This book refers to the question of cultural normativity. The texts of the book present the diverse profiles of cultural normativity: from philosophical assumptions and indications relating to the sources of axiology and normativity in general to analyses of selected examples of social practices and the reconstruction of declared or presupposed kinds of cultural normativity. The authors evaluate the distinction between normativity and normativeness as a state of norms, they describe the relationships between cultural normativity and ethics. This issue is particularly important with regard to the 20th-century criticism of essentialism, the primacy of the culturalist position in humanities and the importance of the concept of difference in social sciences.

Maria Gö¿biewska is Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The fields of her research are contemporary philosophy (phenomenology, philosophy of existence, structuralism and post-structuralism) and the modern sources of contemporary philosophy (epistemology, philosophy of language).

Values and norms - Axiology - Cultural origin of norms - Normative levels of culture - Normative criticism - Tradition vs. prospective creativity - Cultural normalisation of nature - Normalisation of social space - Cultural relativism - Constructivism - Normative aspects of the discourse concerning minorities