Rafał Katamay

The purpose of the article is to present an interpretation in the light of which one can read a characteristic aspect of the understanding of being in Presocratic philosophy. The starting point is to emphasize the idea of ​​a place within the etymology of the verb “be”: “to be” generally means ‘to be in the world’. Then the world is characterized as something _implicite_ existing (i.e. beyond the human mind) and having a “second plane”: order hidden behind phenomena. Attempts to understand it were called investigations into the nature (of “things”), which meant the real foundation of the world and its active source – something that internally constitutes all sensual objects, providing building materials, structures and laws of development. Against this background (interpretive context), the understanding of being is defined as an element of nature – something identifiable in a distributive way and always in connection with (dependent) with self-contained nature. This element can be understood in two ways: as an object accessible to the senses taken together with the constituting nature, e.g. concrete tree, or the very internal nature, e.g. fire (Heraclitus) or four basic elements (Empedocles) from which sensual objects originate or consist.

The aim of the article is to explain the reason why Plato treated a dialogue as the best means of a written form of transmiting a philosophical content. It also constitutes a contribution to the understanding of Plato’s way of philosophising. The author emphasises that both a dialogue and dialectics have a joint structure composed of questions and answers, and, thus, constitute the basic method of philosophy, i.e. the process of moving towards wisdom. The process of philosophising takes place when moving from the state of unknown to wisdom, i.e. from capturing difficulties to their solutions. It is "dia-logical" in nature after all; it assumes the thought movement from one "logos" already included in the question to the other inserted in the answer. The ultimate goal of the dialogue, going beyond its scope, is the stoppage of thinking and mental view of the essence explaining everything. The author discriminates between three forms of dialogue: an internal one, a spoken one and a written one. The conclusion part says that Plato used a dialogue to express not only his most vital philosophical views, but the problems a thinking person faces in the world, and ways of solving them, encouraging the reader to follow them.

The aim of the article is to present a preliminary interpretation of Plato’s thought, based on the text of dialogues which outlines the guidelines allowing for making references to some tendencies of interpretation. The author claims that it is not about looking for a written or oral transmission of a ready made system but a dynamic interpretation of Plato’s thought as directed and problematic. In his main trend, through considerations on the most important issues the world raises in front of a human being, Plato’s philosophy methodologically aims at their ultimate solutions. Its main aim is to dialectically search the truth, set out from the beginning by a recognition of an intelligible fullness of the being uniting the ontological level with an epistemological and practical-religious one. The author reads Plato’s philosophy as esoteric in a sense that the fulfillment, i.e. a recognition of an intelligible whole of the world, takes place beyond discourse, in a mental part of the soul, whereas discourse leads to it or reports on it. Finally, to understand Plato means the effort of philosophizing, starting with a more or less clear experience of the fullness of the truth and being, the recognition of which is directed at from the very moment.