The article presents an obituary for Polish philosopher Piotr Lenartowicz.

The central issue in the debate on animal minds is the issue of mindreading. This complicated cognitive ability belongs to the key elements of social cognition — as a form of adapting to specific circumstances connected with living in groups, it enables the reading of the mental states of other individuals, e.g. intentions, desires, and beliefs as well as the adaptation of one’s own behavior to this information. The primary purpose of the article is to present the main philosophical controversies (...) which arise in the discussion of whether this ability can be attributed to animals; if so, then to what extent. Philosophical discussions concentrate on methodological issues: alternative interpretational models of animal behavior, anthropomorphism, experimental protocols, and gradeability of mindreading as well as the nature of the mind. (shrink)

The author singles out various conceptions of rationality used in practical legal discourse: formal and substantive rationality, instrumental goal‐ and means‐rationality, communicative rationality. Practical rationality is expressed in decisions justified by epistemic and axiological premises according to the rules of justificatory reasoning. Five levels of analysis of this justification are identified. Rules, principles and evaluations are used as justifying arguments and their characteristics determine the dimensions of rationality of decision depending on the features of rules, various conceptions of principles, and (...) kinds of relativisation of evaluations. The dimensions of legal rationality depend mainly on three singled out conceptions of rationality, i.e., formal rationality dealing with the deep structure of justification, instrumentally oriented rationality as content of justifiability, and communicative rationality linked with the pragmatics of human interaction. Legitimacy, according to the presented analysis, appears as a subclass of external justification dealing with axiological premisses in terms of instrumental rationality and/or communicative rationality. (shrink)

The article presents the typological and conceptual tools used by Henryk Skolimowski to describe and explain the relation between man and nature. Skolimowski claims that the main determinant of this relation is the way man sees nature, i.e., the vision of nature which prevails in his culture and times. In other words, decisive for our relation to nature is cosmology. The first part of the article outlines the fundamental functions of the cosmological model which are to interpret daily and scientific (...) experiences, to establish the type of actions which relate to man and nature. The second part concerns the structure of worldview which is based on a cosmological model. The structure of worldview embraces a cosmological model presenting the general structure of nature, eschatology understood as a realm of human life and cosmic goal, and ethicsdetermining human behaviour. (shrink)

The author asks whether the danger of an imminent ecological crisis affects the problems of cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, absolutism vs. relativism and naturalism vs. non-naturalism. The ecological crisis is assumed in order to make the contrast between the above metaethical and general axiological oppositions more pronounced.

Antropozofia dąży do przezwyciężenia ograniczeń poznawczych filozofii Kanta. Jerzy Prokopiuk wielokrotnie przyznawał się do fascynacji antropozofią Rudolfa Steinera. Polski gnostyk, kwestionując kantowski podział sądów, dostrzegł w nich agnostyczną bezsilność. Jego zdaniem, powodem słabości myśli Kanta było materialistyczne rozumienie doświadczenia, protestantyzm oraz życie osobiste filozofa.

The aim of this article is to give a philosophical analysis of inter-theoretical relations between the popular science and philosophy of nature and to formulate and the criteria of evaluation of correctness of such relations. The analysis is grounded in the domain of contemporary evolutionism. The main hypothesis is the following: The scientific theories do not imply philosophical theses directly. Nevertheless, they frequently appear in popular works as allegedly following scientific theories.. For example, papers on the theory of human evolution (...) derive metaphysical theses from certain types of naturalism or spiritualism. These popular, metaphysically loaded, pseudo-scientific theories work as the traps. While using them, it is impossible to realize the cognitive aspirations of scientific theories (the error of metaphysical aspirations) that are suggested in their popular elaborations (the error of naive extrapolations). Metaphysical aspirations of the popular science result from the social demand for the philosophy of life. The main purpose of metaphysical interpretations is to turn the "scientific world" into the world of everyday life. This can be done in the frame of so-called hobby-philosophies, which are implicite loaded with serious metaphysical premises. Philosophy of nature is an open forum for the interpretations of scientific theories. Philosophy of nature takes into considerations theoretical as well as practical human attitudes towards the nature. (shrink)

Conceptions deducing the rules of behaviour from nature are analysed on the basis of a model involving three assumptions: the existence of nature, the deductibility of rules from nature, and natural rules as a criterion of valuation. Three basic constructions of nature are distinguished: „real nature”, two kinds of „ethical nature”, „logical nature”.

The author analysed the notion of moral act from the standpoint of materialist philosophy after having distinguished moral norms and values from other social norms and values, ethics from metaethics, and after having described the connection between moral norms and values.

. The author discusses the conditions necessary to accept the one right answer theory. The argument is based on an analysis of the deep structure of the justified fractional decisions pertaining to the substantive decisional model of the judicial application of law within the statutory law system. The role of evaluative choices is needed to justify the decisions in question at least in hard cases. This makes the theory of one right answer unacceptable in a noncognitivist axiological framework.