Volume 66 (2011), 9

Today social functioning is a key concept in the theories of human well-being, in political theory, in social and moral philosophy, in social work etc. The paper’s focus is on three paradigmatic interpretations of social functioning: that overtaken from H. Bartlett’s the theory of social roles, Sen’s version of social functioning with its concept of capabilities,… Read more

Among the ideas implicitly present and generally accepted in legal theory we can find claims, such as: 1. Justice concerns distribution of goods and burdens. 2. It is connected with the relationship between law and morality. 3. Justice has an existential dimension and is rooted partially in irrational attitudes and intuitions. The first two prepositions make it… Read more

The key issue of the contemporary discourse on self-deception is the necessity to explain the inner structure of consciousness or the state of mind which enable us to tell lies to ourselves or to be befooled by one’s own tricks. Two different approaches to the problem are analyzed: Sartre’s concept of bad faith as well as Davidson’s concept of self-deception. What… Read more

Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work The Sickness unto Death is among his most popular and most commented works. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, numerous philosophers paid close attention to the theory of selfhood systematically expounded in this work. The study examines the critique of this theory formulated by Romano Guardini in a series of essays published… Read more

My making choices and acting on those choices in a way that might count as my being free would seem to require that those choices are truly my choices. Furthermore, for my choices to be truly mine, it would seem that these choices must reflect my true self. So it seems that choosing and acting freely depends in a robust sense on such choosing and acting being… Read more

The present analysis of the evolution of the concept of freedom in Ernst Tugendhat’s philosophy aims to highlight several interesting facts. First, Tugendhat attempts to describe the meaning of Kant’s statement “I could have acted otherwise” from a non-transcendental perspective. Second, he makes an effort to avoid the classical Kantian dilemma of the relation of… Read more

There is a striking similarity between the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Harry G. Frankfurt: they both argue that the temporal nature of human existence and agency is due to the fact that humans care about things. Even though Heidegger’s concept of care and Frankfurt’s concept of caring are very different, they are worth comparing because they play a similar… Read more

The paper focuses on two aspects of Hugh McCann’s theory of action and shows that they stand in conflict. The first of them is McCann’s defense of the claim that all overt actions are grounded in a special kinds of mental action – volitions (from the Gilbert Ryle’s famous ‘dilemma’ argument). The second aspect is his answer to the problem of causal deviance. The… Read more

The paper deals with free will as discussed in the recent book of Michael Frede A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought. Besides a close view on the structure of Fredes’s main ideas and arguments, the paper aims to provide a critical discussion of Frede’s view of St. Augustine’s contribution to the development of the notion of free will. This would… Read more

The aim of the paper is an examination of the critical passages in Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du comportement to show the fruitfulness of Merleau-Ponty’s critical examination of scientific interpretations of behavior and of several case-studies. Further, attention is paid to criticism of Gestaltpsychology and transcendentalism. In the end the author tries to… Read more