Crossroads of praxeology in the second half of the 20th century: Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu and Tadeusz Kotarbiński were materialists. Nevertheless, the French social researcher and subsequently the thinker was a permanently epistemological ma-terialist (he questioned and many times reconstructed his own projects). He researched human behavior in a manner that was surely certain, stripped of even minimal trust in the durability of the findings, questioning how much it could make sense - the significance of the results ob-tained. Tadeusz Kotarbiński, on the other hand, turned to historical-dialectical materialism as a theory of social being supported by the attitude of a scientific atheist, seeking supremacy of the truth and a world of permanent certainty. Thanks to this combination we can show the meth-odological dilemmas of praxeology. For Kotarbiński praxiology is a spontaneous normative science. For Bourdieu praxeology reveals itself from the pressure of axiology – the instinct of possession and becomes part of the sociological analysis of activities (including communica-tion activities).