vital nature, feeling, and faith as opposed to “dead” knowledge based on “pure terms”—can be found in Mickiewicz’s early works. This convergence of motifs is due to the fact that they both have the same source of inspiration: German idealism.