In the paper it is shown that Henryk Skolimowski’s eco-philosophy is a special one. It differs from secular ecologies, being a united insight in life, nature, and values. It is also shown that Skolimowski’s conception is in a close relation both with ancient Greeks religion beliefs and with the Indian metaphysical-religious worldviews.

Global stewardship explores the perspective of caring for the entire globe—all its peoples and life. The interconnectedness of the basic elementary systems—air and water, which are both necessary for terrestrial and aquatic life—is acknowledged. The concomitant threats of their toxification from immoderate employments of substances and techniques justify the need for global respect and cooperation as well as effective world economic systems as the means to sustain this life.

Achilles’ dissatisfaction with the heroic code, despite his preeminence, is Homer’s platform on which he demonstrates that the code is an inadequate basis for the emerging polis. The political requires a new kind of man, one capable of love and friendship. For only this kind of man can be a proper citizen, a person capable of more than adherence to a heroic code.

The article refers to the fact that the eco-systemic paradigm of thinking gives new possibilities to understand and evaluate beauty. The paper analyzes the understanding of beauty proposed by a founder of eco-philosophy, Henryk Skolimowski. Moreover, it refers to the conceptions of the relationship between beauty and creative human activity in the writings of Plotinus, Henri Bergson, and Edward Abramowski. Inspired by their reflections on beauty, the paper presents author’s own justification of the value of beauty obeyed the paradigm of eco-systemic thinking.

Henryk Skolimowski pays particular attention to the problem of ecological culture. He is convinced that only societies characterized by ecological culture are able to cope successfully with the most difficult problem of modernity which is the issue of the environment. The necessary condition for building man’s ecological culture, aside from equipping him with ecological knowledge as well as a system of values along with their normative equivalents, consists in shaping the pro-ecological attitude which manifests itself in particular actions. The objective of the article is to present Skolimowski’s ideas on the essence of ecological culture and on the necessary actions to be undertaken to shape thinking, axiology, individual and social behavior in its light.

According to the author of the paper, philosophy serves to nurture civilizations by nurturing human values. It must evoke human consciousness and initiate a revolution indispensable for an ever evolving, creative, vibrant, and sustainable civilization. For the author, philosophy’s first and the foremost attribute should be the sustaining and enhancement of life. The author claims that such philosophy is desperately needed in our world gradually losing grounds for life. In author’s opinion, Henryk Skolimowski’s eco-philosophy sparks a revolution for healing the self, the planet, restoring the ecological balance, and constructing a new reality. Ecological consciousness, eco-ethics, ecojustice, eco-yoga, eco-dharma, etc. are valuable attributes of eco-philosophy conferred on our present civilization. Skolimowski’s philosophy unfolds the potencies of the mind and serves to educate it. It brings out all the elements of human glory and glorifies humans who are in his view custodians of life and of the whole cosmos. He infuses in them a superb sense of responsibility for Earth. Skolimowski’s philosophy reveals creativedimensions of the cosmic light. It attempts to cosmologise human beings.

In Charles Baudelaire’s poetry there is only one direct reference to Plato. The French poet juxtaposes the joy of the senses to the ascetic, as he perceives it, pursuit of the Platonic Good. This juxtaposition is taking place not only with the aid of ethical terms, but principally through their transformation into aesthetic ones. For Baudelaire, the absence of the metaphysical or symbolical light is tautological to beauty, but also a firm ground where the poet stands upon for his artistic creation. Human existence without light, although bordering to the cold safety of death, is also an affirmation of its emptiness when without pleasure and passion.

The article presents the typological and conceptual tools used by Henryk Skolimowski to describe and explain the relation between man and nature. Skolimowski claims that the main determinant of this relation is the way man sees nature, i.e., the vision of nature which prevails in his culture and times. In other words, decisive for our relation to nature is cosmology (the cosmological model and the view of nature). The first part of the article outlines the fundamental functions of the cosmological model (the central cosmology category) which are (i) to interpret daily and scientific experiences, (ii) to establish the type of actions which relate to man and nature. The second part concerns the structure of worldview which is based on a cosmological model. The structure of worldview embraces a cosmological model presenting the general structure of nature, eschatology understood as a realm of human life and cosmic goal, and ethicsdetermining human behaviour.

In this paper, I give examples of the similarities in thought which I have found in the works of philosophers and thinkers of ancient Greece and ancient India. Being a comparative philosopher, I have worked with both traditions for many years. In fact, the more I do research in both traditions, the more similarities I have found in various views or perspectives, beliefs and values.After briefly explaining some of the similarities, I argue that an ongoing exploration and comparison of these two great traditions can help humans to understand the origins of knowledge, especially philosophical knowledge, and that because the study involves both Western and non-Western traditions, it will require comparative philosophers to undertake the study. Furthermore, since the study will involve research concerning the two cultures, anthropologists, linguists, and some historians will also be needed in this undertaking.

The paper analyses the meaning and implementation of the notion of sustainable development from the viewpoint of Henryk Skolimowski’s eco-philosophy. Skolimowski formulates a radical criticism of the Western civilisation with its dominating forms of rationality and the resulting technological implementations. In his opinion, this system is a source of imbalance both in the nature and social life of people in the global scale, which results in various types of civilizational crises. We will particularly pay attention to the theoretical proposals formulated by Skolimowski in his The Genius of Light and Sacredness of Life. In this work he refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of evolutionary philosophy, enriched with his own original philosophical ideas. Skolimowski particularly emphasises the emergence of the photosynthesis phenomenon, and subsequently logo- and theo-synthesis in evolution process. He claims that these are the forms of light condensation whose laws of development control our planet as well as the whole cosmos. The human species participates in this process taking part in the evolutionarily developing possibilities of transcendence and self-realisation. As Skolimowski suggests, the process of self-realisation and transcending should manifest the character of the conscious self-limitation of man in his relations and interactions with nature and society. The idea of cosmic ethics, of imperative character, developed by him is to serve this purpose.

The reflection presented in this article in three distinct “steps of inspiration” (Agamben, ethnology and art) interrelate apparently distant spheres of problems and cultural phenomena. The starting point is given by Agamben’s idea of the apocatastatic “opening of the community,” overcoming the human condition defined by exclusion. The second move will explore an ethnological inspiration. We will reflect upon the archaic search of transcendence through the animal and in the animal, corresponding to the stage of man before the “invention of monotheism” which introduced the concept of divinity defined by reduction and abstraction. As a working hypothesis, it is assumed that the monotheistic concept of God radically driven away from any biological analogy precedes and shapes the concept of humanity defined by exclusion from the universality of biological life

Clarissa Pinkola Estés in the book Women Who Run with the Wolves. Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992) explores the relationship she sees between women and wolves. In the very beginning of her book she writes: “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species.” To be wise, creative and powerful a modern woman has to regain her connection to nature, claims Estés. On the other hand, we know that in the European culture women have always been perceived as emotional, weak creatures closer to nature and to “wildlife” than men. To be “closer to animals in our culture is to be denigrated,” we read in Lynda Birke’s paper “Exploring the boundaries: Feminism, Animals and Science.” Following the concept of the Wild Woman I will try to cope with some paradoxes hidden in it.

It is, as Deleuze and Guattari observed, “an ordinary sight in those days,” an indispensable part of full modernity, an image that is always within the range of sight. “A horse falls down in the street!,” “a horse is going to die.” From the Auguries ... of William Blake, from Hogarth's second stage of cruelty, through laments of Dostoyevski, up to the madness of Nietzsche and Little Hans’ phobia—the image is always there. It becomes “a hieroglyph that condenses all fears, from unnamable to namable.” Taking famous Freudian Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy as a starting point, we shall try to revise it as well as its famous Lacanian and Deleuzian reinterpretations. We shall invoke Agamben’s concept of “bare life” to reconsider an animal life that is tormented and eventually destroyed

The experience of animality, common denominator of human and nonhuman animal life, is the core concern of Animal Studies. An interdisciplinary project whose methodological spectrum embraces both experiential and observational ways of knowing, Animal Studies poses both moral and scientific questions and pursues both academic and activist goals. By training multiperspectival attention upon the experience of animality, Animal Studies can and does cultivate what environmental philosopher Arne Naess first theorized as “deep ecology.” Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson hypothesizes a biological capacity for deep ecological thinking, an aesthetic and affective responsiveness to nature that he calls “biophilia.” By allying biophilia with biology, Animal Studies can focus the power of both naturalism and natural science upon today’s looming environmental threats to animality in its many earthly forms, including our own.

The question of animality haunts the nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Animals appear not only as an allegoric representation but as a reference which troubles the border between humanity and animality. The aim of this paper is to consider how the Darwinian turn has modified the status of animality in modern narratives (the animal seen as an external object before the romantic turn, animal as an internal object). The question of animality as a part of human experience will be analysed on the basis of literary texts (Flaubert and Gombrowicz).