Lublin School of Philosophy a Comparative Perspective the JOHN PAUL II CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY of LUBLIN
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Lublin School of Philosophy A Comparative Perspective THE JOHN PAUL II CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF LUBLIN THE FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY AT THE KUL L A S Y C Z K NA I A N F A O K Z U O L L - I u F F K Lublin School of Philosophy A Comparative Perspective Edited by Jacek Wojtysiak, Zbigniew Wróblewski, Arkadiusz Gut Wydawnictwo KUL Lublin 2020 e publication was reviewed by Piotr Duchliński, Akademia Ignatianum w Krakowie Electronic typesetting Jarosław Bielecki Cover design Agnieszka Gawryszuk Cover photo: e illuminated initial N, the Augsburg Bible, 1475-1476. Source: e University Library of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin is book is part of the research program “Monuments of the Polish Philosophical, eological, and Social ought of the 20th and the 21st centuries,” conducted from 2016 to 2020 by the Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland and funded with its support. Contract number: 0021/Fil/2016/20. © Copyright by The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin ISBN 978-83-8061-901-2 9 788 380 61 901 2 Wydawnictwo KUL, ul. Konstantynów 1 H, 20-708 Lublin, tel. 81 740-93-40, fax 81 740-93-50, e-mail: [email protected], http:// wydawnictwo.kul.lublin.pl Table of contents Preface (Jacek Wojtysiak) . 7 Andrzej Bronk, Stanisław Majdański, The Epistemological and Methodological Inspirations and Aspirations of the Lublin School of Classical Philosophy . 11 I. Metaphysics Michał Głowala, The Theory of the Act and Potentiality in the Lublin School of Philosophy and in Analytic Metaphysics . 45 Marek Piwowarczyk, The Form and Components of the Substance: Mieczysław A. Krąpiec’s Hylomorphism in the Context of Analytical Currents within Hylomorphism . 65 Marek Piwowarczyk, The Problem of Accidental Existence in Mieczysław A. Krąpiec’s Metaphysics in the Context of the Thomistic Discussion on Esse Accidentale . 87 Jacek Wojtysiak, Błażej Gębura, Antoni B. Stępień’s Metaphysics: A Comparative Approach . 109 II. Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind Jacek Wojtysiak, Antoni B. Stępień’s Epistemology in the Context of Roman Ingarden’s Phenomenology . 133 6 Table of contents Arkadiusz Gut, Joanna K. Teske, Other Minds and Other Bodies: The Phenomenological Idea of Direct Cognition . 151 III. Methodology of Science and Semiotics Monika Walczak, The Categories of Interdisciplinarity and Integration in Relation to Stanisław Kamiński’s Analytical-Ordering Schemas . 183 Robert Kublikowski, Stanisław Kamiński’s Concept of Definition in the Context of Contemporary Theories of Definition . 217 IV. Philosophy of Nature and Natural Sciences Zbigniew Wróblewski, The Dispute on the Existence of Philosophy of Nature . 239 Zenon Roskal, Stanisław Mazierski’s Views on Causality in Comparison with Other Selected Conceptions of Causality . 261 Marian Wnuk, Between Theoretical Biology and Biophilosophy: Włodzimierz Sedlak as a Scientific Poacher . 279 Index of Names . 299 Preface Preface n the 1950s a group of philosophers at the Catholic University of Lublin formed a research community which – due to personal and teaching connections and a common program of practicing philos- ophy – can be called a school of philosophy. This school eventually became known as the Lublin School of Philosophy or (to stress cer- Itain its features) the Lublin School of Classical Philosophy or else the Lu- blin School of Realistic Philosophy. The founders of the school were: the historian of philosophy Stefan Swieżawski, the metaphysician Mieczysław A. Krąpiec OP, the logicians and methodologists of science Jerzy Kalinowski and Rev. Stanisław Kamiński, and the ethicist Rev. Karol Wojtyla (the later pope John Paul II). These philosophers shared a belief in the primary role of the history of philosophy and broadly understood logic in the teaching and practice of philosophy. They considered metaphysics (theory of being) to be the central philosophical discipline within which they proposed an original (yet concurrent with the proposals of Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain) interpretation of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s thought (so-called exis- tential Thomism). They regarded it as their duty to elaborate the most im- portant issues in classical philosophy in dialogue with contemporary phi- losophy and with the awareness of the cognitive functions and limitations of science. Although not all colleagues and disciples of the aforementioned philosophers shared every element of that program, they managed to cre- ate a rather coherent research community, the legacy of which, as well as didactic and scholarly influence on Polish philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century, is significant. It is worth noting that the Lublin School 8 Preface of Philosophy achieved those goals despite serious limitations which (until 1989) were imposed by the actions of the communist authorities, the exter- nal domination of Marxist ideology and numerous difficulties in contacts with Western philosophy. In such conditions the Lublin School – through its publications and teaching activities – prepared for several generations of Polish Catholic intelligentsia an interesting proposal of a rational ground- ing of the foundations of the Christian worldview. It was to a large extent thanks to the Lublin School that the Polish intelligentsia – by becoming aware of the connections and differences between science, philosophy and religion – was not subjected solely to the influence of various types of Marx- ism and Scientism. In this volume we attempt to compare the accomplishments of the Lu- blin School of Philosophy with selected currents and schools of philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The introductory chapter was prepared by two of Kamiński’s direct disciples: Rev. Andrzej Bronk and Stanisław Majdański. The remaining chapters, written by authors coming from later generations of the School, have been arranged in accordance with the philosophical disciplines practiced within it. Since as it was already mentioned metaphysics was treated as the central discipline in the Lublin School of Philosophy, in the first part of the book we juxtapose certain metaphysical topics of the school – especially Krąpiec’s metaphysics – with discussions conducted within Analytical philosophy and Thomistic philos- ophy. We also discuss an outline of the School’s metaphysics as proposed by Antoni B. Stępień (a disciple of Swieżawski, Krąpiec and Kamiński) together with his argumentation against various sorts of naturalistic and non-theistic metaphysics. Stępień contributed to the Lublin School a textbook systematization of its views and an original elaboration of several important philosophical disciplines: epistemology, philosophical psychology (which currently tends to be called “philosophy of mind”) and aesthetics. We dedicate the second part of this volume to the first two disciplines. The comparative context of this section is the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden (who substantively and directly influenced Stępień), and in the case of philosophy of mind (in particular the issue of alter ego) – a broader phenomenological perspective connected with inquiries into contemporary cognitive science. Philosophers at the Lublin School of Philosophy predominantly advocat- ed the autonomy of philosophy. Despite that, a fair amount of their studies have been dedicated to the methodological reflection on the foundations of the sciences (and human knowledge in general) and the philosophical Preface 9 reflection inspired by the natural sciences (or else conducted in their con- text). We devoted the third part of our book to the first of these reflections. It refers to Kamiński’s meta-scientific and semiotic thought in the context of the most recent inquiries into interdisciplinarity, integration of sciences and definitions. In the last part of this volume we focus on the philosophy of nature (and of natural sciences) at the Lublin School of Philosophy. Philosophers of nature were distinguished within the Lublin School of Philosophy by a certain autonomy, maintaining some distance with regard to the main- stream of the School. Most of them did not consider themselves to be ex- istential Thomists but Louvain ones (e.g. Rev. Kazimierz Kłósak and Rev. Stanisław Mazierski), or non-Thomistic philosophers “in the context of sci- ence” (to quote Rev. Michał Heller – Mazierski’s disciple – who due to his world-class achievements, gathered around himself in Krakow a milieu of philosophers of nature, theologians of science and philosophizing natural scientists). Rev. Włodzimierz Sedlak deserves particular attention here; he considered himself to be a natural scientist rather than a philosopher and he was an author of nonstandard scientific conception (bioelectronics) and a specific sort of restorer of the metaphysics of light. We dedicate the last article of this section to his work. The remaining chapters in this section concern Mazierski’s conception of causality (against the background of the conceptions of causality which dominated in his times in physics and phi- losophy) and disputes in the Lublin School of Philosophy (and beyond it) on the concept and methodological status of philosophy of nature. This volume does not cover the accomplishments of Lublin School of Philosophy with regard to the history of philosophy, formal logic (and met- alogic), ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of religion. These issues are in- cluded in other publications within the series encompassed by the project “The Monuments of Polish Philosophical, Theological and Social Thought of the