Early twelfth-century logicians invoked past-tensed statements with future-oriented contents to undermine the assumption that every proposition ‘about the past’ is determinate. In the second half of the century, the notion of future-dependence was used to restrict the scope of necessity per accidens. At some point, this idea began to be applied in theology to solve puzzles surrounding predestination, prescience, prophecy, and faith. In the mid-1160s, Magister Udo quotes some thinkers who insisted that the principle of the necessity of the past (...) should exclude dicta that ‘relate to the future’, such as that he has been predestined. Peter of Poitiers adopted this ‘Ockhamist’ strategy around 1170. We find similar accounts in Simon of Tournai and Alan of Lille, who invoked it in other contexts as well. By the time of Praepositinus of Cremona, Hubert of Pirovano, and Stephen Langton, the restricted principle became something of a common view at Paris. (shrink)

This article aims to show that the so-called ‘Ockhamist’ solution to the determinist challenge was a commonplace among Parisian scholastics around 1200. On the ‘Ockhamist’ view, some propositions about the past do not fall under the necessity of the past, since their truth-value depends on the future. The paper focuses on two puzzles involving Abraham’s belief in the future Incarnation. The author discusses the ‘Ockhamist’ strategies adopted by theologians of the period, including Simon of Tournai, Peter of Poitiers, Praepositinus of (...) Cremona, Stephen Langton, Geoffrey of Poitiers, and William of Auxerre. Langton draws an analogy between Abraham’s faith and Christ’s statement “Thou shalt deny me thrice” and suggests that past movements of faith are counterfactually flexible with regard to content. In order to interpret Langton’s statements, the author sketches a model of empty slots in the supernatural layer of the past, retrospectively infused with grace. (shrink)

Mariusz Grygianiec has criticized the so called "proofs of nonexistence of general objects" as based on a wrong definition. In this paper one of his arguments is shown to depend on an unsatisfiable condition (contradictory to some basic ontological intuitions) without which, however, it is inconclusive as a reductio ad absurdum. Furthermore, it is suggested that even if the argument was sound, it could by no means be counted - contrary to the Author's intention - as a counterargument to Stanisław (...) Leśniewski and Tadeusz Kotarbiński. (shrink)

In the paper we discuss criticisms against David Armstrong’s general theory of truthmaking by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Peter Schulte and Benjamin Schnieder, and conclude that Armstrong’s theory survives these criticisms. Special attention is given to the problems concerning Entailment Principle, Conjunction Thesis, Disjunction Thesis and to the notion of explanation.

During the last half of the twentieth century, legal philosophy (or legal theory or jurisprudence) has grown significantly. It is no longer the domain of a few isolated scholars in law and philosophy. Hundreds of scholars from diverse fields attend international meetings on the subject. In some universities, large lecture courses of five hundred students or more study it. The primary aim of the Law and Philosophy Library is to present some of the best original work on legal philosophy from (...) both the Anglo-American and European traditions. Not only does it help make some of the best work avail able to an international audience, but it also encourages increased awareness of, and interaction between, the two major traditions. The primary focus is on full-length scholarly monographs, although some edited volumes of original papers are also included. The Library editors are assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board of internationally renowed scholars. Legal philosophy should not be considered a narrowly circumscribed field. (shrink)

Traditional martial arts continue to be interesting and inspiring to many people around the globe. Some of their contemporary adaptations attract enthusiasts for whom they are especially important. In this article, the author bases his observations on his own long-term participation. The analysis takes into account the influence of the perspectives of Jigoro Kano and several other creators of modern varieties of Japanese budo. It can be concluded that regular, even daily, practice—cultivating martial arts and internalizing its values—co-creates the lifestyle (...) of instructors and advanced students. (shrink)

With the meaning of trust, good faith and respect for promises made, protection, or assistance, fides in the non-exclusively religious sense of the word comes from the demand for ethical perfection: as such, it is omnipresent in human relations and in the dynamic of societies in the Middle Ages.

This is an account of the Uprising fights of a young machinegunner of the “Baszta” Unit from the “W” hour to the honorable surrender at the end of September.

In this paper, we present two experimental studies on reference of complex demonstratives. The results of our experiments challenge the dominant view in philosophy of language, according to which demonstrative reference is determined by the speaker's intentions. The first experiment shows that in a context where there are two candidates for the referent—one determined by the speaker’s intention, the other by some “external” factors—people prefer to identify the referent of a demonstrative with the latter object. The external factors for which (...) this prediction has been confirmed include the speaker’s demonstration and the descriptive content of a demonstrative. The second experiment shows that while this preference can be explained in terms of the speakers’ having different sorts of referential intentions, the relevant kind of intentions are fully opaque to the subjects. At the end of our paper, we point to some alternative accounts of demonstrative reference, including a pluralistic and hybrid approach, which can accommodate our experimental results. (shrink)

The paper presents the semantic model of logical content processing in the environment of tabooed sentences. Such sentences occur both in academic and colloquial discourses. They can be interpreted as infected formulas with the value of an insult. The proposed model assumes that the inferential mechanism of argumentative activities realised in discourses in the environment of such formulas is based on Bochvar's logical matrices and Kripke’s possible worlds semantic structures. This mechanism is determined by semantic consequence operators of three types. (...) The presented theory can be viewed as a formal tool for reconstructing the logical mental mechanism which stops deductive actions aiming at the development of narrative worlds in discourse practices during epistemic wars. It postulates that these practices, which occur in processes of developing science, are governed by special logical mechanisms of inference. (shrink)

Expression of physical motion (e.g., man runs by) shows systematic variability not only between language types (i.e., inter-typological) but also within a language type (i.e., intra-typological). In this study, we asked whether the patterns of variability extend to metaphorical motion events (e.g., time runs by). Our analysis of randomly selected 450 physical motion (150/language) and 450 metaphorical motion (150/language) event descriptions from written texts originally produced by German, Polish, and Spanish authors showed strong inter-typological differences in the expression of both (...) event types. German and Polish speakers differed from Spanish speakers in how they packaged manner and path components of a motion event; they also differed in how extensively they expressed each component in their lexicalization of motion. The strong inter-typological differences were accompanied by more modest intra-typological variability: Polish and German writers differed in their packaging and lexicalization of manner and path components of metaphorical—but not physical—motion events. Our results provide evidence for robust inter-typological differences evident in the expression of both physical and metaphorical motion, along with less robust intra-typological differences, largely evident in the expression of metaphorical motion. Our study thus highlights event type as an important factor in determining crosslinguistic variation in motion expression. (shrink)

Self-esteem and emotional reactivity may be important personality determinants of human functioning in situations of social exposure. In this study, we compared the levels of these personality variables in a group of professional theater actors and a group of professional illusionists with a control group of participants who were neither actors nor illusionists and had no artistic education. We also examined the correlations between emotional reactivity and self-esteem in the three groups. For emotional reactivity, we found (1) very strong evidence (...) that the level is less for magicians than for controls, (2) substantial evidence that the level is less for magicians than for actors, (3) anecdotal evidence that the level is less for actors than for controls, and (4) decisive evidence that the average score is less for males than for females. For self-esteem, we found (1) anecdotal evidence that the level is higher for magicians than for controls, (2) substantial evidence that there is no difference between actors and magicians, (3) anecdotal evidence against a difference between actors and controls, and (4) anecdotal evidence against a difference between males and females. Based on the entire sample we found a moderate correlation between self-esteem and emotional reactivity (r = -.30, p < 0.001). Our results are compatible with the notion that emotional reactivity – as part of the temperament concept – is a factor influencing the choice of an artistic profession. (shrink)

Truth conditions of sentences ascribing non-doxastic propositional attitudes seem to depend on the information structure of the embedded clause. In this paper, we argue that this kind of sensitivity is a semantic phenomenon rather than a pragmatic one. We report four questionnaire studies which explore the impact of the information structure on the truth conditions of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions from different perspectives. The results of the first two studies show that the acceptability of those ascriptions can be affected by some (...) structural modifications of the embedded clause, in particular, when we replace a simple form by an equivalent complex _conjunctional_ form (‘_p_ and _q_’). However, it is possible that different evaluations of such ascriptions have a pragmatic source, namely, the ascriptions with embedded conjunction _imply_ that the agent’s attitude transfers to both conjuncts. In the second pair of studies, we further investigate the nature of this implication which can be classified as ‘Conjunction Elimination’ (CE) in the scope of an attitude verb. The results show that CE-inferences in the context of non-factive non-doxastic attitude ascriptions are not easily cancellable and hence of a semantic rather than pragmatic nature. The results are not conclusive when it comes to the factive non-doxastic attitudes. We conclude our findings by some considerations about a potential source of the observed difference between non-factive and factive attitude verbs and the significance of our general findings to the semantic theory of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions. (shrink)

In _Roman Ingarden’s Philosophy of Literature_ Wojciech Chojna makes Ingarden’s philosophy of literature more consistent with Husserl’s phenomenology and more immune to both absolutism and relativism. The latter is overcome not through falling back on essentialism but from within itself.

In this paper, I present a new account of Richard Rorty’s interpretation of Michel Foucault, which demonstrates that in the course of his career, Rorty presented several diverse (often mutually exclusive) criticisms of Foucault’s political thought. These give different interpretations of what he took to be the flaws of that thought, but also provide different explanations as to the sources of these flaws. I argue that Rorty’s specific criticisms can be divided into two overall groups. Sometimes he saw Foucault’s rejection (...) of bourgeois democracies and bourgeois utopias as a specific case of his general critique regarding the structures of social life as inherently oppressive. At other times he seemed to attribute to Foucault a view that—while not all forms of social life are inherently oppressive—bourgeois democracies certainly are, in a very specific and radical way. In conclusion I show that Rorty’s interpretation of Foucault should be understood in the context of his approach toward the ‘American Cultural Left.’. (shrink)

Artykuł prezentuje sposoby pozyskiwania klienta i działania na rzecz jego utrzymania przy pomocy nowych technologii i nowych mediów. Wykazano, iż zarządzanie relacjami z klientem jest pojęciem obszernym ze względu na różnorodność sytuacji, w których kontaktuje się on z przedsiębiorstwem. Zaprezentowano, iż zmiany technologiczne, a zwłaszcza dokonujące się w dynamicznym tempie umasowienie Internetu, przeobrażają oblicza firm i standardy obsługi klienta w stopniu niespotykanym we wcześniejszych pokoleniach. Przedstawiono również, że utrzymanie klienta jest ważniejsze niż pozyskanie nowego – zgodnie z zasadą V. Pareto. (...) Artykuł składa się z czterech rozdziałów. Pierwszy z nich opisuje rozwój metod komunikacji z klientem, które otworzyły się przed przedsiębiorstwami w związku z rozwojem Internetu. Drugi stanowi przegląd metod działań marketingowych polepszających statystyki pozyskiwania i utrzymywania klientów. W trzecim rozdziale opisano strategię zarządzania relacjami z klientami oraz scharakteryzowano typową budowę systemu informatycznego, wspomagającego realizację tejże strategii. Czwarty rozdział stanowi próbę uzasadnienia celowości nakładów ponoszonych na utrzymanie klientów. (shrink)

The expression of physical motion (the spider crawls across the net) and metaphorical motion (the fear crawls across her heart) shows strong inter-typological differences between language types (German, an S-language vs. Spanish, a V-language) and more subtle intra-typological differences within a language type (German vs. Polish, both S-languages). However, we know relatively less about the extension of these patterns to translated texts. In this study, we focused on physical and metaphorical motion descriptions in written texts in original language and their (...) translations to a language that belongs to the same or a different typological group, to determine whether motion expression in translated texts shows the same patterns of inter-typological and intra-typological variability as it does in original texts. We investigated this question by extracting 450 physical motion (150/language) and 450 metaphorical motion (150/language) descriptions from novels originally written in German, Polish, or Spanish and their translations to typologically different (i.e. inter-typological; German to Spanish, Spanish to German) or typologically similar (i.e. intra-typological; German to Polish, Polish to German) languages. Our results provided evidence for similar patterns of strong inter-typological and more subtle intra-typological variability in translations akin to those observed in original texts – with translated texts largely following the patterns of the target language in their expression of physical and metaphorical motion. Our results also highlighted specificity of event expression in a language as an important factor in the attainment of target language patterns in translated texts. (shrink)