The lecture of prof. Wojciech Daszkiewicz, „Features and Challenges of Contemporary Culture. Eastern European perspectives“ explores the key features and challenges of contemporary culture from an Eastern European perspective, focusing on its impact on personal identity and social life.
Contemporary culture, shaped by a shift from production to consumption, increasing individualization, and digital mediation, promotes fluid and fragmented identities, temporary social bonds, and the aestheticization of everyday life. At the same time, the expansion of media and the privatization of beliefs contribute to the erosion of shared normative frameworks and to a broader condition of uncertainty.
The rise of digital media further intensifies these dynamics. In a world saturated with images and information, the boundary between reality and representation becomes increasingly blurred, resulting in a fragmented cultural landscape without a coherent center. Many thinkers characterize this condition as one of uncertainty or risk, in which individuals struggle to establish stable points of orientation.
Philosophically, this is reflected in the critique of the classical notion of the human subject, with influential theorists arguing that identity is constituted through discourse, power relations, and language rather than grounded in a stable essence.
By contrast, the lecture argues that engaging with classical thought provides a coherent anthropological and normative foundation for assessing contemporary cultural transformations. Rather than rejecting modern insights, this approach seeks to ground them in stable principles capable of restoring meaning, orientation, and human dignity in a fragmented cultural landscape.
Within this framework, culture can be understood as the cultivation of human nature. This approach provides a normative basis for evaluating contemporary culture without imposing rigid ideological schemes, instead offering guiding principles rooted in the nature of the human person.
The lecture will be held in English.
Dr. hab. Wojciech Daszkiewicz is an Associate Professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy, where he holds a professorial position in the Chair of Metaphysics. In 2007, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy on the basis of a dissertation concerning the concept of intellectual intuition in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. In 2020, he obtained the degree of habilitated doctor in philosophy, granted on the basis of his monograph Being – Human – Culture: A Study in the Philosophy of Culture (Byt – Człowiek – Kultura. Studium z filozofii kultury, Lublin, 2019).
His research interests encompass the philosophy of culture, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, as well as the history and theory of culture. He is the author of numerous scholarly publications in philosophy of culture, the condition of contemporary civilization and philosophy, including the monograph Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics (Intuicja intelektualna w metafizyce, Lublin, 2014). and a range of articles devoted to the philosophy of culture and the condition of contemporary civilization.