Professor Adam Węgrzecki’s philosophical research, as well as his other works, concentrate mainly on philosophical anthropology and the problem of man. It was with these issues in mind that he continued his research into the phenomenology of values and developed a Polish version of the philosophy of encounter. In this paper I discuss his study of the phenomenology of the subject (the self). Whereas Husserl and Ingarden introduce the idea of the self in the context of epistemology, Adam Węgrzecki analyses it from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. I attempt to place his results in a wider horizon which includes both phenomenology and analytic philosophy. I argue that his results contain a narrow idea of the self (as the source of activity) as well as a wider idea of the self, and both of these are necessary. These results can be placed in the center of recent debates on the problems of the self and of personal identity, and they constitute an important contribution to these debates. In particular, they can be used against those who want to ignore or even deconstruct the idea of the self.
Abstract: The concept of reasons for action is widely used in analytic ethics and metaethics of the last few decades, but this phrase is used in different meanings. In the paper I attempt an analysis of this concept within a fairly broad perspective and I show some sources of problems and ambiguities in its content. I argue that an adequate theory of the reasons for action could shed some light on the debate between utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. I also argue that our recent knowledge of reasons and forms of practical reasoning could be used to resolve the debate between universalism and particularism, as well as to analyse human actions in particularly difficult situations.
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