We can speak about individual and social (characteristic for a population) values, but it is difficult to present universal, specifically human values, except for biological needs. The reason of it follows from the fact that superior values, related to two human needs (world model cognition and the meaningful sense of life) depend upon a world-view, in advance accepted and inculcated in us. From this world-view we as its followers draw our notions of good and bad, we shape our ideas on proper human relations and on what for us should be the most important. So what can be of universally human character? It seems that only the possibility of possessing a system of values, of forming its features and defining its components.

The paper is a response to Adam Daniel Rotfeld’s essay, “Shaping a New International System for the Twenty First Century”. Rotfeld’s essay offers provocative insights to current world affairs while asking timely questions. In the following pages I respond to a few of the large and important ideas Rotfeld raises. I do not attempt to engage in a direct dialogue with the details or justifications of Rotfeld’s analysis but rather explore some of his insights in new directions. I do argue that while neoliberalism has emerged as a candidate for a new ideology of globalization it is likely to fail in that quest. Instead, I argue that any new ideological framework for a new world order must emerge through a bottom-up dialogue that includes previously silenced voices. I argue that the zone of conflict between the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern worlds is also a zone of creativity.

The historical record of an individual depends upon context. The United States of the last decade has suffered a series of crisis that are comparable in some ways to those of Poland in the 1970s. Taken together, they have created a mood of misery, but also the possibility for a hopeful transformation of politics. Barack Obama serves a function in American politics today similar to that served by Karol Wojtyła three decades ago.

The present, XIVth Dalai Lama of Tibet since the Chinese occupation of his native land 50 years ago (March 10.1959) has gone into exile in India. Since the seventies the Dalai Lama has started traveling the whole world, meeting with all important political leaders and scientists of all major Universities, giving thousands of lectures to crowds of people and advanced Buddhist teachings and initiations to Western Buddhists. Since receiving the Nobel Peace Przie in 1989 the Dalai Lama has become a person with the worldwide moral authority, comparable only with that of the Polish Pope John Paul II. During his third visit to Poland in December 2008 the Dalai Lama has met with many important people and has given a lot of advice and inspiration. This major visit is recountedhere by the author.His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet visited Poland for the third time, between the 5th and the 12th of December 2008. The previous visits happened in 1993 and 2000, but were much smaller in scope. This time the visit was a major media and social event, drawing the nation’s attention. The Dalai Lama visited the four main cities in Poland.

This paper investigates the reason why humans developed a brain and mind and the latter’s mental processes employed in the search for wisdom. The Anthropological and Cognitive Approaches are applied in defining major cybernetic anatomies of a brain and mind. The INFOCO Systems are defined and applied in defining the stage-oriented development of humans’ kinds. A concept and evolution of a mind is defined too and eight minds are recognized which are grouped in four clusters: Basic, Whole, Global, and Universal Minds. Their development in particular civilizations is analyzed and a model of wisdom’s bifurcation is presented.

This paper defines a quantitative model of civilization wisdom potential in terms of its wisdom capacity potential and wisdom activity potential. Four minds such as the Basic, Whole, Global, and Universal ones are defined and their wisdom potential is assessed for eight particular civilizations, such as Western, Eastern, Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, and African. In conclusion the study states that civilization wisdom should be applied in almost every facet of civilization and its future depends on civilization wisdom.

This article is a speculative review of psychology’s approach to the cultural and civilizational determinants of the development of human identity. It discusses the relation between human freedom and necessity as it is determined by culture and its alternative suggestions concerning normative human existence. As his point of departure the author adopted Feliks Koneczny’s quincunx philosophy of history together with its five basic categories of existence. One can try to transpose these categories into the factors which constitute human intra-psychic space and also into measures of description of the mechanics of human behavior. Attention is drawn to the fact that, in this context, the axiological shortcomings of psychology are exposed, especially the deliberate refusal to evaluate behavior in terms of good and evil or the exclusion of ethics, moral obligations, conscience and responsibility from psychological discourse.

Both nihilism and universalism are historical products of Western speculative philosophy. The failure of this philosophy to discover universally valid laws resulted in widespread despair, which at times created a suicidal atmosphere. The other worldly promises offered by dualistic world models made an escape into an alternate world attractive. This paper investigates whether Nietzsche’s proposal to rekindle the fire of life by recovering the Dionysian spirit in creative work is a feasible alternative to nihilistic despair. It goes on to investigate whether a new sense of community and collaborative ethics can be distilled from a renewed engagement with nature. Recent scientific discoveries and experiential evidence could lead to a reformulation of virtue ethics based on naturalistic sources.

The following is an attempt to grasp synthetically the strategy and development of Jean Baudrillard’s intellectual standpoint. My view emphasizes late ideas by French Philosopher, while the earlier ones are treated from this perspective as preliminary. After having left Marxist and post-Marxist positions, Baudrillard developed an original and idiosyncratic way of thinking about contemporary world that—inspired by Nietzschean idea that the power of interpretation prevails over representation of truth—evolves around rejection of the traditional ideas of the social, reality and revolt, while employing categories of mass, simulation or catastrophe. This attitude took him not only beyond good and evil, but also to affirmation of death and terror, conducting to an extreme standpoint of “intellectual terrorism”.

Under the influence of today’s post-modern human sciences and their relativistic, skepticism-imbued theories the universalism idea, until recently the philosophical driving-force behind efforts to build a global human community based on universal principles of rationality, has lost much of its attractiveness to pluralism. However, despite the recognition that human rationality expresses itself in many different ways, strivings towards a universal human community have by no means ceased. Some take the form of political projects, others are more spontaneous and take place beyond both politics and philosophy. The present reflections on these strivings’ success chances go out from ideas formulated by Eugeniusz Górski in his study Civil Society, Pluralism and Universalism(Washington DC, Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2007).

I can’t say that I resent the Germans, nor that I expect or demand anything from them. I would only like them to know what they have done to me. They have destroyed my childhood and ruined my eight-year-old imagination, leaving only a pile of rubble, heap of corpses, great cesspool—gigantic hole filled with black blood. (K 53)

The present essay focuses on the Frankfurt School’s views on relations between philosophy and science. The author specifically concentrates on Horkheimer, the School’s leader, and Habermas, its most prominent contemporary representative. In her reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s approach to the dependencies between philosophy and science the author—similarly to the Frankfurt theoreticians—abstains from treating it abstractly, instead placing it in its social and historiosophical context. The essay’s leading thesis is that the Frankfurt School sees philosophical self-reflection as a remedy for the crisis in European culture, visible since the beginnings of the modern era in the rise of instrumental thinking. The author reminds that the assumption of philosophy’ primacy over science—or the primacy of wisdom over knowledge—has found avid support among philosophers of other eras and other schools of thought.

Marek J. Siemek’s idea of the transcendental social philosophy seems paradoxical, because it aspires to combine the allegedly “non-historical” and “timeless” transcendental sphere with the social and historical dimension. But the uniqueness of Siemek as a philosopher consists precisely in being Fichtean as well as Hegelian. Siemek’s philosophy is an undertaking to reconstruct the field of rationality in its social and historical dimension. The leading question of this philosophy is not if history is rational, but how it is possible for the rationality to be historical. Siemek seems to maintain, that the noninstrumental rationality has it’s own history: it is a history of self-de-instrumentalization of the initial one-sided instrumental reason. Historical process can be seen as a vehicle of rationality, although not always and necessary rational itself. For Siemek, as well as for Hegel, the historical contradiction is a contradiction of the thing itself, not a development scheme imposed on the history by theoretician from his allegedly external position. On one side: there is no history without the rational interpretation of history. On the other side: the interpretation itself is a part of historical process.