The philosophical problem of the plurality of cultures is coeval with philosophy itself. There are three groups of answers to the basic questions: how many cultures are there, and why? The first one includes all the philosophical conceptions – let us call them “uniculturalist” – that hold that only one culture exists actually, or at least potentially, namely: the universally human one. The opposite conceptions – let us call them “pluriculturalist” – regard the plurality of cultures as a fundamentally important and insurmountable feature: plurality of values then follows from their monadic nature. All the intermediate conceptions that can be located between these extremes form the third group. The paper first presents these three groups in more general terms and then, for the sake of a more detailed presentation, follows it up with a discussion of the problem of the plurality of cultures in the conceptions of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler and Roman Ingarden. However different these three phenomenologists’ ways of approaching this issue might appear, they certainly have at least this in common: they offer their respective solutions against the background of the results of their axiological investigations. The final part of the paper deals with some selected motifs of the contemporary debate concerning the differentiation of cultures. One of them is the impressive frequency of making new uses of Husserl’s concept of the Lebenswelt, especially by Asian and African authors. Another motif: apart from the axiological choices of cultures, other “philosophical determinations” (Levinas’ term), such as the accepted concept of time, are analyzed as important factors making cultures different and numerous. In this context, Ingarden’s works on cultures and the different ways of experiencing time appear ever more interesting.
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