This paper discusses how Universalism came into being as a metaphilosophy and social movement, and outlines its main characteristics, meaning and content. The paper’s central theme is the accentuation of the two main aspects of Universalism. The first aspect is the key role of dialogue in Universalism. The second is the belief that Universalism is first and foremost a social movement, rather than a philosophical doctrine. In outlining the origins of Universalism, the invaluable role of Professor Kuczyński as its originator is emphasized. The rest of the paper discusses Universalism’s other important characteristics, namely: (1) the quest for truth, (2) the principle of dialogue, (3) a practical approach to scientific knowledge and philosophy, (4) its interdisciplinary nature, (5) patriotism, (6) Europeanism, (7) concern over ecological issues, (8) concern for human beings, (9) a permanent alliance between Universalism, Catholic social science and Christian personalism.

In this paper I present my thesis stated numerous times at APA and NACAP meetings, that the current shortage of online programs in philosophy presents adanger to the profession. I also show how this danger could be averted. I give a snapshot of what teaching philosophy online, and doing it well, looks like. I am a very partial spectator in this debate since the example I am referring to is the program at UIS which I designed and, with my colleagues, led to successful implementation. Finally, I draw a broad brush picture of what an inter-campus, international online program in philosophy may look like (as well as some implications for online learning in Poland).

The epic life of Pope John Paul II touches virtually all aspects of the human being in time and space. His successful world outreach achieves unprecedented superlative proportions in his search for universal harmonies among peoples, cultures and religions. Significantly, his death confirms the success of his positive mission on the Earth as his death caused an extraordinary unity of people, cultures, and religions during his funeral. No one else has unified such opposing opposites in a memorial service in a millennium! Thus, Pope John Paul II by his calling served the sacred; his deeds achieve a synchronized symphony of the sacred and secular. This paper examines the views of Pope John Paul II, as expressed in Laborem Excercens, through the concept of the unity of oppositesin sacred and secular architecture.

I analyze only few elements of Srzednicki’s “new epistemology”. I especially appreciate the thesis of transcendentalism and of demanding of the depersonalization of epistemology. In my opinion, the trial of founding cognition on non-cognitive factors is an irrelevant. It leads to irrationalism, as in the case of praxism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, or cognitive sociology. In this lies a critical difficulty of Srzednicki’s “new epistemology”. The main difficulty was acceptance the narrow, analytical idea of knowledge. It implicates the acceptance of a field of evidence (intuition, experience) as a noncognitive one. Another problem with “new epistemology” is propositionalism, and idea that all cognition is external to its object.

Following Grażyna Żurkowska’s work presenting Jan Srzednicki’s views on Wittgenstein’s philosophy (Epistemologia po Wittgensteinie. Nowa perspektywa epistemologiczna Jana Srzednickiego, Wydawnictwo UMCS, Lublin 2006) [Epistemology after Wittgenstein. A New Epistemological Perspective by Jan Srzednicki], the author of this paper ponders the effect of Wittgenstein’s conception upon the domain of epistemology. According to Srzednicki, such an effect is in having posed a skeptical challenge which opened a new epistemological perspective. The author is critical toward this approach and argues that the most genuine intention behind Wittgenstein’s investigations was to draw attention to the diversity of such our concepts as cognition, knowledge, truth, etc. Such diversity is not a challenge but a fact which needs to be accounted for in epistemological studies.

The paper offers a critical analysis of the skeptic’s conviction that his doubts about the truth of thought on existence of the world outside the mind are not equivalent to real the doubts about existence of the world alone, but they are only a theoretical and speculative problem of knowledge. The main case of this criticism is based on the Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s philosophy, precisely, on his theory of truth.

Wittgenstein’s philosophy endeavored to define the role of language as communicative. Language became an original “code” of multifarious meanings and designations but it is also a code which entails emotions and different sorts of internal and external reactions of an individual. The mechanism of penalty and the notion of penalty have invariably raised emotions and meaningful reactions. The analysis focuses on a short derivation of the notion of penalty. It considers its functions, basic tasks and external impact—a short word revealing so many actions and social behaviors.

The article concerns the metaphysical dimension of Jan Srzednicki’s epistemology. It is claimed that the metaphysical perspective of cognitive “normatives” (e. g. norm, form and presence) does not remove paradoxes of self-reference. It is especially difficult to separate the ontic and the cognitive dimensions.

The fundamental problem of Jan Srzednicki’s new epistemology is the question: how thoughts surpass the resistance of that what is ontologically present, how this process is possible? In Srzednicki’s opinion, thinking is a process of distancing from the pressure of ontological presence. His ideas offer a splendid inspiration for philosophy of medicine which attempts to answer the question “whether (and how) a disease is cognizable?” This question refers directly to and is translated into the question of the capacity to diagnose particular diseases. Answering to the above stated question whether disease is cognizable we should answer in the affirmative, however, in a “modified” form that its pre-cognitive resistance to reality is formed at the articulated level. Somewhat intuitively we feel the presence of a disease before we express it in words as a disease according to our scientific or informal thought style.

Whereas at the roots of the Western way of thinking, in particular, at the roots of philosophy and epistemology lies a notion of the one/over/many, in Asiatic cultures, it is an idea of one/and/many, represented by Japanese (Chinese) Ma. In the paper it is argued that Japanese Ma is not only broader than epistemological reality (the world) but also more basic. To overcome Wittgenstein’s skepticism we have to return to a noncognitive idea of the ontic presence. Our thinking and cognition is deeply rooted in the imperceptible and indiscernible ontic flexibility and generality which is not conceptual or linguistic. This essay presents another interesting aspect of my metaphysical project showing that we cannot infer cognition either from the object level or from a meta-level.

In the article the author tries to find some similarities and differences between phenomenological tradition and Srzednicki’s project of the new epistemology. He mostly refers to the thought of a French philosopher, Merleau-Ponty. Especially representative to the arguments is his late turn to metaphysical perspective presented in the work, Visible and Invisible, where he made an attempt to express a kind of logic which may reveal the world and ourselves in its mutual interconnections.

The paper investigates Jan Srzednicki’s epistemological conception with its main Kantian problem on the very possibility of cognition. Investigating Srzednicki’s conception the paper refers to its interpretation elaborated by Grażyna Żurkowska.

Some problems concerning transcendental epistemic arguments are raised on the basis of Jan Srzednicki’s epistemological conception presented in the bookEpistemology after Wittgenstein. Jan Srzednicki’s New Epistemological Perspective by Grażyna Żurkowska. The problem of the cognition immediacy is briefly discussed. The great philosophical importance of many other relevant topics is indicated, i.e. the internal similarity of Jan Srzednicki’s philosophical challenge to the project of Heideggerian hermeneutics or the problem of mutual relations between language and cognition.

In the book Kłopot z istnieniem.[The Trouble with the Existence (1963).Ed. Toruń 2002] Henryk Elzenberg formulates valuable philosophical remarks about suffering. I present them here as “statements”. They provoke many questions defining here as „problems”.At the end in appendix I confront briefly the epistemological position of Elzenberg with that postulated by Jan Srzednicki in the book Kłopoty pojęciowe [Notional Troubles], Warszawa 1993.

The greatest challenge with which the Readers of my book had to cope with was the problem of ontological presence. In Srzednicki’s conception ontological presence has two dimensions: a logical and an onto-factual one.Every cognitive perspective is always contingent but this contingency must be limited somehow. Srzednicki restores the ontological dimension of cognition (crossed out by traditional epistemology and philosophy), but avoids ontological fundamentalism. His conception gives rise to a new model of metaphysics understood not as the most general theory of being or a general theory of cognition but as the non-epistemic closure of all epistemological projects and theoretical discourses.The main parameters of the epistemic closure can only be reconstructed theoretically in the logical space of the observer. This non-epistemic closure is marked by three categorical constraints: ontological, formative and normative.Srzednicki overcomes Wittgenstein’s skepticism by understanding transcendentalism much more deeply.

The term “transcendental” means something which is a necessary and a priori condition of knowledge. In other words, “the transcendental” refers to all presuppositions of a knower who is ready for knowing. These presuppositions are sometimes called “epistemic assumptions”. The paper presents author’s interpretation of the knowledge necessary conditions. The theoretical background for this interpretation is Kazimierz Twardowski’s theory of actions and products, and John Searle’s theory of human action.