The article explores the idea that according to Spinoza finite thought and substantial thought represent reality in different ways. It challenges “acosmic” readings of Spinoza's metaphysics, put forth by readers like Hegel, according to which only an infinite, undifferentiated substance genuinely exists, and all representations of finite things are illusory. Such representations essentially involve negation with respect to a more general kind. The article shows that several common responses to the charge of acosmism fail. It then argues that we must (...) distinguish the well-founded ideality of representations of finite things from mere illusoriness, insofar as for Spinoza we can have true knowledge of what is known only abstractly. Finite things can be seen as well-founded beings of reason. The article also proposes that within Spinoza's framework it is possible to represent a finite thing without drawing on representations of mind-dependent entities. (shrink)

The paper is an attempt to consider the issue that so far has not been discussed frequently in the Polish philological current. It focuses on the endings of 18 selected articles in the field of literary studies. Authors of textbooks on academic discourse argue that it is the ending that plays a fundamental role in the scientific discourse as a concluding, summarising, and potentially memorable part. This approach to a conclusion is often shared by scholars themselves, who choose different strategies (...) with regard to endings of their articles. When studying articles published in the period of 2015‒2019, we identified about 15 different ending strategies, e.g. an apologia for a literary work selected by an author, suggestions for further research possibilities, an attractive punch line, and an quotation from another paper. As the analysis reveals, the conclusion of an academic article is not only a place for introducing conventional rhetorical figures; it also becomes the researchers’ contribution to the understanding of the role ascribed by literary-studies scholars to their own scientific practice. (shrink)

The experimental philosophy of law is a recent movement that aims to inform traditional debates in jurisprudence by conducting empirical research. This paper introduces and provides a systematic overview of the main lines of research in this field. It also covers the most important debates in the literature regarding the implications of these findings for the philosophy and theory of law. It argues that three challenges arise when addressing (old) legal-philosophical questions in (new) experimental ways by drawing normative implications from (...) empirical data: such implications are value-driven, depend on explanations of empirical findings and vary across legal systems. (shrink)

We live in an era when increasing numbers of babies are conceived through assisted reproduction technologies (ART). Using a comprehensive approach, the present research seeks to contribute to the understanding of gender differences in experiencing and coping with infertility, and in dealing with ART treatment. Our sample consisted of 10 heterosexual couples aged 24 to 43 and the data were collected through semi-structured interviews. In the studied sample, gender differences existed not only in experiences of infertility, but also in understanding (...) it, and in dealing with ART treatment. Responses to stress caused by infertility were stronger in women and they also perceived this stress more intensely than men. For women the central aspect of infertility was the desire for a child, while for men it was perceived more as a socially imposed obligation to fulfill the male role. (shrink)

This paper responds to the contributions by Alexander Bird, Nathan Wildman, David Yates, Jennifer McKitrick, Giacomo Giannini & Matthew Tugby, and Jennifer Wang. I react to their comments on my 2015 book Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, and in doing so expands on some of the arguments and ideas of the book.

This essay is about the role of visual surveillance technologies in the policing of the external borders of the European Union. Based on an analysis of documents published by EU institutions and independent organizations, I argue that these technological innovations fundamentally alter the nature of national borders. I discuss how new technologies of vision are deployed to transcend the physical limits of territories. In the last twenty years, EU member states and institutions have increasingly relied on various forms of remote (...) tracking, including the use of drones for the purposes of monitoring frontier zones. In combination with other facets of the EU border management regime, these technologies coalesce into a system of governance that has enabled intervention into neighboring territories and territorial waters of other states to track and target migrants for interception in the “prefrontier.” For jurisdictional reasons, this practice effectively precludes the enforcement of legal human rights obligations, which European states might otherwise have with regard to these persons. This article argues that this technologically mediated expansion of vision has become a key feature of post–cold war governance of borders in Europe. The concept of transterritory is proposed to capture its effects. (shrink)

The article is an introduction to the issue of Polish literature written in Germany after 1989. The first part of the work focuses around the current literary discussions on defining and developing the terminology and methods enabling research into this new literature – written abroad after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Post­-emigration literature, migration literature, minority literature, multi­-, inter­-, trans­-cultural and diasporic literature – these are only a few of the suggested terms. The second part of the article refers (...) to the works of selected representatives of Polish literature written after 1989 and the issues they discuss in their works. The purpose of the article is to briefly present the complexity of an important problem in the views of Polish, German and Slavic philologists. At the same time, it aims to show that study of the phenomenon in question is still insufficient. (shrink)

In the following paper sources of a constitution are put in question in general, and more specifically, the constitutional culture of the European Union Law is being investigated in-depth with regard to principles of deliberative democracy and rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The change of a law application paradigm as well as the change of a legal systems’ nature are taken into account.

The book discusses a democratic legitimation for modern law. Debates on Europeanisation are taken into account. Ronald Dworkin's, Neil MacCormick's and Jürgen Habermas's standpoints on relations between the law and the public sphere are investigated. Concepts of self-reflexive polity, self-constitutionalisation, constitutional patriotism are analysed.

Due to the growing importance of local pro-development attitudes and non-governmental organizations for development, it is important to look at their activities in different subregions. In this work the author presents the results of research carried out in the Leszno subregion on the presence of elements of social capital, the organizational and financial sustainability of NGOs, and their cooperation with public administration in the context of their impact on local development. In addition, through a comparative analysis of selected issues, it (...) recalls the good practices of NGOs in Switzerland which, because of the long tradition of their operation and the experience gained, can also be used in Polish settings. (shrink)

The article proposes a new solution to the long-standing problem of the universality of essences in Spinoza's ontology. It argues that, according to Spinoza, particular things in nature possess unique essences, but that these essences coexist with more general, mind-dependent species-essences, constructed by finite minds on the basis of similarities that obtain among the properties of formally-real particulars. This account provides the best fit both with the textual evidence and with Spinoza's other metaphysical and epistemological commitments. The article offers new (...) readings of how Spinoza understands not just the nature of essence, but also the nature of being, reason, striving, definitions, and different kinds of knowledge. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of work-life balance. Nowadays more and more benefits is being perceived that stem from implementation of the industrial culture based on balance between work and life. On the other hand there are various limitations which in some cases hinder. One of such barriers lays in the process of communication. Moreover, the article discuss the process of gaining competitive advantage on the ground of the idea of work-family balance. The idea seems to be positive (...) especially for the employees, organisation and even the whole society, since it can prevent the phenomenon of professional burnout. It also helps to maintain the most efficient and the best among the employees, who are intentionally aimed at achieving their goals in professional and personal life. The work- -family balance programmes can make a positive impact on the firm’s reputation and its perception by potential employees. The pregnant women and young parents are presented as a group most interested in those flexible solutions and the programmes prepared for them in LG Electronics, IBM, Decora SA, IKEA, BZ WBK, Volkswagen Motor Polska are examined. (shrink)

Success in economic life is a result of the interaction of many factors, which in different ways are developed from the individual characteristics of the person, a specific way of thinking and the ability to perceive oneself in the future. At the same time, more and more attention is focused on the influence of the entrepreneurial characteristics of individuals on their career development and career building process. The impact of personal experience on the perception of individual chances on the labour (...) market is also emphasized. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to identify the differences in enterprising attitudes of students of the humanities and students of economics, as well as compare the characteristics of entrepreneurial abilities between both student groups on the basis of empirical research conducted among students at the University of Lodz. (shrink)

The paper explores situational and dispositional underpinnings of cooperative behavior. According to psychological research, cooperation is strongly related to affective states and personality dimensions. In an experimental study we examined the conditions under which people cooperate with each other. The dispositional traits of co-workers, the contribution to a collaborative effort, and a situational factor – ambient odor condition were taken into consideration. A one-way ANOVA revealed that compared to a malodorous condition, both the pleasant odor condition and the natural odor (...) condition showed higher rates of cooperation. Further analysis indicated that only malodors influenced affective states which in turn determined social decisions. Although we found effects for the participants’ agreeableness and the coworker’s contribution to a joint work, they appeared to play a less critical role than affective states induced by the experimental odor conditions tested here. (shrink)

The emotion of disgust is suggested to be an adaptation that evolved to keep us away from sources of infection. Therefore, individuals from populations with greater pathogen stress should have a greater disgust sensitivity. However, current evidence for a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and the intensity of infectious diseases in the environment is limited. We tested whether disgust and contamination sensitivity changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Disgust was assessed in 984 women in 2017 and 633 women in (...) 2020 by a set of photographs depicting sources of infection and Pathogen and Moral of Three-Domain Disgust Scale. Further, contamination sensitivity among participants in two waves was measured by Contamination Obsessions and Washing Compulsions Subscale of Padua Inventory. State anxiety was measured with the Polish adaptation of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory only during the second wave of data collection. Women from the COVID-19 pandemic group assessed the photographs depicting sources of infection as more disgusting, scoring higher on Padua Inventory, but lower on Moral Disgust Domain as compared to women from before the pandemic. In addition, anxiety levels during pandemic positively correlated with scores from Pathogen Disgust Domain, Padua Inventory, and the ratings of the photographs. The participants of the study scored higher in state anxiety than the norms determined for the Polish population. Summarizing, we present evidence for differences in individual levels of disgust sensitivity in relation to pathogen stress, supporting the idea that disgust evolved to serve as protection from pathogens. (shrink)

The phrase "natural kind term" has come into the linguistic and philosophical literature in connection with well-known work of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975a). I use that phrase here in the sense it has acquired from those and subseqnent works on related topics. This is not the transparent sense of the phrase. That is, if I am right in what follows there are words for kinds of things existing in nature which are not natural kind terms in the current (...) sense - e.g. planet, woman, and weed. I use the term "nondescriptional", following Salmon (1981), to mean "lacking a Fregean sense", where a Fregean sense is taken to be a property or group of properties semantically associated with an expression which determines its denotation. I hope that the term "nondescriptional" will be clarified in subsequent discussion, but perhaps a few words about it and its opposite, "descriptional", would be useful here. These terms (as Salmon notes (p.15, n. 11)) should be taken as technical terms. The idea is that descriptional words, of which bachelor is the overwhelmingly favorite example, express a semantic content, or sense, which is what mediates their denotation. Entities fall in their denotation in virtue of possessing the property or properties expressed as their sense. (It is not necessary, however, that this sense be as easily paraphrasable with descriptive synonyms as it is typically held to be in the case of bachelor, or even that it be paraphrasable at all.) In the case of nondescriptional words there is no Fregean sense to mediate the link between word and object. Hence such terms are described by what Salmon, following Kaplan, calls "the theory of direct reference". What it is that does associate such terms with their denotations is another question which will be touched on briefly at the end. I have several aims in this paper. The first is to defend a conservative position on nondescriptionality. I will argue that relatively few natural language words have this property. My other aims are primarily clarificatory. Among the issues I would like to clarify are those connected with the determination of this property and flae explanation of why it exists, its relationship with other properties such as rigid designation and essentiality, and its significance for lexical semantics. The organization of the paper is as follows. The first section identifies the position taken here on the question of which expressions are nondescriptional and provides a general defense of it. The second section is a critical examination of criteria associated with nondescriptionality. In the third section provide further defense for the conservative position, and in the fourth section we turn to related issues in lexical semantics. (shrink)

Novel precision oncology trial designs, such as basket and umbrella trials, are designed to test new anticancer agents in more effective and affordable ways. However, they present some ethical concerns referred to scientific validity, risk-benefit balance and informed consent. Our aim is to discuss these issues in basket and umbrella trials, giving examples of two ongoing cancer trials: NCI-MATCH (National Cancer Institute – Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice) and Lung-MAP (Lung Cancer Master Protocol) study. We discuss three ethical requirements for (...) clinical trials which may be challenged in basket and umbrella trial designs. Firstly, we consider scientific validity. Thanks to the new trial designs, patients with rare malignancies have the opportunity to be enrolled and benefit from the trial, but due to insufficient accrual, the trial may generate clinically insignificant findings. Inadequate sample size in study arms and the use of surrogate endpoints may result in a drug approval without confirmed efficacy. Moreover, complexity, limited quality and availability of tumor samples may not only introduce bias and result in unreliable and unrepresentative findings, but also can potentially harm patients and assign them to an inappropriate therapy arm. Secondly, we refer to benefits and risks. Novel clinical trials can gain important knowledge on the variety of tumors, which can be used in future trials to develop effective therapies. However, they offer limited direct benefits to patients. All potential participants must wait about 2 weeks for the results of the genetic screening, which may be stressful and produce anxiety. The enrollment of patients whose tumors harbor multiple mutations in treatments matching a single mutation may be controversial. As to informed consent – the third requirement we discuss, the excessive use of phrases like “personalized medicine”, “tailored therapy” or “precision oncology” might be misleading and cause personal convictions that the study protocol is designed to fulfill the individual health-related needs of participants. We suggest that further approaches should be implemented to enhance scientific validity, reduce misunderstandings and risks, thus maximizing the benefits to society and to trial participants. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

Szabó follows Heim in viewing familiarity, rather than uniqueness, as the essence of the definite article, but attempts to derive both familiarity and uniqueness implications pragmatically, assigning a single semantic interpretation to both the definite and indefinite articles. I argue that if there is no semantic distinction between the articles, then there is no way to derive these differences between them pragmatically.

Explicit and implicit values of polish grandmothers and their granddaughters The authors tried to determine if and to what extent maternal granddaughters share the explicit and implicit values of their grandmothers. 80 grandmothers-granddaughter dyads were surveyed using Schwartz' SVS and Mudyń's RN-02, an instrument assigned to identify "ontological orientations". The results indicate that: 1) grandmothers differ significantly from granddaughters in all ontological orientations, especially in Theoretical and Religious orientation, 2) they differ also in personal values, except for Universalism and Power, (...) 3) regression analysis revealed two decisive factors which determine convergence of ontological orientations and values in grandmother-granddaughter dyads, i.e. and level of education and attitudes toward religion. It may mean that these are the two important transmitters of world view as well as personal values. (shrink)

Zrozumienie i zastosowanie zasad projektowania graficznego w plakacie naukowym może dostarczyć korzyści praktycznych, takich jak przyciągnięcie i utrzymanie uwagi odbiorców, a także korzyści merytorycznych, czyli pomocy w komunikowaniu treści. Te drugie opierają się między innymi na koncepcji wizualnej gramatyki (opisanej przez Kress i Van Leeuwen [2006] i zastosowanej do analizy plakatu naukowego przez D’Angelo [2010]), wedle której elementy wizualne przekazują znaczenie w sposób podobny do języka, i tak jak język posiadają swoją gramatykę: zasady ich zastosowania i prezentacji, które mają wpływ (...) na wyrażany przez nie sens. Poster pokazuje zastosowanie wizualnej gramatyki w plakacie naukowym na przykładzie jednego z elementów wizualnych plakatu, który często jest niedoceniany: pustej przestrzeni. (shrink)

Dispositionalism about modality is the view that metaphysical modality is a matter of the dispositions possessed by actual objects. In a recent paper, David Yates has raised an important worry about the formal adequacy of dispositionalism. This paper responds to Yates’s worry by developing a reply that Yates discusses briefly but dismisses as ad hoc: an appeal to a ’plenitude of powers’ including such powers as the necessarily always manifested power for 2+2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} (...) \begin{document}$$2+2$$\end{document} to be 4. I argue that the reply is not ad hoc at all, by defending the metaphysics of dispositions that should underly it. I then argue, first, that a proper understanding of dispositions’ degrees provides us with an argument for such necessarily always manifested dispositions; second, that all the natural attempts to block that argument can be resisted without being ad hoc; and third, that pragmatic considerations explain our intuitive resistance to the ascription of necessarily always manifested dispositions. Dispositionalism can be formally adequate after all. (shrink)

The article proposes a new solution to the long-standing problem of the universality of essences in Spinoza's ontology. It argues that, according to Spinoza, particular things in nature possess unique essences, but that these essences coexist with more general, mind-dependent species-essences, constructed by finite minds on the basis of similarities that obtain among the properties of formally-real particulars. This account provides the best fit both with the textual evidence and with Spinoza's other metaphysical and epistemological commitments. The article offers new (...) readings of how Spinoza understands not just the nature of essence, but also the nature of being, reason, striving, definitions, and different kinds of knowledge. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 2 Seiten: 196-233.

According to the Principle of Conditional Non-Contradiction (CNC), conditionals of the form “If p, q” and “If p, not q” cannot both be true, unless p is inconsistent. This principle is widely regarded as an adequacy constraint on any semantics that attributes truth conditions to conditionals. Gibbard has presented an example of a pair of conditionals that, in the context he describes, appear to violate CNC. He concluded from this that conditionals lack truth conditions. We argue that this conclusion is (...) rash by proposing a new diagnosis of what is going on in Gibbard’s argument. We also provide empirical evidence in support of our proposal. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects for dispositional accounts of abilities. According to so-called new dispositionalists, an agent has the ability to Φ iff they have a disposition to Φ when trying to Φ. We show that the new dispositionalism is beset by some problems that also beset its predecessor, the conditional analysis of abilities, and bring up some further problems. We then turn to a different approach, which links abilities not to motivational states but to the notion of success, and (...) consider ways of implementing that approach. Our results suggest that there are principled disanalogies between abilities and disposition which prevent any dispositional account of abilities from succeeding. (shrink)