| dc.description.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. | en_EN |
