Stanislaw Jedrczak

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. Advocating the legal relativism, I aim to bring out the roots of objectivism that lead us to the Roussonian democratism.