In his numerous books and articles, Leszek Kołakowski brought up a number of topics in the fields of the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy. His work offers valuable insights into problems revolving around Karl Marx’s philosophy, social philosophy, and the philosophy of religion, to mention but a few. In all these areas of thought, the Polish philosopher centres his focus on the fundamental question of man. The present paper is aimed at discussing Leszek Kołakowski’s contribution to the philosophical debate (...) on this topic. The evolution of Kołakowski’s views is traced from the Marxist concept of man which, after a certain period, is discarded by the philosopher in favour of a religious concept, to be confronted again with a liberal theory. Kołakowski is not uncritical about any of the conceptions, which testifies to the profound complexity of every attempt to gain insights into the very essence of the human being which, irrespective of the doctrine or perspective taken for interpretation, escapes clear-cut definition. However, despite the lack of unambiguous definitions Kołakowski recognises that the sole point of reference in any attempts to gain an understanding of the human condition in culture is religion. (shrink)

The classic approach to science is dominated by the belief that science is a form of cognitive activity that focuses on constructing theories to describe and explain the phenomena and processes found in the world. Due to the fulfilment of the criteria of intersubjective communicability and controllability, theories are considered to be objective products of research activity that do not bear social responsibility for their applications. In this paper, the issue of social responsibility of science is addressed both from the (...) classic perspective and from the non-classic viewpoint represented by laboratory sciences, i.e. those sciences that are predominantly concerned with creating phenomena rather than discovering them. It is argued that whereas in the former case the problem of social responsibility of science does not provoke serious controversy, in the latter case such controversies do exist and, furthermore, they are justified. (shrink)