Collegium Intermarium

REKRUTACJA

CENTER FOR CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy is the basis of broadly understood culture – science, art, morality, religion. Most, or rather all, disputes taking place today in various fields: in politics, economy, in the international arena, disputes regarding education and the shape of law, have a philosophical basis and derive from philosophical decisions. They come down to the eternal conflict between realism and relativism; to acknowledge or reject a reality that exists beyond the human mind and to acknowledge or deny that we can know it using human reason. Relativism is widespread today, not only through the mass media and mass culture, through the press, television, radio, literature, films, but also through, and this must be emphasized – fundamentally – through schools and, especially, universities higher education. However, contemporary relativism fundamentally excludes the realistic position from the debate as it is the only one in this debate. This is done by rhetorically stigmatizing the realist position and even penalizing it.

The goal of CFK is:

  • developing the methodology of realistic philosophy, determining its methodological status in relation to the development of sciences;
  • developing realistic cognitive procedures, demonstrating their cognitive value, distinctiveness and autonomy from other cognitive procedures and methods;
  • development of methodology and procedures in individual philosophical disciplines: general metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, ethics, philosophy of law, philosophy of politics, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion.

The philosophy pursued as part of CFK research is characterized by:

  • relying on broadly understood experience, with a common sense starting point, covering not only sensory and intellectual perception, but also intellectual intuition – as a source of knowledge of reality;
  • orientation towards learning the truth for its own sake, the primacy of sapiential knowledge over utilitarian knowledge. This means that the consequences and practical goals result from the truth, they are the result of reading the nature of things;
  • in ethics and aesthetics, assessments and norms are justified and explained by the ultimately specific nature of things, and not by immediate effects, fashions or current ideologies;
  • cognitive realism – reality and the nature of things are the ultimate verifier of the truth of judgments, reasoning and explanations, and questions and answers are formulated in natural language, shaped by everyday contact with reality, and not in the language resulting from scientific or ideological mediations that leave their mark character on the structure and content of cognition;
  • cognitive maximalism, i.e. the search for explanations and final, necessary and irrefutable reasons;
  • openness to the entire reality, to all its fields and to the entire achievements of human thought, to old and new philosophical directions that allow us to assess the failures and successes of philosophical thought;

The Center conducts research on the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Saint. Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, other authors of antiquity and the Middle Ages (Tertullian, St. Justin Martyr, Boethius, Alcuin, John Scotus Eriugena, St. Anselm of Canterbury, John Duns Szkod, William of Ockham and others) and on the works of modern and contemporary thinkers. CFK researchers, equipped with the instruments of classical philosophy, refer to new philosophical trends, to contemporary philosophy of mind, emotivist trends in ethics, to cognitivism and transhumanism, explaining and assessing these and other trends using a critical apparatus taken from classical philosophy.

Arkadiusz Robaczewski

Director of the Center for Classical Philosophy

 

Philosopher and publicist, university lecturer. In the years 1995-2007, he was a research and teaching employee at the Catholic University of Lublin, at the Faculty of Philosophy, at the Department of Metaphysics and Anthropology. Founder and long-time director of the Institute of National Education. Founding member of the Polish Thomas Aquinas Society. Author of educational programs in the field of ethics and philosophical anthropology as well as numerous articles and encyclopedia entries, including in the Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in the field of ethics, pedagogy, philosophy of culture and others. Originator of a series of scientific and popularization conferences, including: “The everlasting novelty of Christian culture” and a series of nationwide conferences for teachers. Author of two popularizing books in the field of arethology and cultural philosophy.

SCIENTIFIC PROJECTS

Personalistic threads of Saint’s philosophy Tomasz towards the challenges of modern times.

 

The main goal of the project is to examine, through historical analysis and by weaving research threads of contemporary anthropology, psychology and social sciences, to what extent the classical philosophy of man, based on Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, is able to enter into the discussion and answer the assumed, implicit or explicit, concepts. anthropological topics included in gender studies and transhumanism. The project develops methodological and substantive tools that are able to enter into a substantive discussion with today’s fashionable trends, represented in the academic life of many research centers.