One of the popular explications of the deflationary tenet of ‘thinness’ of truth is the conservativeness demand: the declaration that a deflationary truth theory should be conservative over its base. This paper contains a critical discussion and assessment of this demand. We ask and answer the question of whether conservativity forms a part of deflationary doctrines.

We formulate and explore two basic axiomatic systems of type-free subjective probability. One of them explicates a notion of finitely additive probability. The other explicates a concept of infinitely additive probability. It is argued that the first of these systems is a suitable background theory for formally investigating controversial principles about type-free subjective probability.

In the traditional sense, a work of art creates an illustration of the outside world, or of a certain text or doctrine. Sometimes it is considered that such an illustration is not literal, but is an interpretation of what is visible, or an interpretation of a certain literary or ideological message. It can also be assumed that a work of art creates its own visual world, a separate story or a separate philosophical statement. The Parc de La Villette represents the (...) last of these possibilities: it is a philosophical statement that develops the premises derived from poststructuralist philosophies and the philosophy of deconstruction. The uniqueness of its being status, however, is that it does so not only at the level of the theoretical assumptions, but also through its functioning as an active philosophical work. This means that a park is a happening philosophy. Its activity, however, does not refer only to the present tense, but is also an attempt to penetrate the future, all otherness and impossibility. This kind of activity assumes that the work, in a sense, does not yet fully exist, but is also still produced in the processes of its interpretation. The theoretical foundations of the park included texts by Bernard Tschumi, in which he questioned traditional ways of creating a work of architecture, postulating in return the use of a long series of negations, which were comparable to the crisis of metaphysics characteristic of contemporary philosophy. It is therefore no coincidence that the publication containing Tschumi’s theoretical text on Parc de La Villette was accompanied by an essay by Jacques Derrida developing some of the architect’s concepts. The next step in integrating philosophy into the process of park design was a series of discussions between Peter Eisenman and Derrida, who completely moved the creation of the park into the world of thoughts, without accentuating the need for their realization in the material reality. The main topic of these discussions was the problem of the chôra, which was taken up by later commentators and used to interpret the park as a work in which the philosophy of the beginning is manifested relating to issues of politics, morality and religion. The park was therefore interpreted as a space of invention within the scope of creating new rules of functioning of the community and democracy. Thinking about the political future may, however, exceed the horizon of ordinary expectations. Although philosophical thought is always connected with contemporary problems and metaphysics sometimes intertwines with current politics, yet at the same time the customs of philosophy also include crossing horizons and thinking about absolute otherness and impossibility. Initially, the chôra, différance, Absolute Otherness (tout autre) and the Impossibile were concepts of pure philosophy of atheistic character, but with the further development of the discussion, more and more theological motifs began to emerge. One of the reasons for this phenomenon was the fact that radical negations of all being, which were contemplated in contemporary philosophy (by Heidegger and Derrida, among others), had previously been manifested in negative and apophatic theologies (by Master Eckhart, among others). Also the category of the “Other”, taken from Emmanuel Levinas, was clearly connected with the thought about God. A further reason for connecting the chôra with the theological thought was the interest in the philosophy of deconstruction expressed by some theologians. Caputo in particular managed to persuade Derrida to participate in discussions on the current status of religion. In the late period of Derrida’s writing, further statements on religious topics appeared. All these reasons led to posing a question about the identity of the chôra and God. Although there were no satisfactory conclusions on this issue, the discussion was also important to create an interpretation of the park as a place of worship. The chôra, representing, according to Plato, the preoriginal emptiness is the place of every beginning, but it turns out that it is not neutral to the being created in it. The chôra deposits itself in every being as an irremovable beginning that interferes with its stability. The chôra, therefore, forces us into a palintropical movement, but it also turns out to be a pure compulsion, an erring necessity and a fundamental force from which, in the human perception, motifs useful to the individual and to the community are extracted. All definitions of this force, including its anthropomorphisation, are formulated in such a way that they allow for building private and collective morality upon them. Such definitions are changed depending on variable political situations. It is difficult to determine whether in the processes of changes in the formulation of “God’s names” any essential value is retained, which is not subject to change. The current definitions of the chôra (God?), which can be found, for example, in the philosophy of Caputo, stress that she is a combination of various and contradictory forces. This characteristic inherits much of Plato’s concept, reminds us of Master Eckhart’s views on Gottheit and, at the same time, is not unfamiliar to Tschumi, whose essays were an apologia of contradictions. The current concept of chôra, transferred into the sphere of politics, is the praise of social diversity and the protection of the difference from the forces of order. In the Parc de La Villette, the future community and democracy were elevated as a system of safe existence of individuals in all their singularity. The park is a temple of a future community in which individual beings have nothing in common. (shrink)

Mutilation, along with all forms of maltreatment of the dead, was widely condemned by Greek authors of the Classical period. In a culture where the obligation to bury and respect the dead was seen as one of the strongest moral compulsions universal to all men, mistreating the dead was considered to be the most outrageous and unholy of actions, more suitable, as Herodotus states, for barbarians than for Greeks, ‘and even in them we find it loathsome’. The importance of the (...) theme of mutilating the dead in theIliad, where one can find numerous and surprisingly detailed descriptions of warriors maltreating the corpses of their enemies, is therefore puzzling, to say the least. (shrink)

Praktykowanie teorii. Koncepty wczesnych prac Daniela Libeskinda jako wzorce realnej architektury Treści wczesnych prac Libeskinda, w tym zwłaszcza idee zawarte w cyklach rysunków pod nazwą Micromegas: The Architecture of End Space (1979) i Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on the Themes from Heraclitus (1983) oraz trzy maszyny określone jako Three Lessons in Architecture (1985) w decydujący sposób wpłynęły na wszystkie późniejsze realizacje architekta. Prace te w dużym zakresie zmieniły zasady oddzielania teorii od praktyki budowlanej, w tym tak- że odgraniczania architektury od (...) literatury czy filozofii. Już Micromegas były polemiką z traktowaniem rysunku architektonicznego wyłącznie jako utylitarnego narzędzia w procesie stwarzania budowli i postawiły na uczynienie z tej techniki pełnoprawnej postaci realnej architektury. Chamber Works w jeszcze większym stopniu niż prace z serii Micromegas akcentowały samodzielność rysunku i jego odrębność od wszelkiej rzeczywistości czy zewnętrznych źródeł treści. Maszyny połączone w Three Lessons in Architecture streszczały dokonania dawnych epok historii sztuki budowania. Reading Machine opowiadała o rzemieślniczych początkach, Memory Machine o intelektualizmie okresu nowożytnego, Writing Machine zaś o współczesnym okresie mechanizacji pamięci i kreacji. Zadaniem maszyn była metafizyczna refleksja nad głównymi założeniami i mitami architektury, a zarazem przeniesienie tej refleksji na poziom doświadczenia zmysłowego. W berlińskim Jüdisches Museum wymyślone liternictwo architektoniczne połączyło się z narracją na temat zagłady żydowskich mieszkańców miasta. Libeskind wykreował nie tyle budowlę,ile literacką relację o zbrodni przełamującej historię ludzkość. (shrink)

Locke’s theory of property is irreconcilable with intellectual property. Property-like titles in ideal objects cannot be introduced within the framework of the natural law, because they could constrain others from acts necessary for their survival. Nevertheless, followers of Locke’s theory of politics choose to belittle this conclusion and even Locke himself supported early copyright legislation. The inconsistency is important, for it depicts the problem of legitimization of intellectual property as political and demonstrates liberal reification of various aspects of social life.

In the paper two definitions of moments of time as the sets of events are considered. The first one is Russell’s definition based on a relation simultaneity of events. The second one is my construction of moments of time grounded on a relation of being immediately preceding.

Northrop Frye, Anatomia krytyki, przeł. Monika Bokiniec, Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2012.

Mimicry is known to produce benefits for the mimicker such as liking, increased prosocial tendencies, and trust. Little is known about the benefits or costs to the mimickee. The aim of this study is to explore this issue. Participants were mimicked or not by a confederate. The confederate then dropped pens and checked if the participants picked them up. Finally, questionnaires were administered that assessed each participant’s liking of the confederate and self-liking, and self-esteem. As expected, mimicked participants picked up (...) more pens and liked the mimicker more. Surprisingly, mimicked participants reported significantly lower self-like when compared to non-mimicked participants, and their self-esteem tended towards being lower. This research fills an important theoretical gap showing that there is a great cost to mimicry. (shrink)

Roman Ingarden was a prominent Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, and student of Edmund Husserl. A characteristic feature of his works was the almost complete absence of analyzes from the history of philosophy. That is why it is so surprising that right after the end of World War II, the first text analyzed when Ingarden started working at the Jagiellonian University was Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Ingarden published the results of his research in Polish in 1948 in “Kwartalnik Filozoficzny” and in the early 1960s (...) his essay was translated and published in the renowned American magazine “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” as “A Marginal Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics.” As far as I know today, this text does not arouse much interest among the many commentators and followers of Ingarden’s philosophy. Perhaps this state of affairs is justified: Ingarden’s own ideas are only repeated here, and their usefulness in the meaning of “Poetics” remains far from obvious. However, I think that this relative obscurity is worth considering now, because it shows how modern reason tries to control ancient concepts. The main purpose of this article is therefore to recon- struct the strategy by which philosophy tames the text of “Poetics,” especially its concepts such as catharsis and mimesis. The discovery and presentation of these treatments would not have been possible were it not for the mimetic theory of René Girad, which provides anthropological foundations for a critique of philosophical discourse. (shrink)

In this paper I describe three similar projects, and investigate origins of their success. All of them are non-governmental and non-profit voluntary international initiatives that developed from small local projects. I claim that the basis of their success is universality of their underlying philosophy.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the relationship – conceptualised by Michel Foucault – between politics and truth. Here truth is understood in ontological terms rather than in linguistic and epistemological terms. By outlining some mutual relations between politics and truth, the author tries to show how politics/power determines truth and how truth affects politics. He is particularly interested in parrhesia, which is a form of truth that has emancipatory or even revolutionary potential, i.e. it introduces a difference (...) into the relations of power functioning at a given moment. (shrink)

People tend to judge more recent events, relative to earlier ones, as the cause of some particular outcome. For instance, people are more inclined to judge that the last basket, rather than the first, caused the team to win the basketball game. This recency effect, however, reverses in cases of overdetermination: people judge that earlier events, rather than more recent ones, caused the outcome when the event is individually sufficient but not individually necessary for the outcome. In five experiments (N (...) = 5507), we find evidence for the recency effect and the primacy effect for causal judgment. Traditionally, these effects have been a problem for counterfactual views of causal judgment. However, we argue that an extension of a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment explains both the recency and the primacy effect. In line with the predictions of our extended counterfactual model, we also find that, regardless of causal structure, people tend to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event rather than to the earlier one. Moreover, manipulating this tendency affects causal judgments in the ways predicted by this extended model: asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the earlier event weakens the interaction between recency and causal structure, and asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event strengthens the interaction between recency and causal structure. We discuss these results in relation to work on counterfactual thinking, causal modeling, and late-preemption. (shrink)

Conservativeness has been proposed as an important requirement for deflationary truth theories. This in turn gave rise to the so-called ‘conservativeness argument’ against deflationism: a theory of truth which is conservative over its base theory S cannot be adequate, because it cannot prove that all theorems of S are true. In this paper we show that the problems confronting the deflationist are in fact more basic: even the observation that logic is true is beyond his reach. This seems to conflict (...) with the deflationary characterization of the role of the truth predicate in proving generalizations. However, in the final section we propose a way out for the deflationist — a solution that permits him to accept a strong theory, having important truth-theoretical generalizations as its theorems. (shrink)

People tend to judge more recent events, relative to earlier ones, as the cause of some particular outcome. For instance, people are more inclined to judge that the last basket, rather than the first, caused the team to win the basketball game. This recency effect, however, reverses in cases of overdetermination: people judge that earlier events, rather than more recent ones, caused the outcome when the event is individually sufficient but not individually necessary for the outcome. In five experiments (N (...) = 5507), we find evidence for the recency effect and the primacy effect for causal judgment. Traditionally, these effects have been a problem for counterfactual views of causal judgment. However, an extension of a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment explains both the recency and the primacy effect. In line with the predictions of the extended counterfactual model, we also find that, regardless of causal structure, people tend to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event rather than to the earlier one (Experiment 2). Moreover, manipulating this tendency affects causal judgments in the ways predicted by this extended model: asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the earlier event weakens (and sometimes eliminates) the interaction between recency and causal structure, and asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event strengthens the interaction between recency and causal structure (Experiments 3 & 5). We discuss these results in relation to work on counterfactual thinking and causal modeling. (shrink)

I explore the economic, social and cultural constraints of the regional mission of a university located beyond a metropolitan area or urban agglomeration, henceforth referred to as a “peripheral university.” In the first part of the paper, I briefly describe the “third mission” of a university and analyze it within the context of a “peripheral university”. The main constraints on the influence of regional mission and regional development are described. In the second part, I examine one type of a “peripheral (...) university,” namely a cross-border university, on a case study of a consortium of two universities: Viadrina University in Frankfurt am Oder and Collegium Polonicum – a department of Adam Mickiewicz University. I focus on issues like civil mission or problems of the regional contribution of a border university. I also analyze hidden-agenda concerns with respect to the trans-culture added value of the cross-border university. The ensuing analysis is based on interviews made with present and former rectors of those universities. (shrink)

Ali Enayat had asked whether two halves of Disjunctive Correctness ([Formula: see text]) for the compositional truth predicate are conservative over Peano Arithmetic (PA). In this paper, we show that the principle “every true disjunction has a true disjunct” is equivalent to bounded induction for the compositional truth predicate and thus it is not conservative. On the other hand, the converse implication “any disjunction with a true disjunct is true” can be conservatively added to [Formula: see text]. The methods introduced (...) here allow us to give a direct nonconservativeness proof for [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

We investigate what happens when ‘truth’ is replaced with ‘provability’ in Yablo’s paradox. By diagonalization, appropriate sequences of sentences can be constructed. Such sequences contain no sentence decided by the background consistent and sufficiently strong arithmetical theory. If the provability predicate satisfies the derivability conditions, each such sentence is provably equivalent to the consistency statement and to the Gödel sentence. Thus each two such sentences are provably equivalent to each other. The same holds for the arithmetization of the existential Yablo (...) paradox. We also look at a formulation which employs Rosser’s provability predicate. (shrink)

Answering a question formulated by Halbach (2009), I show that a disquotational truth theory, which takes as axioms all positive substitutions of the sentential T-schema, together with all instances of induction in the language with the truth predicate, is conservative over its syntactical base.

By a classical result of Kotlarski, Krajewski and Lachlan, pathological satisfaction classes can be constructed for countable, recursively saturated models of Peano arithmetic. In this paper we consider the question of whether the pathology can be eliminated; we ask in effect what generalities involving the notion of truth can be obtained in a deflationary truth theory (a theory of truth which is conservative over its base). It is shown that the answer depends on the notion of pathology we adopt. It (...) turns out in particular that a certain natural closure condition imposed on a satisfaction class—namely, closure of truth under sentential proofs—generates a nonconservative extension of a syntactic base theory (Peano arithmetic). (shrink)

We discuss two desirable properties of deflationary truth theories: conservativeness and maximality. Joining them together, we obtain a notion of a maximal conservative truth theory - a theory which is conservative over its base, but can't be enlarged any further without losing its conservative character. There are indeed such theories; we show however that none of them is axiomatizable, and moreover, that there will be in fact continuum many theories of this sort. It turns out in effect that the deflationist (...) still needs some additional principles, which would permit him to construct his preferred theory of truth. (shrink)

Today’s reality, largely based on the development of technology, carries with it many dangers for various spheres of our lives. One of the areas most at risk is our privacyand thus our right to privacy. It is one of the fundamental human rights, but unfortunately today it is exposed to many violations. This article is an attempt to interpret the right to privacy, and it shows selected threats to this right from the perspective of the development of new technologies.

The Personal Data Protection Act was enacted in 1997; it imposed some obligations on all the administrators of personal data regardless if acting as private or public establishments. The Act was intended to guarantee the safety of personal data and to ensure the right to controlling the data processing. However, since the enacting of the Act, there have been reported instances of its infringement, especially by private entrepreneurs. The numerous appealed complaints show that the entrepreneurs neglect their duty of ensuring (...) the safety of personal data (e.g. documents or media with such personal data), which results in unauthorised revealing the data to third parties. An especially serious case of the infringements of the Act and the rights of the persons concerned is selling the data without a person’s consent. In many cases the administrator only seemingly informs about the purposes of processing the data and then, in this or any other insidious way (among them an inacceptable presumption of consent), beguiles the necessary acceptance. The occurrences of neglecting duties imposed by the Act are to be considered not only as infringement of law, but also as unethical actions resulting in undermining customers’ confidence in entrepreneurs. For example: The unprotected data can be viewed and used by unauthorised parties to the detriment of the persons concerned (e. g. identity theft). The selling of the data is also a source of an unjustifiable profit for an entrepreneur and makes controlling of the processing of personal data impossible. Even if there are no negative consequences for the customer, the cases of infringement the Personal Data Protection Act bring about to undermine confidence not only in the entrepreneur (the source of personal data) but also in private establishments in general. (shrink)

Wyniki badań, jakie przeprowadziłem nad trzema napisanymi przez kobiety powieściami dotyczącymi KL Auschwitz-Birkenau: Z otchłani Zofii Kossak, Dymy nad Birkenau Seweryny Szmaglewskiej i Przeżyłam Oświęcim Krystyny Żywulskiej wskazują, że wymienione teksty mistyfikują obozową rzeczywistość, a środki do tego użyte, niezależnie od ich zróżnicowania, są literackiej proweniencji. Na tej podstawie zasadny wydaje mi się przede wszystkim ten wniosek, który wskazuje potrzebę opracowania historycznoliterackiej syntezy omawiającej literaturę obozową napisaną przez kobiety i umieszczenie jej w kontekście polskiej literatury obozowej, zwłaszcza tej, która dotyczy (...) Zagłady. W ten sposób weryfikowane rezultaty moich badań powinny okazać się użyteczne ze względu na stan wiedzy o kobiecym doświadczeniu obozu, funkcjonalność tego, co literackie w tekstach obozowych i wreszcie całościowy obraz polskiej literatury obozowej. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Cooperation presents the intellectual achievements of the Polish associative socialist and pioneer of social sciences, Edward Abramowski. The volume is divided into five sections, each of them contains an analysis of Polish philosopher's work according to the issues he dealt with: sociology, ethics, politics, cooperativism, and psychology. Each part also contains a selection of his writings. Its intention is to show Abramowski's works in the context of global intellectual history and to include them in the current political (...) debates. Abramowski makes fraternity or cooperation the main concepts of his social metaphysics. The Polish version of cooperativism can be inspiring both for contemporary researchers and political activists in the post-economic-crisis Europe. It also opens up a space for creating more democratic political and economic institutions. (shrink)