Przegląd Filozoficzny. Nowa Seria

This essay presents an intellectual profile of Roger Scruton. Its contents have been gathered from personal reminiscences of the author about their friendly encounters and discussions of books that inspired them both when Scruton was involved in the activities of the anti-communist opposition in East-Central Europe. His motives and ventures are tentatively reconstructed. He has been remembered in Poland as a conservative thinker and intellectual figure with views that are shown here against the background of his past and in the context of his efforts to understand religion with its practices, origin, the role in Western and local communities, and its bearing on the changes that have occurred European culture.

In the article I discuss Roger Scruton’s opposition between utopian optimism and anti- -utopian pessimism. I show how it connects with the concepts of politics of faith and politics of skepticism introduced by Michael Oakeshott. Then I explain the relationship between the attitude of skeptical moderation and philosophical realism.

The text discusses Roger Scruton’s most important philosophical views. Scruton was a conservative whose world view was firmly grounded in the Anglo-Saxon philo-sophical tradition. At the same time, he was a man of versatile interests (aesthetics, music, architecture, ecology), which was reflected in his rich creativity. He was a critic of all leftist and liberal ideologies, so he rejected both the liberal meaning of freedom and socialist meaning of equality. He understood freedom as an element of social bonds and hierarchical order. His philosophy revolves around such categories as property, natural justice, common law and oikophilia, on which he bases his ecological project („green philosophy”). Scruton’s texts also contain elements of conservative political practice.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Roger Scruton’s views on patriotism and the attitudes of nationalism and oikophobia that endanger proper love of homeland. According to Scruton, patriotism is identical with loyalty to the people who inhabited a certain territory and share common culture, customs and history. The feeling of national loyalty so understood is peaceful by its nature and stabilizes the democratic system. Besides patriotism, Scruton distinguishes two attitudes, of worship of one’s nation and of hostility towards it. The first attitude may transform into nationalism, and then deifies nation and leads to wars and conflicts in history. Unlike the former, the attitude of hostility towards own nation (oikophobia) justifies development of transnational institutions that limited sovereignty of the democratic nation-states and – indirectly – undermine the sovereignty of one’s people. In the final part of the paper I paraphrase the concepts of nation presupposed in the attitudes of patriotism, nationalism and oikophobia, as they are discussed in the theoretical apparatus used by Leszek Nowak in his deformative conception of culture.

Roger Scruton repudiates the idea that civil liberty is a natural and unconditionally desirable state of citizenry, while subjection is something degrading and unnatural. He characterizes the conservative political system as a ‘rule by institutions’ supported by a theory of nature and a theory describing the functioning of institutions. National politics results from operations of social and political institutions which have grown out of traditional arrangements, respect raison d’État, and are governed by offices. The author argues that this is a sound interpretation of essential political arrangements, if it can solve the problem of political reconstruction after a period of decline or disintegration. As a matter of fact Scruton offers such a solution in his analysis of various forms of liberalism, one of which he seems to identify with conservatism.

Roger Scruton refers to Thomas Stearns Eliot in almost every one of his books, but despite the undoubtedly fundamental influence, which Eliot had exerted on the development of Scruton’s outlook, apart from a short article entitled Eliot and Conservatism, Scruton did not devote a separate work to Eliot’s thought. As I try to show this is due to the fact that Scruton was not so much a scholar of Eliot, as a continuator of his thought – not merely an expert on his philosophy and poetry, but an inheritor of his spiritual legacy. Both Eliot and Scruton belong to a current, which may rightly be called conservative philosophy of culture. In this paper I outline the conception of culture advanced by Eliot, and show how Scruton draws on this conception in his own spiritual development.

In the article I present a concise view of the conservative image of the world, inspired by the works of Roger Scruton. His vision starts as a moral and political project, but then goes on to turn into a theory of culture, education and aesthetic experience. Although the project was originally intended as devoid of any religious justification, it is possible to see religion as a complement or an equivalent to the conservative attitude, as it is expressed in private life. Religious language can be understood as a useful, personal, symbolic expression of the conservative attitude to life. Scruton also undertook to defend the humane face of philosophy, by which I mean his conviction that philosophy should resist reductive tendencies of natural science, and instead should strive to develop better understanding of the essential works of art and literature known in the Western canon.

This is an obituary of Harold Bloom and a brief review of his two books: The Western Canon and How to Read and Why, which were recently translated into Polish. It also outlines Bloom’s unique conception of literature and his praise of solitary reading.

Bogusław Wolniewicz’s book Things and facts, although it is essentially devoted to the interpretation of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, also has a substantive layer in which Wolniewicz raises very important problems in the fields of methodology, semiotics and metaphysics, such as: (a) the problem of clarity of philosophical texts and its relation to simplicity and brevity, as well as to thoroughness and suggestiveness; (b) the problem of semantic correlation types; (c) the problem of analysis, interpretation and definition; (d) the problems of modality, negative facts, absolute monism and coherentionism; (e) the problem of abstraction and moral-praxeological antinomy. The author of the paper reconstructs Wolniewicz’s views on these matters.

The study focuses on the relationship between the ethics of reading and the narrator’s unreliability in the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day. Drawing on James Phelan’s research, the authoress states that unreliability that can be attributed to the narrator of Ishiguro’s novel can be classified as either an error of being in the wrong or withholding some information consciously. Consequently, six types of unreliability can be distinguished: misreporting, misinterpreting, misevaluating, underreporting, underinterpreting, underevaluating. Employing these categories, the authoress analyses a literary text and lists different types of unreliability which are characteristic of Stevens, the main character and the narrator in Ishiguro’s novel.

Environmental ethics draws on the belief that nature is an object of moral worth; i.e. that we have certain moral duties with respect to the natural environment. This article is intended as a defense of this belief. According to the proposal I set forth here, targeting nature as an object of moral worth is grounded on a specific esthetic experience. This conception is based, on the one hand, on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas; on the other hand – it makes use of Roman Ingarden’s concept of esthetic experience.

Akratic actions are usually defined as intentional actions which conflict with the agent’s best judgement. As both irrational and conscious, actions of that type stand in need of an explanation. In this paper I reconstruct and criticize Donald Davidson’s classical standpoint on the problem of akrasia. I show the disadvantages of Davidsonian conception of practical reasoning and I defend the conception of syllogistic reasoning. I also criticize the theory of intention as unconditional normative judgement. Against Davidson’s view, I argue for the theory of intention as an act of will (not a judgement). According to this theory of intention and practical reasoning, akratic actions should be explained as actions caused by an act of will which conflicts with the best judgement. I propose to interpret the inclination of will to conflict or to follow the best judgement by the theory of habitus.

The purpose of this article is to point out the historical reasons why W.V. Quine’s article Two Dogmas of Empiricism should be read not as an attempt to criticize the characteristic theses of logical positivism, but as an attempt to reject the conceptual analysis based on the unclear concepts such as ‘analytical’, ‘synonymous’ and ‘meaning’. Instead of the conceptual analysis, Quine proposed the methods of explication and paraphrase. These two methods are useful for clarifying and simplifying the conceptual apparatus in which scientific knowledge is formulated.

This article presents the problem of understanding Heideggerian ‘turn’ (Kehre) in the context of the most important aspects of his later philosophy. Since Heidegger had written (secretly) Contributions to Philosophy, he departed from his original philosophical assumptions, which had been presented in Being and Time. Heidegger’s turn was conceived as a discovery of truth of Being, as a project of another beginning, as proper asking about Being as such, as well as a discovery of a hidden aspect of being that is revealed in an event (‘enowning’).