Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. (...) We argue that the ways in which instrumental and ritual stances are adopted in cultural transmission influence the nature and degree of copying fidelity and thus also patterns of cultural spread and stability at a population level over time. BST creates a unifying framework for interpreting the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate areas of enquiry, including social learning, cumulative culture, overimitation, and ritual performance. We discuss the implications of BST for competing by-product accounts which assume that faithful copying is merely a side-effect of instrumental learning and action parsing. We also set out a novel “cultural action framework” bringing to light aspects of social learning that have been relatively neglected by behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists and establishing a roadmap for future research on this topic. The BST framework sheds new light on the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative cultural change, selection, and spread within an encompassing evolutionary framework. (shrink)

Many contemporary writers misunderstand early Christian views on philosophy because they identify the critical stances of the ante-Nicene fathers toward specific pagan philosophical schools with a general negative stance toward reason itself. Dariusz Karlowicz's Socrates and Other Saints demonstrates why this identification is false. The question of the extent of humanity's natural knowledge cannot be reduced to the question of faith's relationship to the historical manifestations of philosophy among the Ancients. Karlowicz closely reads the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, (...) Clement of Alexandria, and others to demonstrate this point. He also builds upon Pierre Hadot's thesis that ancient philosophy is not primarily theory but a "way of life" taught by sages, which aimed at happiness through participation in the divine. The fact that pagan philosophers falsely described humanity's telos did not mean that the spiritual practices they developed could not be helpful in the Christian pilgrimage. As it turns out, the ancient Christian writers traditionally considered to be enemies of philosophy actually borrowed from her much more than we think-and perhaps more than they admitted. -- back cover. (shrink)

Genocide as a part of nation or ethnic group extermination process is not a well-defined concept. Its meaning is understood intuitively. When law intervenes, the issue of defining the term comes back. Nevertheless, the Polish nation has been recognized as subjected to genocide activities during the Second World War by the Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. The paper focuses on the genocide against mainly one group of Poles that is to say foresters. The martyrologic evidence proves that foresters were an (...) occupation group which for a variety of reasons suffered most. The research carried out in this respect by the National Forests in Poland has revealed that over 20% of pre-war staff of the institution actually lost their lives. They were killed by the German and Soviet occupiers, as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In the eastern parts of Poland foresters and their families were deported and sent to various labour and extermination camps e.g. in Siberia. The aim of the paper is to present the scale of genocide with the main emphasis on genocide against foresters. The definition of genocide provided by Lemkin, who coined the term, is a starting point for the analysis. The main research methods included the analysis of pertinent literature and source materials as well as the semiotic analysis of genocide circumstances. The thesis put forward by the authors is that foresters due to their education, practical skills, professional experience and insight knowledge turned out to be the group especially vulnerable and subjected to extermination on purpose. (shrink)

Nowa Zelandia to jedno z najlepiej rozwiniętych państw świata. Pomimo ogromnej odległości od Polski zamieszkuje tam, począwszy od XIX w., wielu polskich migrantów. Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie aktualnej sytuacji zachowania archiwaliów dotyczących działalności Polaków w Nowej Zelandii oraz stanu ich cyfryzacji. Materiał źródłowy do tego typu badań posiadają archiwa oraz biblioteki państwowe w Nowej Zelandii. Jest on również dostępny w niewielkiej ilości jako cyfrowy zasób polskich organizacji w Nowej Zelandii, obecny na ich oficjalnych stronach internetowych. W Polsce kilka instytucji na (...) własnych stronach internetowych także posiada cyfrowe wersje materiałów Polonii nowozelandzkiej. Dzięki zastosowanym metodom badawczym wskazano poziom cyfryzacji materiałów polonijnych. Podstawową tezą pracy jest stwierdzenie faktu znacznego rozproszenia dorobku kulturowego Polonii nowozelandzkiej, nie tylko pomiędzy instytucjami państwowymi w Nowej Zelandii i miejscowymi organizacjami polskimi, ale również poza jej granicami, w tym nad Wisłą. Głównym wnioskiem artykułu jest utworzenie na antypodach jednego, centralnego archiwum Polonii nowozelandzkiej posiadającego doświadczonych pracowników i dysponującemu środkami pozwalającymi na konsekwentne zachowywanie śladów naszej obecności w Nowej Zelandii. (shrink)

The article reviews the book The Problem of Evil, by Peter van Inwagen.

Ewolucjonizm–kreacjonizm. Poszukiwanie płaszczyzny dialogu W artykule przedstawiona została próba wskazania płaszczyzny dyskusji ewolucjonistów z kreacjonistami, która umożliwiałaby dialog zwiększający szansę wypracowania spójnego światopoglądu łączącego elementy wiedzy naukowej i wiary religijnej. W odniesieniu do różnych typów wiedzy zaproponowane zostało wyróżnienie trzech poziomów: 1) przedmiot badań, 2) wiedza o tym przedmiocie, 3) interpretacja tej wiedzy. Dialog może być prowadzony już na poziomie drugim, lecz z poszanowaniem wzajemnej autonomii i ukierunkowaniem raczej na inspirację, niż na integrację. Właściwą płaszczyzną dialogu jest poziom trzeci: interpretacja (...) wiedzy oraz budowanie wizji świata i człowieka. Celem dialogu na tym poziomie jest integracja wszystkich elementów światopoglądu i dążenie do wyjaśnienia i zrozumienia całej rzeczywistości. (shrink)

The chief motivation for undertaking this research comes from my encounter with Charles Taylor’s excellent work, “A Secular Age,” in which he not only analyzes the various historical manifestations of secularization in Western civilization, but also—and above all—tries to identify the newly emerging conditions in which forms of religious belief may develop on the threshold of the new millennium, in the context of what he himself describes as a secular age. My paper chiefly focuses on the fact that the routes (...) leading to, and attempts to bring about, a revival of Christian spirituality in the modern world, which Taylor describes in his book, were already a concern for many philosophers working at the start of the 20th century. One amongst these, the Austrian thinker Ferdinand Ebner, occupies a special position. Known to the philosophical world as one of the originators of dialogical thinking, Ebner uncovers the real key to the revitalization and consolidation of Christian spirituality in the form of the reality of the spoken word. First and foremost, his philosophy of the word constitutes a spectacular example of the intensive search for meaning in life: something not always easy for human beings in a secular age to discover and define for themselves. In this paper I also aim to present the basis for Ebner’s assertion of an inseparable link between the word and religious faith, and to show how this relationship founds a possibility for the renewal of Christian spirituality in the modern world. (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)

In this paper, we study natural language constructions which were first examined by Barwise: The richer the country, the more powerful some of its officials. Guided by Barwise’s observations, we suggest that conceivable interpretations of such constructions express the existence of various similarities between partial orders such as homomorphism or embedding. Semantically, we interpret the constructions as polyadic generalized quantifiers restricted to finite models. We extend the results obtained by Barwise by showing that similarity quantifiers are not expressible in elementary (...) logic over finite models. We also investigate whether the proposed readings are sound from the cognitive perspective. We prove that almost all similarity quantifiers are intractable. This leads us to first-order variants, which only approximate the strong readings, but are cognitively more plausible. Driven by the question of ambiguity, we recall Barwise’s argumentation in favour of strong readings, enriching it with some arguments of our own. Given that Barwise-like sentences are indeed ambiguous, we use a generalized Strong Meaning Hypothesis to derive predictions for their verification. Finally, we propose a hypothesis according to which conflicting pressures of communication and cognition might give rise to an ambiguous construction, provided that different semantic variants of the construction withstand different pressures involved in its usage. (shrink)

Jan Patočka’s extensive oeuvre contains eleven notebooks filled with randomly dated notes from 1946 to 1950. These documents originate from the so-called Strahov legacy, specifically manuscripts discovered in the 1990s in the Strahov library. This legacy includes a collection of Patočka’s manuscripts from the 1930s and 1940s. The 1980s were mainly devoted to the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, and phenomenological reflections on the concept of the world. In 1971, Patočka deposited them in this renowned library in Prague (...) without disclosing this information to anyone (Karfík 2000/2001). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 1 Seiten: 13-38.

This article examines the evolution of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of culture during his over-sixty-year-long scholarly activity. Bauman wrote his first books on the theory of culture (Culture and Society; Sketches in the Theory of Culture) when he was a Professor at Warsaw University. The ideas put forward at that time were later developed in his writings. This applies in particular to the critical nature of his thought, the combination of synchronic and diachronic perspectives, the inclusion of the context of the (...) social structure as well as his references to the structural dimension and to agency. Later years – starting with the publication of the book, Culture as Praxis – saw Bauman’s growing emphasis on the transcendence of the existing reality and the creative role of an individual in the transformation of cultural reality. This article shows how other theorists of culture inspired Bauman and how he critically referred to them. The article offers a holistic look at Zygmunt Bauman’s oeuvre. It also creates an opportunity for English-speaking readers to become familiar with Bauman’s writings in his mother tongue. (shrink)

W artykule rozważam sformułowaną przez Jacka Wojtysiaka krytykę probabilistycznego argumentu z istnienia wielkiego faktu zła za nieistnieniem Boga. Sugeruję, że proponowana przez J. Wojtysiaka krytyka tego argumentu powinna zostać zmodyfikowana w taki sposób, aby nie prowadziła ona do wniosku, że Bóg jest przyczyną zła. Proponuję korektę dotycząca koncepcji Bożej przyczynowości. Wskazuję również na inny sposób osłabienia argumentu probabilistycznego ze zła niż ten wybrany przez J. Wojtysiaka. Proponuję podważyć przesłankę głoszącą, że zło istnieje, przy założeniu naturalizmu. Sygnalizuję krótko trudności naturalistycznego realizmu (...) moralnego i wskazuję na ewolucyjne argumenty podważające moralny realizm. W kontekście tych trudności rozważam stanowisko Paula Drapera, pioniera probabilistycznego (Baysowskiego) argumentu ze zła za ateizmem, i staram się pokazać niektóre słabości jego poglądów. Następnie formułuję teistyczny argument dedukcyjny z istnienia zła i sugeruję, że ze względu na prostotę należy preferować argumentację dedukcyjną, a nie probabilistyczną na rzecz teizmu. (shrink)

This paper deals with Gärdenfors’ theory of conceptual spaces. Let \({\mathcal {S}}\) be a conceptual space consisting of 2-type fuzzy sets equipped with several kinds of metrics. Let a finite set of prototypes \(\tilde{P}_1,\ldots,\tilde{P}_n\in \mathcal {S}\) be given. Our main result is the construction of a classification algorithm. That is, given an element \({\tilde{A}}\in \mathcal {S},\) our algorithm classifies it into the conceptual field determined by one of the given prototypes \(\tilde{P}_i.\) The construction of our algorithm uses some physical analogies (...) and the Newton potential plays a significant role here. Importantly, the resulting conceptual fields are not convex in the Euclidean sense, which we believe is a reasonable departure from the assumptions of Gardenfors’ original definition of the conceptual space. A partitioning algorithm of the space \(\mathcal {S}\) is also considered in the paper. In the application section, we test our classification algorithm on real data and obtain very satisfactory results. Moreover, the example we consider is another argument against requiring convexity of conceptual fields. (shrink)

Opatrzność Boża a przypadek w świecie Celem artykułu jest obrona dwóch tez: pierwszej, że istnienie zdarzeń przypadkowych jest do pogodzenia z istnieniem Boga oraz tezy drugiej, że przypadek może być częścią Bożej opatrzności. Koniunkcja obu powyższych tez nazwana jest w artykule tezą kompatybilizmu. Argumentacja w obronie kompatybilizmu opiera się na danych współczesnej nauki oraz na idei wszechmocnego Boga Stwórcy. Porządek argumentacji w artykule jest następujący. W części drugiej przedstawiony jest historyczny kontekst oraz podstawy doktrynalne pojęcia opatrzności. W części trzeciej omówiony (...) jest argument za nieistnieniem Boga oparty na założeniu głoszącym istnienie zdarzeń przypadkowych w świecie oraz przedstawiona jest krytyka tego argumentu. W części czwartej prezentowane są możliwe modele działania Boga w świecie, w ramach których przyjmuje się istnienie zdarzeń przypadkowych. W części piątej i ostatniej rozważana jest idea Bożej doskonałości obejmującej takie atrybuty jak wszechmoc, wszechwiedzę, doskonałą dobroć i suwerenną wolę Bożą. (shrink)

BackgroundRemotely provided psychotherapy due to the COVID-19 pandemic became common. One of the most significant changes related to providing online psychotherapy services is that clients no longer travel to their sessions.AimsIn the article we are interested in the narrated experience of the absence of journey to psychotherapy sessions. We study clients' stories of past journeys and how their absence, resulting from the change of the mode of therapy provision, is coped with and replaced by other activities in their narratives.MethodsThe study (...) takes a constructionist approach to discourse and focuses on the lexico-grammatical form of the notes. The data come from 12 semi-structured interviews with people who declared attending remote psychotherapy sessions after the national lockdown had been introduced.ResultsIn the collected data, the physical journey is constructed not only as travel time, solitude which can be used for reflection, but, importantly, as an active process which ends with a resolution. In contrast, in narratives of the time before an online session, constructions of unfettered agents are replaced with those of people whose actions are hedged and qualified.ConclusionWe argue that in the informants' narratives the journey to psychotherapy is meaningful and is part of the therapeutic process. We propose that it is a time of passing between two states—one before therapy and one in session. The journey therefore is experienced as a process of change, and not only a process of traveling. (shrink)

Psychiatrists' accounts of clinical significance in depression Clinical significance is a crucial element in the diagnosis of mental illness, yet, it is practically untheorised and significantly under-researched. This article takes up the question of how the criterion of clinical significance is translated into psychiatric practice. More particularly, it examines how psychiatrists account for the threshold between health and depression. The paper is anchored in the constructionist view of discourse underpinned by the assumptions of critically oriented discourse analysis. It is based (...) upon a convenience sample of 39 semi-structured interviews with specialist-psychiatrists in south-western Poland. There is no discursive space for clinical significance in psychiatrists' accounts. There is no boundary, no decision to be taken as to whether the symptoms are clinically significant. Depression, invariably constructed in terms of diagnostic criteria, is always represented as fully developed, appearing out of thin air, with no period of falling ill. The article raises the issue of the validity and usefulness of psychiatric diagnosis. (shrink)

In the article, I present the main assumptions of the natural-order theodicy and the free-will theodicy defended by William Hasker. Next, I pose the question of whether Hasker’s theodicies are compatible with the Christian doctrine of continuous creation accepted by Hasker himself. I consider several different ways of how the doctrine of continuous creation can be understood and the difficulties associated with them. Finally, I propose a modified conception of continuous creation and I claim that it is consistent with the (...) main assumptions of William Hasker’s theodicies. (shrink)

Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings.To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as (...) “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans-dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness.Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co-appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event-horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation. (shrink)

We provide a computational model of semantic alignment among communicating agents constrained by social and cognitive pressures. We use our model to analyze the effects of social stratification and a local transmission bottleneck on the coordination of meaning in isolated dyads. The analysis suggests that the traditional approach to learning—understood as inferring prescribed meaning from observations—can be viewed as a special case of semantic alignment, manifesting itself in the behaviour of socially imbalanced dyads put under mild pressure of a local (...) transmission bottleneck. Other parametrizations of the model yield different long-term effects, including lack of convergence or convergence on simple meanings only. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” considers how the ultramodernist aesthetics of Central Europe has related to and reacted against the region's political history and cartography. Central Europe has been a rich source of “soluble” realities that can be observed as they emerge, mature, and rapidly decay. Central European modernism, represented here by Adolf Loos in architecture and by Arnold Schoenberg and Leoš Janáček in music, experimented with blurry regions between presence and absence, light and shadow, sound (...) and silence. Loos disrupted the logic of architecture, while Schoenberg and Janáček nearly dissolved the acoustic paradigm of sound. This essay argues that the curious positioning of Central Europe, with its frequently changing borders and national entities, conduced both to positive experiments in cultural vagueness and to a corrosive reaction against existing and potential identities, parameters, distinctions, foci, and logics. (shrink)

The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic ‘extra-territorial’ identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at (...) one point referred to the ‘peripheral’ sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the ‘navigational hesitation’ underpinning identity and its many trajectories. (shrink)

This article investigates the meaning of the ‘social’ based on Durkheim’s philosophy of society as a ‘collective representation’. I argue that the social, the way Durkheim formulates it, is an abstract sign for reality, a metaphor, which operates on the level of language. Because of this fact, the ‘social’ is from the start limited in its functionality as a descriptor, but it also contains within its own linguistic form, in its word, the possibility of renewal and renaming that is the (...) unique force inherent in language. I propose that this origin of the social operates according to the ‘spirit of postmodernism’, which constitutes a common response to modernity, by what later differentiates itself into the currents of sociology and postmodernism. (shrink)

This paper focuses on one of Tischner’s last and little-known essays on the issues concerning work in the era of free market and the hegemony of the laws of economic calculation. In a discussion with Dominique Méda and André Gorz, Tischner diagnoses various threats to contemporary forms of work. Tischner criticizes above all the one-sided—that is, only objective—conception of today’s work. Referring to his own and original anthropologico-ethical project of work, the Polish scholar draws the reader’s attention to the need (...) to promote the subjective model of work to be construed as interhuman dialogue. In work, thus construed, Tischner discerns a guarantee of the moral order of contemporary societies. His anthropological-ethical concept of work successfully inscribes itself in some of the models of work of the future, which are very much promoted today. (shrink)

The chief motivation for undertaking this research comes from my encounter with Charles Taylor’s excellent work, “A Secular Age,” in which he not only analyzes the various historical manifestations of secularization in Western civilization, but also—and above all—tries to identify the newly emerging conditions in which forms of religious belief may develop on the threshold of the new millennium, in the context of what he himself describes as a secular age. My paper chiefly focuses on the fact that the routes (...) leading to, and attempts to bring about, a revival of Christian spirituality in the modern world, which Taylor describes in his book, were already a concern for many philosophers working at the start of the 20th century. One amongst these, the Austrian thinker Ferdinand Ebner, occupies a special position. Known to the philosophical world as one of the originators of dialogical thinking, Ebner uncovers the real key to the revitalization and consolidation of Christian spirituality in the form of the reality of the spoken word. First and foremost, his philosophy of the word constitutes a spectacular example of the intensive search for meaning in life: something not always easy for human beings in a secular age to discover and define for themselves. In this paper I also aim to present the basis for Ebner’s assertion of an inseparable link between the word and religious faith, and to show how this relationship founds a possibility for the renewal of Christian spirituality in the modern world. (shrink)

Max Weber’s thesis on the decisive influence of Protestant ethic on the formation and development of modern capitalism has become one of the best-known and widely shared canonical claims in social sciences. Since its publication at the beginning of the 20th century, this thesis, supported by subsequent great works by the German classic, has rarely been the subject of major controversy. The work of correcting Weber’s thesis was undertaken in the late 20th century by Michael Novak. Novak’s correction is not (...) confrontational, but complementary. The American thinker abandons the research area of minority Protestant communities, which caught Weber’s attention, and undertakes an analysis of the broader religious tradition, developing both before and after the Reformation. In particular, the achievements of Pope John Paul II, interpreted by Novak in terms of the renewal of a liberty current of Catholic social thought, provide important corrective data. (shrink)

In this article we examine the role of vocative forms of address in shaping the political space in public/political discourse. We are particularly interested in strategic uses of forms of address by participants in political debates in order to gain legitimacy for their ideologies. Our data come from four formal television debates between Lech Wałęsa, the former Solidarity trade union leader and president of Poland, and two other Polish politicians, which were held between 1988 and 1995. Due to this historical (...) perspective, we are able to contextualize discursive patterns in the rapidly changing political and social situation in Poland, and show the diachronic development of the ideological underpinnings of discourse. (shrink)

At the first stage of setting up Kinematical Relativity, Milne modified Einstein\'s Principle of Relativity and assumed that the Universe had to appear the same to all observers. He called this an \"Extended Principle of Relativity\". In order to specify this postulate, Milne defined the notion of the \"equivalence of observers,\" and then formulated a new definition of the Principle of Relativity: all descriptions of the whole system made by equivalent observers must be identical. Under Freundlich\'s influence he called it (...) the \"Cosmological Principle\" (CP). The content of Milne\'s CP was different from both Einstein\'s Principles of Relativity and the uniformity postulate of Relativistic Cosmology. Notwithstanding this, the adherents of the latter adopted this name for the isotropy and homogeneity postulate. Initially, Milne treated CP as a hypothesis about matter distribution. But when he separated model constructing from verifying to what extent it corresponded with the actual Universe, he began to emphasize that CP is not a law of nature, but a definition of the research domain. (shrink)

This article discusses pilot data for a major research project into the discursive construction of identity in three-generation families living in border communities where each generation has experienced fundamental changes in their socio-political environment. The oral data on which the analysis is based were triggered by photographs from the communities in question, and are being analysed with discourse-analytical procedures. The article demonstrates how an innovative method of using symbolically-charged photography as triggers for oral narratives can solve a major dilemma for (...) discourse analysts interested in oral data. It also demonstrates the processes of identity construction under highly conflictual circumstances. Using examples mainly taken from the narratives of three individuals from three different generations, living in a town on the border between the former GDR and West Germany, the article discusses the discursive means of coming to terms with different kinds of difficulties encountered by each generation in constructing for themselves an identity in the new Germany. (shrink)