Using the hands and minds of its most prominent representatives, humanity has been on a remarkable quest to combat evil, dangers, suffering, life’s hardships, and premature death. Who or what have our enemies been?

The author states that the language functions in the service to the thought; it organizes the course of our thought and enables transfer of information. To attain this purpose, it has two mechanisms at its disposal: 1. lexicalisation, which enables us to give form to the results of our conceptualisation of the world, and 2. grammaticalization, which ensures that the information most important to the successful course of the linguistic communication gets regular transparent surface categorial markers (= markers of the so‑called grammatical categories). She discusses parallels and differences in the functioning of these two mechanisms in Polish and in Macedonian.

The aim of the article is to compare the thought collective and the interpretive community, two surprisingly similar notions formulated independently by Ludwik Fleck and Stanley Fish. In contemporary discourse, both concepts are used as synonims, while an accurate analysis of the contexts of the use of interesting terms proves that the equivalent of the interpretive community is rather thought collective, as well as the thought style, both of these concepts in the deliberations of Fish are subject to contamination. The exact repartition of the notion of interpretive community seems to be important due to the frequency of its use in works in the field of literary interpretation and cognition. The article also presents more general remarks on the functioning and possible origin of twin terms and their role in scientific cognition.

Do the humans nowadays enjoy the freedom of thinking? To what extent is the modern man critical of the flood of information, smooth words and beautiful truisms that come from newspapers, the Internet and television? G. K. Chesterton, an English writer and publicist of the 20th century, noticed the progressive decrease in thinking in the modern world, which seems to strive for relativization, shapelessness, disappearance of precisely defined words, and thus, for the lack of clear language. This is an extremely important phenomenon because human thoughtlessness leads to serious threats. For this reason the article analyzes the issues of Chesterton’s language blurs in contemporary discourse and their relation to the progressive thoughtlessness of the present times which increasingly absorb man into thoughtlessness of consumption. The second part of the article presents the concept of common sense by outlining its most important features and showing the inalienable need for religion and philosophy to return to clear thinking.

The aim of this article is to answer the question, “How Philaret Drozdov understood God’s holiness and human holiness and how both the ideas were displayed in his writings?” The research material constitutes selected homilies and a catechism. In the first place, the author discusses the definition of holiness and its understanding by the Orthodox Church with regard to the issue of deification. Also, he familiarizes the reader with the concept of holiness in its various aspects. Subsequently, the homilies and the catechism of Philaret Drozdov are analysed. The article shows the Moscow Metropolitan’s beliefs about the essence of human holiness as well as about the eschatological dimension of temporality and the pneumatological aspect of holiness, the issue of grace and a human seen as a vessel of God’s energy. The author proves that the Moscow Metropolitan continued in his works the traditions of the Church Fathers and creatively developed the most important assumptions of Orthodox anthropology and soteriology and, hence enriching Russian spiritual thought.

The new edition in Italian of the articles by the Polish microbiologist and philosopher Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961) edited by Francesco Coniglione offers the opportunity for some considerations around this significant scholar. Fleck anticipates Kuhn’s ideas as well as those of the sociology of science. For him, any epistemology that does not take psychological and sociological methods into account, or that does not concern itself with economics, technology, art, and even politics, is an epistemology imaginabilis. Here we discuss some key points of the essays collected in the book, some observations taken from the rich introduction of the editor, and an inevitable question: Why has Fleck been neglected for so long?

In his works from maturity, Honoré de Balzac tries to formulate a philosophical system describing the role of the thought and its impact on human life. Those reflections originate already in his early works since 1818, in his philosophical notes, and later in the novels from the 1820s, as well as in other texts. His opinions develop in a certain “economy of thought” through which are expressed dialectics of thought, will and vital energy.

Andrzej Walicki’s book: O Rosji inaczej („On Russia in a different way”, 2019) is a crucial item for the Polish reader, because it treats significant issues in Polish and Russian history, as exemplified by ideology based on philosophy and other pivotal issues of contemporary times. Walicki was a prominent expert on Russian thought and on important phenomena of Russian culture. He was well prepared to raise important questions and offer competent new answers. In his book, Walicki focused primarily on modernism which had influenced the development of socialist thought and on the philosophy of the opposition at the so‑called golden age. The main intention of this paper is to make certain additions to the assessment of these phenomena by the Russian Orthodox thought, and especially by those who sustain the position of the conservative Orthodox Church, regardless of the historical moment of its formulation. Modernism stands in opposition to Orthodox dogmatics, anthropology, ecclesiology and patristics. It has its roots in Byzantine Renaissance that migrated to Italy after the fall of Constantinople. Modernism constitutes an important paradigm of post‑medieval culture. It is active in Western culture and influences Russian culture as well. Obviously, Russian culture is attached to the Orthodox Church in a special way, as the Church constitutes a specific genotype of that culture. Modernist influences that are rooted in this specific soil bring forth completely different upshots in Russia from those that emerge in the West. Essential examples of this phenomenon are absolutism, imperialism or Marxist socialism in their Western and Russian versions. These phenomena concern primarily political matters but they clearly show that the ideals of modernism in Russia assume a religious character. However, they were not inherently religious, and should rather be placed in the sphere of myths.

This article is devoted to the presentation of the philosophical contacts between Andrzej Walicki and his contemporary Russian philosophers. On the basis of already published texts as well as archived correspondence, Walicki’s relations with Sergei Hessen and Dmitry Chizhevsky, and especially with Fr. Georges Florovsky, are discussed. Walicki and Russian thinkers deliberated about historiosophy, the history of Russian philosophy and even theology. In spite of their different perspectives (Florovsky was the founder of the so‑called neo‑Patristic synthesis, which had an exclusively historical significance for Walicki), they played a significant role in popularizing Russian thought in the West, especially in the USA.

The main task of the paper is to analyse pope Benedict XVI’s social teaching on poverty as introduced in the encyclical letter ‘Caritas in veritate’. While the methodo-logical language of the papal teaching is anthropological and theological in character, the document uses its own interdisciplinary approach that is characteristic of Catholic Social Teaching. Consequently such a Christian reflection on social issues like pover-ty, inequality, marginalisation and globalisation can be compared with other social fin-dings. In the global context the pope identifies growing economic inequalities but also the advantages of cooperation within the global economy. The analysis also discerns the theories of social development that are convergent with the papal social diagnosis. Finally, comparing the pope’s social teaching with some studies in economy, sociolo-gy and political sciences, the author of the paper examines the possibility to construct an interdisciplinary link between Catholic Social Teaching and other social sciences.

In this paper, I present a short 10-point characteristics of the classical conception of truth. Subsequently I point to the importance and comprehensive usefulness of this truth, among others, to the possibility of applying it in some virtual environments, e.g., in those which include virtual objects of types A and C. I also emphasize that—independently of views of promotors and creators of the “post-truth era” (e.g. the will of politicians, propagandists and the authors of conspiracy theories)—truth as it is grasped in the classical theory is in principle non-withdrawable from social discourse, including its philosophical and scientific fields.

In education, information and Communications Technologies mostly play the role of a medium of communication, as well as a means of imparting knowledge. ICT, however, is used less as a subject for student activity, i.e. a subject for students to learn, where they can operate the technology, as in robotics or mechantronics. Information technologies are also very rarely implemented in education as a way for students to build their identity and shape their attitudes towards their outside and inside worlds. In spite of this, in the history of educational technology there have been a number of researchers and educators who have promoted interesting ideas for implementing technologies as tools for human cognitive, affective, psychomotor and moral empowerment. Today such people are also present in education, however, they play unimportant roles on the periphery of formal education. This paper is a reminder of a number of ideas by theorists and researchers concerning the implementation of ICT, but mainly highlights the empowerment it gives students and its humanizing/humanitarian role.

The aim of the author is to present some messianic and prophetic ideas, which are intrinsically fused with Karl Marx’s doctrines, and which had also been expressed in Jewish mystical thought as well as in the ethical message of the Bible. Although Marx did not obtain any proper Jewish education, he was not able to reject his own being-a-Jew or his inborn spirituality together with the implicit axio-normative system of Judaism. Marxist philosophy, generally speaking, is dominated by the postulate of building a better and a more just world, and by the ethical demand of creating a new reality, from which poverty and social marginalization would be eradicated. However, such views were not new. For, it was the author of the Biblical “Book of Devarim”, who earlier emphasized the need for social solidarity. There had also been some Jewish prophets who criticized kings and priests, and Tsfat Jewish mystics who had formulated an ethically radical tikkun ha-olam postulate in the 16th century.