The use of assisted reproductive technology is becoming more and more common nowadays and the procedures that a few years ago would be seen as experimental have now become basic benefits. The present text covers the issues of risks and conflicts faced by family members and related with the use of technology in the process of conceiving and giving birth to a child. The authors pay special attention to the possible use of foreign germ cells in the conception of a (...) child. The article aims to demonstrate that the use of modern and advanced medical technology in health care in the field of medically assisted procreation may be seen as a benefit for the family, which satisfies the desire to have a child, but in the long run it may give rise to legal or psychological problems as well. The authors examine the draft on the infertility treatment. (shrink)

Praca stanowi przyczynek do badań nad życiem i twórczością Ignacego Dąbrowskiego – pisarza przełomu wieków XIX i XX. Jego rękopisy, zachowane przeważnie w znakomitym stanie, zgromadziła Aniela Skórska, siostrzenica literata. Dziś przechowywane są one w zbiorach Biblioteki Narodowej. Cyzelowane i wielokrotnie poprawiane utwory stanowią świadectwo złożonego procesu twórczego, jaki towarzyszył prozaikowi w pracy nad kolejnymi dziełami. Analiza zachowanych brulionów i manuskryptów pozwala na głębsze poznanie literackiej osobowości Dąbrowskiego – postaci skrytej i introwertycznej, a uporządkowanie materiałów rękopiśmiennych pomocne będzie w odtworzeniu (...) oraz weryfikacji faktów z jego życia. (shrink)

This paper suggests that some climate denialism is bullshit. Those who spread it do not display a proper concern for the truth. This paper also shows that this bullshit is harmful in some significant ways. It undermines the epistemic demands imposed on us by what we care about, by the social roles we occupy, and by morality. It is also harmful because it corrodes epistemic trust.

A new layer of complexity, constituted of networks of information token recurrence, has been identified in socio-technical systems such as the Wikipedia online community and the Zooniverse citizen science platform. The identification of this complexity reveals that our current understanding of the actual structure of those systems, and consequently the structure of the entire World Wide Web, is incomplete, which raises novel questions for data science research but also from the perspective of social epistemology. Here we establish the principled foundations (...) and practical advantages of analyzing information diffusion within and across Web systems with Transcendental Information Cascades, and outline resulting directions for future study in the area of socio-technical systems. We also suggest that Transcendental Information Cascades may be applicable to any kind of time-evolving system that can be observed using digital technologies, and that the structures found in such systems comprise properties common to all naturally occurring complex systems. (shrink)

Treścią artykułu jest charakterystyka cech swoistych polskiej wersji modernizmu. Analiza polskiej myśli estetycznej z przełomu XIX i XX w. wskazuje, że program polskich modernistów niesłusznie utożsamia się z estetyzmem. Wydaje się, że modernistycznego odwrotu od rzeczywistości nie należy traktować jedynie jako ucieczki od skomplikowanych problemów ówczesnej codzienności. Równie uprawnione jest interpretowanie go jako sposobu wiodącego do zachowania wartości humanistycznych, które zatraciły się w otaczającej artystów rzeczywistości. Aksjologię modernistów uzasadniało założenie o monistycznym charakterze bytu. Jego naturalną konsekwencją było traktowanie sztuki - (...) ze względu na jej cechy - jako jedynego rodzaju działalności ludzkiej, który umożliwia kontakt z Absolutem. Bowiem zbliżenie do istoty rzeczy jest możliwe jedynie poprzez dzieło sztuki stanowiące przekaz wartości absolutnych. Wysoka ranga twórczości wynika z faktu, iż wartości te są zapośredniczone w duszy twórcy. (shrink)

The paper presents Josefina Niggli, an American mid-twentieth-century writer who was born and grew up in Mexico, and her novel Mexican Village. A connoisseur of Mexican culture and tradition, and at the same time conscious of the stereotypical perceptions of Mexico in the United States, Niggli saw it as her literary goal to “reveal” the “true” Mexico as she remembered it to her American readers. Somewhat forgotten for several decades, Niggli, preoccupied with issues of marginalization, hybridization, and ambiguity, is now (...) becoming of interest to literary critics as a forerunner of Chicano/a literature. In her novel Mexican Village, set in the times of the Mexican Revolution, she creates a prototypical bicultural and bilingual Chicano protagonist, who becomes witness to the rise of Mexico’s modern national identity. (shrink)

In American ethnic literature of the last three decades of the 20th century, recurrent themes of mobility, travel, and “homing in” are emblematic of the search for identity. In this essay, which discusses three short stories, Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Louise Erdrich’s “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” and Daniel Chacon’s “The Biggest City in the World,” I attempt to demonstrate that as a consequence of technological development, with travel becoming increasingly accessible to ethnic Americans, their search for identity assumes wider range, (...) transcending national and cultural boundaries. (shrink)

The following will analyze a surprising symmetry between the Leninist mode of reasoning and Solidarity's behavior with the help of Lévi-Strauss' notion of bricolage and Besançon's concept of “surreality.” A basic dualism pervades both communist ideology, i.e., the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, and everyday consciousness in “really existing socialist” societies. This dualism will be counterposed to a two-level thought, in which the world of ideas and the world of things are qualitatively different. This approach obviously clashes with the conventional wisdom (...) on the subject, both in Eastern Europe and in the West. Thus, it is claimed that, e.g., liberal or neo-conservative themes appear both in Poland and in the West. (shrink)

Two streams of political thought will be presented: metaphysics of State and metaphysics of Power . An impact of globalization concealing both traditions will be analyzed, with the present evolution of European Union as an example. Structural violence will be shown in a post-communist context.

This article highlights the limitations of typicality accounts of thermodynamic behavior so as to promote an alternative line of research: understanding and accounting for the success of the techniques and equations physicists use to model the behavior of systems that begin away from equilibrium. This article also takes steps in this promising direction. It examines a technique commonly used to model the behavior of an important kind of system: a Brownian particle that has been introduced to an isolated fluid at (...) equilibrium. It also accounts for the success of the model, by identifying and grounding the technique’s key assumptions. (shrink)

Scientific models are frequently discussed in philosophy of science. A great deal of the discussion is centred on approximation, idealisation, and on how these models achieve their representational function. Despite the importance, distinct nature, and high presence of toy models, they have received little attention from philosophers. This paper hopes to remedy this situation. It aims to elevate the status of toy models: by distinguishing them from approximations and idealisations, by highlighting and elaborating on several ways the Kac ring, a (...) simple statistical mechanical model, is used as a toy model, and by explaining why toy models can be used to successfully carry out important work without performing a representational function. (shrink)

W pracy przeanalizowano motyw melancholii jako elementu wpisanego w życie młodopolskich bohaterów literackich zmagających się z gruźlicą. Tematem dociekań jest zależność między chorobą i ograniczonością ciała a nadnaturalnie szybkim rozwojem duchowym. Niezmienność otoczenia, izolację oraz obserwację kondycji fizycznej człowieka, postrzegane przez pryzmat dyskursu maladycznego, uznano w pracy za źródło głębokiej melancholicznej autorefleksji oraz przemyśleń o zmieniającym się świecie, z którego chory jest wykluczony.

Artykuł jest współczesnym odniesieniem do tezy Wittgensteina, iż „granice mego języka są granicami mojego świata”. Konsumpcjonizm w połączeniu z liberalizmem oraz kulturą masową prowadzą do merkantylizacji i obiektywizacji świata i człowieka, do mentalności pragmatycznej i odpowiednich form ekspresji, których głównymi wyróżnikami są: ograniczenie człowieka do funkcji ekonomicznych oraz użytkowych. Pociągają za sobą zubożenie i pospolitość słownictwa oraz są związane z ogólną tendencją do trywializacji, np. wulgaryzacji mowy i słowa pisanego, szczególnie rażących w obliczu „estetyzacji życia”. Wiedzie to do wniosku, że (...) ten estetyzm jest jedynie powierzchowny i niekonsekwentny. Jednocześnie należy przestrzec przed ignorowaniem etycznych aspektów mowy i pisma. Może ono być niebezpieczne ze względu na siłę oddziaływania języka. Stanowi nie tylko formę upodlenia i znikczemnienia, lecz także głębokiej degradacji człowieczeństwa w człowieku. (shrink)

The main question addressed by this article is this: How should one understand the role of the sentences of the Tractatus, given Wittgenstein’s statement that they are nonsensical? I begin with a presentation of three general principles of interpretation in order to avoid answering the question in an inappropriate way. I then move on to a short presentation and commentary on a selection of readings – namely, the ineffabilist, resolute and elucidatory ones – and elaborate the answers given by advocates (...) of these to the question explored here. I agree on many points with resolute and elucidatory readings: the Tractatus presents an austere conception of nonsense, and is not a book that seeks to present ontological or semantic theories. I point out, however, that these readings cannot fully explain the nature of Tractarian elucidations. Then I discuss those parts of the Tractatus which refer to the sentences of the book itself. The main proposal of my own approach is this: Tractarian elucidations should be construed as rules of translation, in that they show how to substitute certain expressions for others. They enable us to construct a notation in which everything that is expressible in ordinary language can be said perspicuously. (shrink)

Δημοσίευση δυό επιγραφών του Έθνικοΰ Μουσείου της Βαρσοβίας. Ή πρώτη είναι « επιτάφιος συντρόφου » δηλαδή ενός « θρεπτου », στον όποιο οι συμφοιτητές του ανέγειραν ένα ταπεινό ταφικό μνημείο. Ό λίθος προέρχεται πιθανόν άπό τή Φρυγία των αυτοκρατορικών χρόνων, καί άπό περιβάλλον επηρεασμένο πολιτιστικά άπό τή Ρώμη. Ή δεύτερη επιγραφή μας παρουσιάζει μιά οικογένεια άπό τή Φρυγία μέ τό δνομα Sestullii, σπουδαία οικογένεια, γνωστή χάρη στίς μελέτες του Mitchell. Πρόκειται χωρίς αμφιβολία γιά απελεύθερους πού έχτισαν οσο ζούσαν έναν οικογενειακό (...) τάφο-ήρώον. (shrink)

I highlight that the aim of using statistical mechanics to underpin irreversible processes is, strictly speaking, ambiguous. Traditionally, however, the task of underpinning irreversible processes has been thought to be synonymous with underpinning the Second Law of thermodynamics. I claim that contributors to the foundational discussion are best interpreted as aiming to provide a microphysical justification of the Minus First Law, despite the ways their aims are often stated. I suggest that contributors should aim at accounting for both the Minus (...) First Law and Second Law. (shrink)

The article analyzes the world of transience, deterioration and death characteristic of Boghill, the place of action of Samuel Beckett’s short radio play-All That Fall. In a broadcast drama, existence is equivalent to being heard, the idea skilfully employed and commented upon by the playwright. The characters actually heard in the play are in most cases elderly or quite old and even the two young ones appear in the context of death. Numerous off-the-air individuals are dead, sterile or suffering from (...) different illnesses. The two main characters’ situation is not different-Mr Rooney is blind, and his wife, Maddy, complains of many ailments. She is a woman in her seventies, overweight and having different kinds of health problems and thus, several times in the course of the play she expresses a wish to die. At the same time, however, in encounters with men on her way to the station she speaks in a manner characterized by numerous sexual innuendos. Furthermore, she expresses a strong yearning for love and hopes her unloving husband would show her some warm feelings. Thus she becomes a convincing illustration of Georges Bataille’s argument: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death”. (shrink)

Many of Beckett characters suffer from different kinds of disabilities and impairments, this being one of the ways of punishing them for “the eternal sin of having been born.” The article discusses blindness in Waiting for Godot, Endgame and All That Fall. In the first of these plays blindness afflicts Pozzo during the interval between the two acts, that is during a single night. Combined with the loss of his watch it is indicative of his entering the subjective realm of (...) timelessness. The blindness of Hamm in Endgame and his inability to walk make him dependant on Clov who is unable to sit, which recalls Pozzo’s dependence on Lucky in the second act. Similarly, the blind Mr Rooney also must get help from other people to be able to move around. In the case of all three plays blindness must be perceived on a literal, as well as metaphorical level. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to compare four versions of the text of Waitingfor Godot: the French original, Beckett’s own translation into English and two Polish renderings done by Julian Rogoziński and Antoni Libera. The article starts with a short discussion concerning rules governing the translation process and then its evaluation. While working on the transposition of the French original into English, Beckett introduced numerous changes, this being due to his sensitivity to the very quality of each of the (...) languages and specific references characteristic of the two cultures. Antoni Libera, an expert in Beckett’s oeuvre, argues that Beckett’s translations should be more adequately described as second language versions and that the artist recommended further translations based on his two language versions. Libera himself followed this recommendation while translating Beckett’s works into Polish. Upon publication, he provided illuminating notes, shedding light on the differences in Beckett’s versions and providing critical insight into the texts. Julian Rogoziński, on the other hand, based his translation of Waiting for Godot only on the French original. This accounts for the fact that, at times, his rendering of the text lacks precision and may not even be quite understandable. Rogoziński’s version is less satisfactory than that of Libera due to the fact that it was written earlier and by an older man, which at times results in the use of old-fashioned, outdated Polish diction and structures. (shrink)

The expression “Pinteresque” describing the characteristic features of Harold Pinter’s artistic output, established its position as a literary critical denominator many years ago. The aim of this article is to analyze some of the specific aspects of the playwright’s use of language. On several occasions, the artist made comments pertaining to certain issues concerning communication. He rejected the idea of the alienation of language and promoted the concept of evasive communication, thus showing people’s unwillingness to communicate. He also spoke about (...) two kinds of silence, the first referring to a situation where there is actual silence, when “no word is spoken,” and the second, when “a torrent of language is being employed” in order to cover the character’s “nakedness.” Accordingly, Pinter’s plays may, depending on their perspective, be treated as dramas of language or of silence. This led Peter Hall, Pinter’s favourite theatre director and also a close friend, to notice that in the playwright’s oeuvre there is a clear distinction beween three dots, a pause and a silence. This article discusses in detail the uneven distribution of pauses and silences in Harold Pinter’s 1977 play, Betrayal. It becomes evident that the use of different kinds of silence clearly indicates the emotional state of the characters at any given moment. (shrink)

The main question of our article is: What is the logical form of statements containing expressions such as “… is true” and “it is true that …”? We claim that these expressions are generally not used in order to assign a certain property to sentences. We indicate that a predicative interpretation of these expressions was rejected by Frege and adherents to the prosentential conception of truth. We treat these expressions as operators. The main advantage of our operational reading is the (...) fact that it adequately represents how the words, “true” and “truth,” function in everyday speech. Our approach confirms the intuition that so-called T-equivalences are not contingent truths, and explains why they seem to be—in some sense—necessary sentences. Moreover, our operational readingof truth expressions dissolves problems arising from the belief that there is some specific property—truth. The fact that we reject that truth is a certain property does not mean that we deny that the concept of truth plays a very important role in our language, and hence in our life. We indicate that the concept of truth is inseparable from the concept of sentence and vice versa—it is impossible to explicate one of these concepts without appeal to the other. (shrink)

The main aim of this text is to explicate what paragraphs 134-137 of Philosophical Investigations say about truth. Nevertheless, I start with a discussion of the remarks on truth contained in the Tractatus because the thoughts expressed in the latter should be read in the context of the thoughts expressed in the former. According to my interpretation of paragraphs 134-137 of the Investigations, Wittgenstein aims to show that the relationship between the concept of truth and the concept of a proposition (...) may consist in the fact that truth and falsity, in certain language games, are constitutive elements of what a proposition is, but it must be added that these concepts cannot be comprehended independently from each other. I also come to the conclusion that in his opinion the concept of truth is expressed in various ways in our language, it being conveyed by such expressions as “… is true” and “this is how things are: …”, and that this shows that while asserting that something is true one can emphasize, on the one hand, that it is a proposition that says that things are a certain way, and on the other, just the fact that things are thus and so. (shrink)

Despite the general agreement that the interdisciplinary model of physical education (PE), based on the incorporation of core academic subjects into the PE curriculum, stimulates the holistic development of students, there is still a lack of methods for its implementation. Therefore, Eduball was created, i.e., a method that uses educational balls with printed letters, numbers, and other signs. Numerous studies have shown that children participating in activities with Eduballs can develop their physical fitness while simultaneously improving their academic performance, particularly (...) in math and language, including some writing skills. However, little is known about the effects of Eduball on children’s graphomotor skills, which are key for the academic performance of students throughout the entire schooling process. Here, we investigate whether 6-month participation in PE with Eduball stimulates graphomotor skills in primary school students, such as drawing prehandwriting letter patterns on unlined or lined paper and rewriting text on unlined or lined paper. Our results show that the Eduball class (N= 28) significantly improved these skills compared to the control class (N= 26) participating in traditional PE. For example, students from the experimental group wrote with a lower pen pressure and better stability of the line, in contrast to those from the control group. Therefore, this study demonstrates that the Eduball method successfully supports teachers in developing graphomotor skills in children. More broadly, our findings make clear once again that there is the need to integrate physical and cognitive development in education, which can be achieved by using an interdisciplinary model of PE. (shrink)

The aim of this text is to elucidate certain aspects of the use of expressions such as “is true” and “it is true that” (henceforth “truth-expressions”) and, through this, some features of the concept of truth. It focuses on addressing the question of whether truth-expressions play the role of a predicate or an operator. The investigations pursued are intended to be grammatical—in Wittgenstein’s sense of the term. I begin with a short presentation of a widely held view about the role (...) played by truth-expressions. I then contrast the Wittgensteinian conception of grammar with that of linguistics. I sketch Frege’s, Wittgenstein’s, Prior’s and Brandom’s central ideas regarding the issue under consideration. As a further step, I investigate the role of truth-expressions by examining several sentences in which they occur, and discuss objections to the proposed analysis. On my approach, truth expressions play the role of a predicate only when applied to sentences, and in all other cases function as operators. One advantage of such a position is that it enables a dissolution of the problem of truth-bearers: where truth-expressions are operators, the issue simply does not arise, and where they are predicates, it is sentences that are the truth-bearers. (shrink)

Present day anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric both in European countries and in the USA makes reference both to shared tropes and to culture-specific rhetoric devices. The paper analyzes four instances of Polish rabid anti-refugee rhetoric that is eminently country specific: they invoke Holocaust scenario as the means of dealing with the refugee question, should they appear on Polish soil, and specifically suggest exterminating them in former Nazi death camps. The analysis is carried out within the Conceptual Integration Theory, amended by (...) the Author with the notion of parasitic blends: these are said to occur when audiences recruit into the blend some elements of the two input spaces that were not intended to be recruited and come up with an emergent meaning that differ from the intended one. It is claimed that such possibility is actually built into CIT and explains why some of the criticism of CIT claims blends’ non-predictability and generally ex-post character of most analyses found in relevant literature. (shrink)

THE JUDICIOUS PERCEIVING OF GOOD AS ITS MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE The Plato’s mysticism arises from a conviction of an existence of two realities. The world of phenomena cannot be recognized by a human, it can only be seen. The whole world of our experience should be put in brackets. The reality which is a subject of our cognition contains an existence inside itself. The speculative thinking is a method of capture an existence by mind. Thus only a philosopher can reach the (...) top of intellectual mysticism. It is a specific experience of mind. Dialectic cognition in its final point is placed beyond speculative cognition. It is a direct seeing of the Good Itself. The communion with It changes the human. Contemplation brings to mind that you are identical with the Final Principle, the Real existence. Judicious perceiving of existence is a natural state of a soul and at the same time an experience of something unique and unusual. The Plato’s mysticism is an inner look at what is the most common and existing. The philosophers are presented as an elite reaching the god’s wisdom, capable of dialectical considering of an existence. Mysticism is an offer for those who are awesome of the world elapsing. Due to this awareness, a human can get his inside and rise to the level of existence in his homeland as well as be granted the true holiness and reach the immortality as gods. (shrink)