Michael Novak’s concept of democratic capitalism in Poland aroused great interest for several reasons. The most important of them consisted in its close relation to the teaching of the Polish Pope John Paul II. The second was its temporal coincidence with the start of a political transformation in Poland, when a model of development consistent with Polish tradition and social expectations was sought. The third was related to its Slavic roots and origin, which gained in importance given a perceived civilizational (...) backwardness of the countries belonging to the former socialist bloc. For Polish Catholic thinkers, the concept of democratic capitalism initially seemed to promise a smooth transition to a market economy, protecting society from the shock of a possible collision with predatory capitalism. But the discussions of Michael Novak’s conception which took place in Poland at that time were unfortunately burdened with fears of cultural pluralism and with leaving individuals too much freedom in implementing their own ways of achieving happiness. Polish conservatives, who were in power at that time, did not seem to understand the important need for a dynamic moral and cultural system in a society that was just starting its modernization processes. It is paradoxical, but in these discussions what was most feared was the weakening of religious traditions in Polish society. According to the author, this fear caused distrust of the democratic conception, and especially its moral foundations, which continues to this day. This paper, therefore, also contributes to reflection on to what extent the teachings of John Paul II have been absorbed in Polish conservative circles. (shrink)

Autor prezentuje mało znane fakty z historii polskiej nauki świadczące o tym, że przedstawiciele polskiej emigracji powojennej mieli bardzo dobre rozeznanie o sytuacji w nauce krajowej. W filozofii przykładem tego były kontakty Zbigniewa Jordana (1911–1977) z przedstawicielami filozofii pracującymi w kraju. Jordan przez wiele lat utrzymywał systematyczne kontakty z około czterdziestoma osobami, stanowiącymi elitę polskiej powojennej filozofii i socjologii. Do grona jego znajomych i korespondentów należeli m.in. Jan Łukasiewicz, ks. Józef Pastuszka, Tadeusz Czeżowski, Maria i Stanisław Ossowscy, Tadeusz i Janina (...) Kotarbińscy, Adam Schaff, Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Szczepański, Andrzej Grzegorczyk, a także przedstawiciele polskiej emigracji pracujący na uczelniach zachodnich. Dzięki tym kontaktom potrafił zrealizować naraz dwa cele. Po pierwsze, popularyzował godne upamiętnienia osiągnięcia nauki polskiej, dzięki czemu jego starania zapewniały ścisły związek między nauką krajową a światową. Po drugie, zapewniał historyczna ciągłość nauki polskiej, której nie przerwało nawet wprowadzenie komunistycznych porządków w kraju, które sprowadzały się do próby odrzucenia całej dotychczasowej tradycji. Autor stoi na stanowisku, że nauka stanowi najważniejszą część kultury i z tej racji dokonania Jordana powinny zostać spopularyzowane w całym środowisku nauki w Polsce jako przykład, którym winni kierować się jej młodzi adepci, koncentrujący się wyłącznie na karierze w zagranicznych instytucjach naukowych. (shrink)

Karol Frenkel was one of Kazimierz Twardowski’s first disciples to undertake an attempt to develop their own concept of ethics. In his case, the process of developing his own ethical concept involved questioning the tradition in which he had been educated. Accordingly, he was able to formulate an original concept of independent ethics. In his doctoral dissertation, Frenkel analyzed two ethical systems, formulated by David Hume and Arthur Schopenhauer respectively which sought ethical determinants in the affective sphere. For Frenkel, these (...) proposals turned out to be unsatisfactory, and thus he proposed his own solution derived from the accepted concept of morality. From today’s perspective, it was the first reflection in Poland referring to scientific ethics, which – chronologically speaking – in many respects preceded the analogous solutions proposed later by British analytical philosophers. (shrink)

In the article, the author presents attempts by Polish Marxist philosophers to enrich Marxism with ethical issues. The initial absence of ethics in Marxism is associated with the ignorance of tradition related to their own formation. In the author’s opinion, only polemics with the competitive Lviv-Warsaw school forced Polish Marxists to take the issue seriously. That is why Polish Marxist ethics in its mature form was only established in the 1960s, and did not enrich Marxism itself, but rather indirectly contributed (...) to the initiation of socio-political transformations in our country. (shrink)

Author: Konstańczak Stefan Title: EXISTENTIAL MEANING OF SUFFERING IN AXIOLOGY OF WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ (Egzystencjalne znaczenie cierpienia w aksjologii Władysława Tatarkiewicza) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 629-642 Keywords: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, ETHICS, SUFFERING, HAPPINESS, INJUSTICE, MORAL COMPENSATION, MINIMIZING OF SUFFERING, HAPPINESS Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The problem of human suffering was not the subject of a separate publication by Władysław Tatarkiewicz. However, such theme matter appeared in (...) a few of his important publications, including his post-doctoral thesis “On inexorability of the good”, after-war publication “On happiness” and a small treatise “Ethical bases of revindication and compensation” justifying Polish claims for reparations after the warfare. Tatarkiewicz made a distinction between physical and spiritual suffering, but each one was always considered as a bad thing. War experience changed his attitude in this matter and therefore he admitted that it is impossible to eliminate suffering from human life and hence he claimed that one can experience happiness even in spite of some negative sensations. Age is not an obstacle to feel it either. However, he pointed out that undeserved suffering justifiably demands a compensation and the lack of it or evasion from redressing the wrong are immoral. One cannot evade a duty of minimizing of suffering because even personal suffering cannot be the reason of drawing back from moral duties fulfillment. (shrink)

Environmental problems do have a universal dimension: they concern entire humanity as well as each human being individually, therefore, a new ecology needs to be developed in which man will play a principal role being a focal point of the study, its creator and executor of its assumptions, the discipline thus understood is one of the aspects of general ecology for it studies relationships between man as a species and its environment, the author believes that, regardless of the standpoint that (...) representatives of various sciences may take, the future of our species depends on the interdisciplinary approach toward the questions that are subject to human ecology studies. (shrink)

In his paper, the author makes an attempt at reconstructing one of the first propositions in Poland to start a philosophical discourse on ecological problems. The author of this proposition is priest Tadeusz Ślipko. According to this author the problems of the moral aspects of natural environmental protection are also bioethical problems. Therefore, we can see that he does not consider ethics of the environment as an individual philosophical discipline. The article concentrates on presenting the sources and the range of (...) moral duties of humankind towards the natural environment. Tadeusz Ślipko does not approve of the anthropocentric or biocentric standpoints in the issues of natural environmental protection. He offers his own idea of anthropopriorism, which takes the middle ground between these two extreme concepts. In conclusion, the author underlines that there is still a strong need for ethical reflection over the state of the natural environment along the lines of Ślipko’s stance. (shrink)

The starting point of the article is the thesis that Hippocrates’ rule: “the health of an ill person is the highest right” is not only the main rule of the conduct of medical staff but also includes a defined method of evaluation. According to the author, the consequence of such evaluation is a detailed rule “Firstly, not to harm”. This rule has got a universal character and cannot only be restricted to medical staff. Healthcare is not the domain of doctors (...) alone. It is everybody’s obligation, as it is to ensure that people don’t risk their own health or others’. In support of this approach, Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s considerations have been mentioned in the article, especially those that combine an individual sense of happiness with a state of health. In the end, the author refers to empirical research, which shows dependence on the state of health on and acquired lifestyle and points to the greater rationale of health prevention rather than institutional medical care. (shrink)

The article is mainly based on Tadeusz Czeżowski’s publication – “Metaethical considerations”, prepared to be printed but never published. This publication, however, is not a handbook of classical metaethics but a kind of generalization of ethical theories ordering in a way, all known until now ethical systems within philosophy. Thus, Czeżowski does not offer his metaethics as a section of traditional ethics but also as a kind of generalization of all ethics until now, and therefore, all systems worked out within (...) itself. In its essence “Metaethical considerations” is the concept of scientific ethics, regardless of anything that does not pass verification, subject of which are e.g. empirical science research results. (shrink)

„Ruch Filozoficzny” and the freedom of scientific research in Poland (in 1947-1957 years). Presented article refers to the situation in the Polish philosophy, which took place between 40-50 of the twentieth century. Author’s reflections are carried on the example of attempts to reactivate in the realities of war, the polish philosophical journal “Ruch Filozoficzny” founded in 1911 by Kazimierz Twardowski. Political conditions have made the magazine was renewed twice, at each time was the greatest merit of Tadeusz Czeżowski. He was (...) assisted by the other representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School, who worked in various academic centers in Poland. The reconstruction of the history of the magazine in the postwar years, will be based on previously unpublished archival material. In its conclusions, the author tries to point out of great importance of independent from the political authorities publishers on development of Polish philosophy. (shrink)

In this article the author presents the history of the development of independent ethics in Poland, which was developed by followers of the Lvov-Warsaw School, the most famous Polish school of philosophy in the world. The general specificity of all branches, defined as independent ethics is presented first. Next, the author presents the historical and political conditions for the creation of this type of ethical concept. In Poland, such ethics was established in two forms, the first of which exhibited its (...) separation from the whole ethical tradition while the second, in contrast, tried to generalise this tradition in a form, named by Tadeusz Czeżowski, as metaethics. This article discusses in depth only the most well-known concept of independent ethics developed by Tadeusz Kotarbiński. (shrink)

Justifying the existence of professional ethics in medicine is usually connected with the traditions of a profession and with a humanistic dimension of these ethics, pointing at the same time to their culture-forming character. With such an attitude, professional ethics is treated as a part of all mankind’s output, and its teaching turns out to be an important element of preparation for taking part in culture. Taking into account the cultural meaning of professional ethics, one should notice that all discussions (...) about the character of relations of medicine and ethics exceed the very health care system. The dilemma outlined in the article deals with the problem whether the existence of medical ethics requires external regulations or is this also a creation of the very representatives of medicine and only they can formulate it. If the latter is to be assumed, ethics in medicine would have to be independent of other detailed ethics and it would not need to be included in any other more general theory. In the first solution, medical ethics is becoming a part of general ethics and, therefore, it would be justified to include it in a more general theory – bioethics. The authors indicate that professional ethics does not limit freedom of the staff but gives a special opportunity to use it. Records constituting its contents are mostly standardized by a professional group which sets criteria of recruitment on its own and general duties resting on their members. (shrink)

Artykuł przedstawia historię sporów i polemik naukowych na temat teorii ewolucji oraz publikacji Karola Darwina, jakie miały miejsce w w Polsce w drugiej połowie XIX wieku.

The program of Evolutionary Ethics (EE) is based on the assumption that our moral features constitute adaptations and as such are to be explained in terms of the evolutionary process of natural selection. However, the fundamental assumption of EE was seriously put into question: the level of analysis relevant for moral features is essentially ontogeny and culture, while the explanation using natural selection applies to the level of phylogeny and genes (Sober, 1995; Ayala, 1995; Okasha, 2009). To the discussion on (...) the validity of the program of EE we propose to bring the recent program of Extended Synthesis (ES, Pigliucci & Muller, 2010), because it attempts to account for the role of the ontogeny in evolution. We conclude, nevertheless, that ES fails to properly account for the importance of ontogeny in evolutionary processes because by extending the notion of inheritance it (con-)fuses the notions of unit of inheritance and of unit of selection (against the well-known distinction made by Hull, 1980). (shrink)

Artykuł w całości nawiązuje do dotąd niepublikowanej korespondencji Tadeusza Czeżowskiego z emigracyjnym filozofem Zbigniewem Jordanem zachowanej w rękopisach w zasobach archiwalnych Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu. Ich korespondencja trwała blisko 40 lat i jest dowodem, że nawet przymusowa powojenna emigracja nie zrywała więzów łączących filozofów związanych ze szkołą lwowsko-warszawską. Choć Czeżowski i Jordan należeli do dwóch różnych pokoleń tej szkoły, to wspólne zainteresowania naukowe i podobne zapatrywania polityczne spowodowały, że ich więź, choć tylko korespondencyjna, była w pewnym sensie wyjątkowa, bo (...) nawet ingerencje komunistycznej cenzury nie były w stanie wpłynąć na jej kształt. Dzięki niej Jordan wykazywał się doskonałą orientacją w dorobku samego Czeżowskiego jak i pozostałych przedstawicieli szkoły lwowsko-warszawskiej. To właśnie głównie dzięki tej korespondencji mógł pełnić rolę „ambasadora” polskiej filozofii w świecie i zarazem pierwszego historyka szkoły lwowsko-warszawskiej. Przypomnieniu roli obu filozofów w dziejach polskiej filozofii sprzyja zwłaszcza przypadająca w tym roku 40-ta rocznica śmierci Czeżowskiego oraz 110 rocznica urodzin Jordana. (shrink)

In this article, the author attempts to identify the sources of good and evil as undertaken by the Lvov-Warsaw School of Philosophy (LWSP) founded by Kazimierz Twardowski. Such attempts were undertaken by both Twardowski himself and his closest students and associates; Władysław Witwicki, Tadeusz Kotarbiński. Tadeusz Czeżowski, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The best-known approach is Kotarbiński’s independent ethics in which the author refers to Aristotle perceiving such potential in the characteristics of each individual as to distinguish elementary qualities in the form (...) of opposites including opposition to good and evil. According to this approach, man acts in an evil manner because he stops following the natural voice of his own heart and instead implements set proposals provided by external factors. In the opinion of the author, the proposals formulated within the LWSP can form the basis for a rational explanation of the atrocities committed during World War II which modern ethics, being focused on neutral metaethical issues, fails to do. (shrink)

In the article, the author analyses the impact of the tragic experiences during the Holocaust on contemporary ethics and literature. Such considerations coincide with yet another anniversary – the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, celebrated globally as Holocaust Memorial Day. The article also considers the reasons why testimonies from Holocaust survivors have not had an adequate impact on society. The author argues that trivialisation of the Holocaust tragedy occurred in modern science and it is related to the fact that (...) traditional ethics has not been able to convincingly explain why the Holocaust occurred in the most civilised nations. Thus, Holocaust testimonies should be constantly popularised in society for the good of all mankind. Literature seems to be the best form of mass media for this task and it is also a recorder of human emotions. According to the author, it is essential that humanity is protected this way against the possibility of a similar tragedy occurring in the future. (shrink)

This book, through its essays, captures this interdisciplinary nature of research into morality, treated both as a social fact, as well as man’s individual disposition. The Slovak philosopher and ethicist Vasil Gluchman, as the book’s scientific editor, divided the book into two parts, the first, entitled Different Concepts of Morality presents, in accordance with its title, various and sometimes even controversial stances related to the understanding of key issues of morality. The second part of the book titled New Trends in (...) Understanding Morality consists primarily of the author’s attempts to explain the sources of morality formulated not only by ethics, but also by the biological sciences. In this short presentation it is clear that both the scientific editor as well as the individual authors, did not set themselves the objective of writing another book on moral philosophy, but instead focused themselves on the key issues which determine the status and direction of contemporary rese .. (shrink)

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when (...) it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)

‘Jürgen Habermas’, wrote the American philosopher Ronald Dworkin on the occasion of the great European thinker’s eightieth birthday, ‘is not only the world’s most famous living philosopher. Even his fame is famous.’ Now, after many years of intensive research and in-depth conversations with contemporaries, colleagues and Habermas himself, Stefan Müller-Doohm presents the first comprehensive biography of one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. From his political and philosophical awakening in West Germany to the formative relationships with (...) Adorno and Horkheimer, Müller-Doohm masterfully traces the major forces that shaped Habermas’s intellectual development. He shows how Habermas’s life and work were conditioned by the possibilities offered to his generation in the unique circumstances of regained freedom that characterized postwar Germany. And yet Habermas’s career is fascinating precisely because it amounts to more than a corpus of scholarly work, however original and influential that may be. For here is someone who continually left the protective space of the university in order to assume the role of a participant in controversial public debates Ð from the significance of the Holocaust to the future of Europe Ð and in this way sought to influence the development of social and political life in an arena much broader than the academy. The significance and virtuosity of Habermas’s many writings over the years are also fully and expertly documented, ranging from his early work on the public sphere to his more recent writings on communicative action, cosmopolitanism and the postnational condition. What emerges from this biography is a vivid portrait of one of the great public intellectuals of our time Ð a unique thinker who has made an immense and lasting philosophical contribution but who, when he perceives that society is not living up to its potential for creating free and just conditions for all, becomes one of its most rigorous and persistent critics. (shrink)

Most accounts of our knowledge of the successor axiom claim that this is based on the procedure of adding one. While they usually don’t claim to provide an account of how children actually acquire this knowledge, one may well think that this is how they get that knowledge. I argue that when we look at children’s responses in interviews, the time when they learn the successor axiom and the intermediate learning stages they find themselves in, that there is an empirically (...) viable alternative. I argue that they could also learn it on the basis of a method that has to do with the structure of the numeral system. Specifically, that they (1) use the syntactic structure of the numeral system and (2) attend to the leftmost digits, the one with the highest place-value. Children can learn that this is a reliable method of forming larger numbers by combining two elements. First, a grasp of the syntactic structure of the numeral system. That way they know that the leftmost digit receives the highest value. Second, an interpretation of numerals as designating cardinal values, so that they also realise that increasing or adding digits on the lefthand side of a numeral produces a larger number. There are thus two, currently equally well-supported, ways in which children might learn that there are infinitely many natural numbers. (shrink)

The philosophy of Thomas Kuhn proposes that scientific progress involves periods of crisis and revolution in which previous paradigms are discarded and replaced. Revolutions in how mental health problems are conceptualised have had a substantial impact on the work of mental health nurses. However, despite numerous revolutions within the field of mental health, the biological paradigm has remained largely dominant within western healthcare, especially in orientating the understanding and treatment of psychosis. This paper utilises concepts drawn from the philosophy of (...) Thomas Kuhn to explore the impact of what Kuhn terms ‘anomalies’ within the dominant biological paradigm: the anomaly of the meaningful utterance, the anomaly of complex aetiology and taxonomy and the anomaly of pharmacological inefficacy in recovery. The paper argues that the biological paradigm for understanding psychosis is in crisis and explores the implications for mental health nursing. (shrink)

This paper studies the epistemic failures to reach understanding in relation to scientific explanations. We make a distinction between genuine understanding and its negative phenomena—lack of understanding and misunderstanding. We define explanatory understanding as inclusive as possible, as the epistemic success that depends on abilities, skills, and correct explanations. This success, we add, is often supplemented by specific positive phenomenology which plays a part in forming epistemic inclinations—tendencies to receive an insight from familiar types of explanations. We define lack of (...) understanding as the epistemic failure that results from a lack of an explanation or from an incorrect one. This can occur due to insufficient abilities and skills, or to fallacious explanatory information. Finally, we characterize misunderstanding by cases where one’s epistemic inclinations do not align with an otherwise correct explanation. We suggest that it leads to potential debates about the explanatory power of different explanatory strategies. We further illustrate this idea with a short meta-philosophical study on the current debates about distinctively mathematical explanations. (shrink)

Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies—money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of money, drawing on the (...) insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance—like so much about money—is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money. (shrink)

The manuscripts and writings of the fifteenth-century astronomer and physician Lewis Caerleon (d. c. 1495) have been largely overlooked. To fill this gap, this article focuses on his writings and working methods through a case study of his canons and table for the equation of time. In the first part, an account of his life and writings is given on the basis of new evidence. The context in which his work on the equation of time was produced is explored in (...) detail by reviewing the three key periods of his scientific production. His heavy reliance on Simon Bredon’s Commentum super Almagesti is also analyzed. The article also provides editions of Lewis Caerleon’s canons for calculating his table for the equation of time and a critical edition of Simon Bredon’s Commentum super Almagesti, III, 22–24. In the second part of this article, we analyze the table for the equation of time derived by Lewis around 1485. In addition to the final table, there is a unique table with intermediate results that records every step of his derivation. By following and discussing the details of this derivation, we shed a new light on tabular practices in mathematical astronomy. Following Lewis in his historical mathematical procedure, we argue, offers a novel historiographical approach that allows us to identify different sources and practices used by historical actors. Therefore, beyond the exchange of parameters residing in modern mathematical analysis, this novel approach offers a promising refinement for the analysis of the transmission of knowledge across space, time, and culture. (shrink)

Bostrom rejects Nietzsche as an ancestor of the transhumanist movement, as he claims that there were merely some “surface-level similarities with the Nietzschean vision” (Bostrom 2005a, 4). In contrast to Bostrom, I think that significant similarities between the posthuman and the overhuman can be found on a fundamental level. In addition, it seems to me that Nietzsche explained the relevance of the overhuman by referring to a dimension which seems to be lacking in transhumanism. In order to explain my position, (...) I will progress as follows. First, I will compare the concept of the posthuman to that of Nietzsche’s overhuman, focusing more on their similarities than their differences. Second, I will contextualise the overhuman in Nietzsche’s general vision, so that I can point out which dimension seems to me to be lacking in transhumanist thought. (shrink)

A measure of coherence is said to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) results in a higher likelihood that the witnesses are reliable. Recently, it has been proved that several coherence measures proposed in the literature are reliability conducive in a restricted scenario (Olsson and Schubert 2007, Synthese 157:297–308). My aim is to investigate which coherence measures turn out to be reliability conducive in the more general scenario where it is any finite (...) number of witnesses that give equivalent reports. It is shown that only the so-called Shogenji measure is reliability conducive in this scenario. I take that to be an argument for the Shogenji measure being a fruitful explication of coherence. (shrink)