Szekspirowskie przywołania w polskiej literaturze kryminalnej (rekonesans)

Taking into consideration the variety of Shakespearean elements both in world and Polish literature, it is hard to resist the impression that it is the phenomenon without which European culture would be impossible to imagine. At the same time, the writer — whose works not only constitute an important part of Western culture and determine its canon, but also have an influence on current, globalised culture — is perceived as a “dangerous trap”. The above-mentioned danger seems to derive, paradoxically, from the ubiquity of Shakespeare’s works, which are used as a point of reference for modern stories and sometimes treated instrumentally as the “culture brand”. However, it is important to determine if the reception of Shakespeare — present in the socio-cultural aesthetics as well as in the area of paratheatrical avant-garde — among Polish audience is followed by the pop-cultural assimilation of his works. The success on the market of crime fiction whose authors relate to Shakespeare’s works implies the reductio ad absurdum question: how much of Shakespeare remains in these Shakespearean inspirations? Are they really inspirations or is Shakespeare only the brand-author who, due to his name, elevates a given text on the cultural level? If that was the case, we would be experiencing the branding after the pattern of culturally imposed stereotypes. They are in turn assimilated by the popular culture and have a significant impact on the everyday behaviours of the readers — including their attitude towards the past. Thus, tracking the Shakespearean traces within this cultural circuit usually remains a “wishful thinking”, while countless Polish stories (or the ones that the readers know from translations into the Polish language) about “crime and punishment” are the exceptions that prove the rule.

The Internalist Justificatory Function of Reductio Ad Absurdum

In the present essay it is discussed the main features of reductio ad absurdum as a source of justification. These properties are consequences of the employment of contradictions as a reason for proving if a statement is true. Although a valid deductive argument can build an internalistic justification, I would suggest that the justification obtained by reductio ad absurdum cannot be externalist. This is because contradictions as reasons can be considered internal states from different definitions.

The Vienna Protocol and Reflections on Nazi Medicine: Murder à la Carte

An historian of World War II Germany was asked, about whether there was a single ideological notion that proved to be the most influential in allowing the horrific evils of the Holocaust to take place. It is the very idea, derived from the Romantics, he wrote, that artists are entitled to live outside of morality. Hitler and others unquestionably saw themselves in this way. With this realization we have arrived at the reductio ad absurdum of this Romantic ethic: the Artist as Murderer. And it is because we believe that like artists, physicians occupy a higher sphere, that we have, in Holocaust times, the transformation of the physician, like the artist, into the murderer. Like the artist, who murders but does not do so with his own hand, the physician supervises executions and unspeakable experiments. Anatomists buttressed their collections at a range of German and Austrian universities, by placing orders from among the executed and about-to-be executed. It is this that I have in mind when I speak of "murder-a-la-carte." Pernkopf was one of these anatomists. Through the atlas he immortalizes the victims. Years later, a surgeon asks about the atlas and protocols for continued use, to benefit patients and educate, are created. The surgeon may well be rescuing the medical profession itself from its own historical sins of presumed unaccountability, of returning it to a human place where the dignity of the patient remains inviolable, and where the victims of medically inspired evil gaze out at us from the pages of the atlas, both as a blessing and as a warning. זכור ("remember") Image credit: Table of Contents image provided by the Medical University of Vienna, MUW-AD-003250-5-ABB--89

David Hume & Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Common Approach to Common Sense?

With characteristic candour, David Hume is prepared to admit that in ordinary life, but certainly not when reflecting on the nature of perceptual experience, he has no option but to ‘believe in the existence of body’ despite his philosophical reasonings to the contrary. In this instance, his commitment to ‘Common Sense’ has become, as it was not to become for his contemporary Thomas Reid, a direct consequence of participating in a day-to-day existence if nevertheless one which he has no option but to reject when reflecting in the study. Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other hand, presents us with a picture of what has come to be regarded as a form of Humean ‘phenomenalist language’, private in nature, which, in one of the most famous passages of his later philosophy, he appears to reject via a form of reductio ad absurdum argument. In what follows, it will be questioned whether his ‘argument’ clearly represents phenomenalist proposals which Hume’s successors, e. g., A.J. Ayer, accepted without question. If there is a misunderstanding here on both sides, an investigation into its nature must lead to an appreciation of the varying roles attributed by these philosophers to the notion of ‘Common Sense’.

Should the Lion Eat Straw Like the Ox? Animal Ethics and the Predation Problem

Stephen Clark’s article The Rights of Wild Things from 1979 was the starting point for the consideration in the animal ethics literature of the so-called ‘predation problem’. Clark examines the response of David George Ritchie to Henry Stephens Salt, the first writer who has argued explicitly in favor of animal rights. Ritchie attempts to demonstrate—via reductio ad absurdum—that animals cannot have rights, because granting them rights would oblige us to protect prey animals against predators that wrongly violate their rights. This article navigates the reader through the debate sparked off by Clarke’s article, with as final destination what I consider to be the best way to deal with the predation problem. I will successively discuss arguments against the predation reductio from Singer’s utilitarian approach, Regan’s deontological approach, Nussbaum’s capability approach, and Donaldson and Kymlicka’s political theory of animal rights.