“Dialectic” has been a matter of growing interest in contemporary philosophy. The present article analyzes dialectical methods and positions them by reference to two paradigmatic texts of German idealism and analytic philosophy, i.e. J.G. Fichte’s Science of Knowing (1804) and J. McDowell’s Mind and World. Both dialectical approaches will be interpreted with regard to their contribution in the debate on reductionism and anti-reductionism: both Fichte and McDowell claim that philosophical positions and logical terms stand in a dualistic relationship to one another, on the one hand, but are separated by a gulf, on the other. I will argue that for McDowell dialectic seems to be an alternative to one-sided reductionisms as well as to normal anti-reductionistic holism. Furthermore, for Fichte dialectic is an adequate method for describing the relationship of reductionism and anti-reductionism itself. Both see in dialectic a technique for bridging the gulf between binary opposite terms of logic as well as mutually exclusive positions, such as mind and world, subject and object, or idealism and realism.

Phenomenologists inspired by the embodiment approach seem to subscribe to the psychophysical identity thesis. I argue that I (ego) cannot be eliminated and I differentiate phenomenologically between the sensory field and the body understood as a Koerper holding that the identification of those three items as “in fact one and the same” is not sufficiently warranted, at least on phenomenological grounds.

Any intention to present the philosophical ideas of ancient authors to a contemporary audience provokes various dilemmas. In this text I attempt first to identify and illustrate seven such dilemmas and then suggest briefly a way of their systematization.

In this paper, I overview selected ideas central to Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy of media, while focusing on the idea of oscillation, to which the Italian philosopher attached some emancipatory hopes. By describing certain aspects of animated film from the perspective of Vattimo’s philosophy of media, I argue that animation is the form of art most fitting to the theory proposed by the author of The End of Modernity. As a result, the development of experimental forms of animation should contribute to a great extent to the fulfilment of Vattimo’s ethico-political hopes.

A part of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy of religion, focused on the question of secularization and its relation to Christianity or at least to some interpretation of this religion, is presented in the article. The concept of desacralizing the world which is present in Vattimo’s thought is considered on the grounds of Taylor’s and Węcławski’s classification of secularization, and then compared with Rorty’s concept, which claims to be similar to Vattimo’s. However, there is no sufficient base on which one could support Rorty’s thesis.

Three anti-contextualist arguments of various character aimed at contextual dependence of the knowledge operator are reconstructed and critically analyzed in the paper. These arguments may be divided into two distinct categories. One category encompasses such arguments which are easily and naturally extendable against other sorts of expressions regarded as contextually sensitive. The second category is specific to the word „know”. Reconstruction of the three arguments belonging to these categories (two to the first one, one to the second one) is followed by the attempt to assess some contextualist responses which may be given to these arguments.

An analysis of trends is a specific research approach concentrated on noticeable changes. As an orientation of research, the analysis is determined by a future, possible course of events and their meaning. An analysis of trends combines two perspectives of interpretations of changes. The first perspective is cognitive, focused on an analysis of facts in order to use them in process understanding and used to create future scenarios. The other perspective is axiological, used in valuation of processes and for sensemaking. Both of these perspectives are complementary with a result in critical understanding of changes and, simultaneously, an attempt to evaluate their meaning and determine possible outcomes. Thus, their impact on human being, culture, and nature, regardless of historical patterns and empirical knowledge is the most important goal of research. An analysis of trends combines an inter- and transdisciplinary approach; it is a hermeneutics of the future and a way of prospective thinking.

I analyze Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in the context of cinematic montage. I refer to Giorgio Agamben, who points out that Warburg’s methodology was created in the early days of cinema, and Philippe-Alain Michaud’s thesis in which he shows the correspondence between Siegfried Kracauer’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s projects and Mnemosyne. Critically addressing their theses, I emphasize a significant difference between using montage in the Atlas and in cinema – while in the first one montage creates something that we can call, after Umberto Eco, the open work, in cinema it is a method of expressing the director’s ideas.

The basic feature of Wolniewicz’s philosophical anthropology is radical nativism. A man comes into being at their conception, that is, from the creation of a zygote. In potentia, all their main features, which determine them and define their identity, arise at this moment. They include: life expansion and its associated dynamics, character, intelligence, temperament, conscience, religious movement of the soul, language, sense of community, musical hearing, sex, blood type, right- or left-handedness, various physical characteristics (e.g. height, eye colour, hair colour, beauty), perception of some features of human nature, etc. Philosophical anthropology according to Wolniewicz is characterized, among others, by radical nativism, non-meliorism, tychism, voluntarism, organic nature of language, organic nature of religion, human sense of community, conscience predestination.