Od filozofii ku socjologii. Floriana Znanieckiego program reformy nauk humanistycznych

Abstract

The article deals with the issue of reformulating the status of human sciences, undertaken by Florian Znaniecki on the background of the anti-positivist turn at the beginning of the 20th century. His programme of reforming human sciences, which Znaniecki was realising in the course of his long-lasting intellectual activity, was accompanied by a transition from a philosophical reflection on the form of social sciences to sociological research activity. It resulted in Znaniecki’s own, self-elaborated, original theoretical system in sociology, and in a wider perspective – in a new outlook on the form of human sciences. His culturalist vision of the society combines the elements of the anti-positivist turn with a moderate inclination to the – more and more popular at the time – psychological explanations. Despite a certain degree of approval of positivist norms determining the science, Znaniecki represents a different, humanistic approach. Besides other reasons, it is due to the fact that Znaniecki’s theory very determinately locates man in the social world by means of the activities he performs. Moreover, Znaniecki remains a pioneer (and, so far, an undiscovered initiator) of the trends which connected the creation of the social world structures with the development of the individual (e.g. symbolic interactionism). What is more, his construction of the scientific sociology is based on the original theory of consciousness, which enables the union of the social and individual worlds. Starting with the critique of the mainstream trends of social sciences development at the turn of the 20th century, Znaniecki created his own model of the human sciences, which, when it comes to the range and richness of contents, can be compared to the sociological systems by Max Weber and Georg Simmel.