Modern and contemporary times have brought a juxtaposition and a peculiar rivalry between the positive law and man’s freedom that have not been known earlier. This is accompanied not only by a tendency to give law and freedom autonomy, but also to separate them from man’s nature, from real order of social life and from the moral dimension of human activities.The article undertakes an attempt at revealing the ostensible character of the antagonism between positive law formulated by man and freedom. In the author’s opinion, this antagonism, so distinct in modern conceptions referring to liberalism, anarchism, as well as to totalitarianism and collectivism and other trends — can be solved not by engaging in a discussion with participants of the dispute, but by showing the truth of reality itself, or by understanding the nature of human freedom itself and the nature of law itself. Thus the author of the present article claims that basic explanation of the relation of human freedom to positive law needs studying reality of law itself and reality of human freedom itself. Non-antagonistic character of the relation between positive law and human freedom was best shown and explained by St Thomas Aquinas (STh I-II, q. 90-97).

The current cosmological observations of distant supernovae type Ia suggest the existence of dark energy component with negative pressure. The most obvious candidate for this dark energy is the cosmological constant which raises several theoretical difficulties. The problem of dark energy, due to our Universe is accelerating at present in principle is open. We argue that this problem will dominate the cosmology in XXI century. From the philosophical point of view it is interesting to provide evidence and comments for the key issues related to the dark energy models just at the moment before scientific revolution.

The article juxtaposes modern skepticism stating lack of the criterion of true beliefs about transcendent reality with respect to their contents, but accepting the assumption about existence and cognoscibility of those contents on the one hand, and — after M. F. Burnyeat — ancient skepticism understood as one that questions this assumption on the other. The doubt as to existence of beliefs — resp. propositions as contents of beliefs — is a link joining ancient skeptics with Wittgenstein. Their skepticism is not – as modern skepticism – an epistemological position, but an ontological one — nominalism — questioning existence of universals that are the conditions of meaning and hence the conditions of truth of propositions. This is why the ancient dispute concerning the truth was in fact a dispute over the problem of universals, i.e. over existence of constant rules deciding which ways of connecting the subject and the predicate in a proposition are right and which are not. Realists referred to such rules, sophists denied their existence, and skeptics stated that without having such a rule at their disposal they do not have a basis for deciding the dispute between realists and sophists. This does not have much to do either with so-called correspondence concept of the truth or with the modern understanding of conceptual realism talking about “ideal paradigms” or “common properties” of things. Today’s typologies of philosophical positions do not fit antiquity. Ch. S. Peirce's and D. Armstrong's arguments lead to the conclusion that Plato was a… nominalist in the modern meaning of the world. P. T. Geach’s and N. Wolterstorff’s analyses allow stating the same about St Thomas Aquinas. This places under the question mark the statement that the latter could be an advocate of the generally ascribed to him correspondence theory of truth, which also cannot be derived from Aristotle’s philosophy without any doubts.

The article in the systematic and ordered way presents the most important philosophical problems, which are undertaken with regard to their close connections with contemporary (scientific) cosmology. Lately more and more often the issue mentioned above is called philosophy of cosmology. In the first part of that article, with accordance to the broad understanding of that philosophy, methodological problem of cosmology containing both: its external methodology (general and particular) and so-called internal methodology has been presented. The second part of the article contains various philosophical questions which are undertaken in the context of concrete achievements of contemporary scientific cosmology. They include issues from the field of philosophy of nature, philosophy of God, and ontology.

Philosophers are mainly focused on the epistemological concept of truth. However, if we want to maintain this concept in the classical version (correspondence one) we have to assume at least some minimal ontology (metaphysics), and hence some ontological (metaphysical) concept of truth. Items I. and II. are an attempt at explicating this ontology in the context of Aristotle’s and Tarski’s conceptions, and item IV. is (in discussion with P. Horwich and D. Lewis) taking an attitude towards contemporary challenges that deflationism brings to them. It seems that today one may defend the correspondence conception of truth and its ontological assumptions, that boil down to stating a certain form of the world’s “rationality”.