The Changing Guise of Myths ― Philosophical Essays

Each of us, waking in the morning, has to open the world we have woken into. We have to endow meaning to people, objects and tasks, have to secure a place in the chaos of time passing. When opening their eyes during the palpable reality of a dream, a person will dream beyond the dream, will carry over meanings and experiences from one sphere to another. The author of these collected essays puts various strategies under the microscope which we deploy to make the world material, analyzing the mythical structures we use for this purpose – interpreting anew their changing guise in the contemporary. Being witness to the changing material desert of post-Soviet Eastern Europe transforming into the over-saturated jungle of modern capitalism, he offers a unique window into the seemingly obvious – only to unveil its manifold human aspects of the hidden.

Andrzej Leder is a philosopher and philosophical essayist, whose main research area is contemporary continental philosophy, especially the question of the philosophical position of psychoanalytical thought. He has published books in Polish on unconsciousness, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger. At present, he is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.