These seminar offerings grow directly out of my doctoral research at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) and my nearly thirty-five years of experience as an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each seminar is available as a half-day in-person or online engagement. Inquiries regarding scheduling and availability may be directed to marvinpelaez119@gmail.com.
Seminar One: Classical Realism and the Nature of Science: What the Lublin Philosophical School Offers Contemporary Philosophy of Science
Intended for philosophers of science, graduate seminars, and interdisciplinary research groups.
This seminar introduces the methodological tradition of the Lublin Philosophical School and situates it against the backdrop of logical positivism and the Kuhnian revolution. The central argument is that twentieth-century English-speaking philosophy of science was asking questions that Kamiński and Krąpiec had already answered, in isolation, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, one year before Kuhn posed them to the Western conversation. Participants engage primary sources from the KUL synthesis and examine how classical metaphysics, as a foundational discipline, addresses problems of scientific rationality, paradigm change, and the unity of knowledge that post-positivist frameworks have not been able to resolve from within their own terms.
Seminar Two: Science Advisers, Co-Production, and Classical Philosophy: Rethinking the Role of Science in Public Policy
Intended for public policy programs, public administration departments, government research institutes, and regulatory agencies.
Every policy framework rests on philosophical foundations it does not make explicit. This seminar traces those foundations, from Lasswell's postwar policy sciences through Jasanoff's co-production of science, and argues that both inherit the pragmatist tradition's characteristic exclusion of metaphysics from legitimate policy deliberation. Through two case studies, the Warnock Commission's deliberations on human embryo research and the GMO policy conflict between Poland and the European Union, participants see concretely what happens when science advisory deliberation lacks the metaphysical resources that the Lublin Philosophical School's methodology of the sciences provides. The seminar closes by asking what classical realist science policy would look like in practice.
Seminar Three: The Completing Move: How the Lublin Philosophical School Finished What the Lvov-Warsaw School Began
Intended for philosophy departments, history of philosophy seminars, and science, technology, and society networks in the United States, and other contexts where the Central European philosophical tradition remains largely unknown.
The Lvov-Warsaw School produced some of the twentieth century's most rigorous work in logic, semantics, and philosophy of science, and left its relationship to metaphysics unresolved. This seminar argues that Maria Kokoszyńska's 1935 demonstration that the Vienna Circle's exclusion of metaphysics was stipulative rather than logically necessary opened a door the LWS never fully walked through, and that Kamiński and Krąpiec's synthesis made the completing move by grounding the methodology of the sciences classicial metaphysics, where the genus of the metaphysican is not the same as the genus of the logician. The seminar traces this intellectual genealogy through primary sources and closes by examining what remains to be recovered and transmitted from the KUL tradition to the broader philosophical conversation.
Seminar Four: Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Nested Formal Objects, the Architectonic Hierarchy of Knowledge, and the Classical Alternative to Transdisciplinarity
Intended for transdisciplinarity research programs, science policy institutes, university curriculum designers, and philosophy of science departments.
The proliferation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary frameworks since the mid-twentieth century is a symptom of a philosophical problem the modern academy has not been able to name, because the tools needed to name it are the tools modernity discarded. This seminar examines Basarab Nicolescu's transdisciplinarity framework as the most philosophically ambitious contemporary attempt to restore the unity of knowledge, and argues that it reaches toward a unity classical philosophy has already found and grounded. Through the distinction between nested and non-nested formal objects, participants see that the disciplines are not as separate as modernity assumed, and that the unity transdisciplinarity seeks to construct from the outside, classical philosophy restores from within. This seminar was prepared for the doctoral colloquium of the Department of the Methodology of the Sciences, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, in January 2025.
For inquiries regarding scheduling, honoraria, and availability, please contact marvinpelaez119@gmail.com.