This meditative essay in philosophy and literature is the much expanded and revised version of three invited seminar lectures and discussions that I was privileged to present and direct at the Institute of European Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow during the last week of May, 2009. Th e main theme was moral intuitionisms and emerging European reflection on principled bases for an eventual common European social policy.

I am very grateful to the Director of the Institute, Professor Zdzisław Mach, and to Professor Czesław Porębski for their invitation, and to Dr. Krzysztof Kowalski and Dr. Martin Galent for their hospitality and their encouragements. I thank Łukasz Kocój, Director of the Jagiellonian University Press, for accepting the book manuscript, and his professional colleagues for their preparation of the manuscript for publication. I owe particular thanks to the participants in the seminars for their lively interventions, and especially to Professor Czesław Porębski for his comments and criticisms of the manuscript, and for his long and patient friendship.

As the numerous billboards next to the Barbakan Fortress behind the medieval Florian's Gate insisted at the time, the immediate contexts of these Cracow Seminars were the European elections that were to be held the following week on June 7, 2009. The global contexts were those of a continuing and historically unprecedented financial and economic crisis together with increasing geopolitical tensions, especially between the European Union (EU) and Iran, the EU and Russia, and even the EU and China.