Stanislaw Jedrczak

Section 1 introduces the notion of transcendental arguments as arguments from the necessary conditions of possibility. What distinguishes them from other forms of deductive reasoning is the so-called transcendental conditional of the logical form ‘p is possible only if q’. Section 2 outlines three models for such arguments, analysing transcendental conditionals in terms of material implication, strict implication, and presupposition (semantic and pragmatic). Section 3 considers competing interpretations of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism presented in the B-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Section 4 summarises the main results of the paper.

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the fundamental assumptions underlying Alfred N. Whitehead’s process philosophy. The impetus for these reflections is the recent publication of Adventures of Ideas, translated into Polish by Marek Piwowarczyk, as part of the prestigious series: Library of Contemporary Philosophers by the Polish Scientific Publishers PWN. Adventures of Ideas is the final installment of Whitehead’s metaphysical trilogy, which includes Science and the Modern World as well as Process and Reality. The book, first published in 1933, contains the author’s original theory of civilization, based on the principles of process philosophy developed over the preceding several years. However, this theory of civilization seems to be the weakest link in Whitehead’s metaphysical system. Today, it holds primarily biographical significance, and serves as an illustration of the historical optimism that the author adhered to even on the eve of the Second World War.

E. J. Lowe and Ontology, edited by Mirosław Szatkowski, is the outcome of the international conference Jonathan Lowe and Ontology, which took place in Warsaw on 21–23 May 2019. The book consists of fifteen essays by philosophers of international renown; it concerns, among others, meta-ontology, theory of categories, persistence in time, agency, and mental causation. In addition to summarizing the book’s contribution to contemporary formal ontology, this review includes a critical discussion of selected chapters on meta-metaphysics, as well as general and special metaphysics.

This article covers the traditional problems of the philosophy of law: the controversies between realism and normativism, on the one hand, and positivism and non-positivism, on the other. The author, adopting the ontological perspective of the artefactual theory of law, attempts to attain two research aims. First, he argues that artefactual theory of law paves the way towards a moderate position overcoming realism-normativism duality. Second, he advocates the thesis that the supposedly ontological difference between positivist and non-positivist views might be dispelled and described as merely conceptual. Therefore, the opposite points of view could be considered as metaphysically equivalent ways of grasping the same social reality. According to the crucial premise of the argument law is a meliorative thick concept. The essay was inspired by an analogy between the philosophy of law and the philosophy of science first discussed by Lon L. Fuller.

The article has two purposes: the argumentative one, which is to present the problem of the authority of judges in democracy, and the argumentative and historical one, which is to outline Bogusław Wolniewicz’s philosophy of politics. The theoretical approach to the title issue has become a necessity after the Polish constitutional crisis, which questioned the so-called myth of the non-political character of judicature in 2015. In the on-going discussion, opposite positions have been formulated. They can be referred to as relativism and objectivism (the latter proclaims judicial apoliticality in the personal, jurisprudential and ideological sense). Advocating the legal relativism, I aim to bring out the roots of objectivism that lead us to the Roussonian democratism (contrasted with the Jeffersonian one).