Building on our diverse research traditions in the study of reasoning, language and communication, the Polish School of Argumentation integrates various disciplines and institutions across Poland in which scholars are dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of the force of argument. Our primary goal is to craft a methodological programme and establish organisational infrastructure: this is the first key step in facilitating and fostering our research movement, which joins people with a common research focus, complementary skills and an enthusiasm to work (...) together. This statement—the Manifesto—lays the foundations for the research programme of the Polish School of Argumentation. (shrink)

Need for closure is a construct that describes a motivational tendency to quickly select and prioritize information in the environment. Such tendencies can affect the process of negotiations, and so the quality of their outcome. The rigidity that accompanies high need for closure can lead to less openness to proposals that benefit one’s partner, and to solutions that are less optimal. We conducted a study in which 34 pairs of individuals negotiated. Pairs were matched in terms of need for closure (...) and gender. We found that need for closure affected subjective evaluations of certain aspects of the negotiation process. Participants with low need for closure were more likely to indicate that they and their partners sought win-win solutions during the negotiation. This led to a greater sense of process fairness for the negotiation. These results can be taken into consideration when teaching negotiations, and when planning real-life negotiations. (shrink)

Recent discussions on corporate citizenship highlight the new political role of corporations in society by arguing that corporations increasingly act as quasi-governmental actors and take on what hitherto had originally been governmental tasks. By examining political and sociological citizenship theories, the authors show that such a corporate engagement can be explained by a changing conception of corporate citizens from corporate bourgeois to corporate citoyen. As an intermediate actor in society, the corporate citoyen assumes co-responsibilities for social and civic affairs and (...) actively collaborates with fellow citizens beyond governmental regulation. This change raises the question of how such corporate civic engagement can be aligned with public policy regulations and how corporate activities can be integrated into the democratic regime. To clarify the mode of CC contributions to society, the authors will apply the tenet of subsidiarity as a governing principle which allows for specifying corporations’ tasks as intermediate actors in society. By referring to the renewed European Union strategy for Corporate Social Responsibility, the authors show how such a subsidiary corporate-governmental task-sharing can be organized. (shrink)

Historians have often described embryology and concepts of development in the period around 1800 in terms of “temporalization” or “dynamization”. This paper, in contrast, argues that a central epistemological category in the period was “rhythm”, which played a major role in the establishment of the emerging discipline of biology. I show that Caspar Friedrich Wolff’s epigenetic theory of development was based on a rhythmical notion, namely the hypothesis that organic development occurs as a series of ordered rhythmical repetitions and variations. (...) Presenting Christian Heinrich Pander’s and Karl Ernst von Baer’s theory of germ layers, I argue that Pander and Baer regarded folding as an organizing principle of ontogenesis, and that the principle’s explanatory power stems from their understanding of folding as a rhythmical figuration. In a brief discussion of the notion of rhythm in contemporary music theory, I identify an underlying physiological epistemology in the new musical concept of rhythm around 1800. The paper closes with a more general discussion of the relationship between the rhythmic episteme, conceptions of life, and aesthetic theory at the end of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

What is the nature of the compulsion to life writing? How does the elongated project of writing a life change as it shifts moments and locales, and why do others respond so directly as readers of stories that are so specific and particular? Janina Bauman is known in English-speaking cultures for two books, Winter in the Morning and A Dream of Belonging. The first covers her girlhood in the Warsaw ghetto, and escape; the second, more fictionalized, deals with the (...) period leading up to exile from Poland after 1968. Janina Bauman spent 20 years of her life working in Polish film. This article reflects on the process of coming to autobiography, and making sense of the writing process and the reception process. (shrink)

Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need (...) to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to identify the manifestations of speciesism in the history of research into theory of mind in non-human animals and, more importantly, to identify the cognitive biases that contribute to the adoption of incautious and, as we will see in later chapters, often misinterpretations of empirical research. The influence of speciesism is also visible in broadly understood animal studies. The manifestations of species-related chauvinism are present, inter alia, in in considerations on the theory of mind. (...) An analysis of the already classic articles by Premarck and Woodruff (1978) and Calla and Tomasello (2011) reveals an attempt to maintain faith in human uniqueness. Maintaining this belief sometimes involves constructing careless interpretations. (shrink)

This article suggests that the best available normative framework for guiding conduct in war rests on categories that do not echo the terms of an individual rights-based morality, but acknowledge the impossibility of rendering warfare fully morally justified. Avoiding the undue moralization of conduct in war is an imperative for a normative framework that strives to actually give behavioral guidance to combatants, most of whom will inevitably be ignorant of the moral status of the individuals they encounter on the battlefield (...) and will often be uncertain or mistaken about the justice of their own cause. We identify the requirement of military necessity, applied on the basis of what we refer to as the “St. Petersburg assumption”, as the main principle according to which a combatant should act, regardless of which side or in which battlefield encounter she finds herself. This pragmatic normative framework enjoys moral traction for three reasons: first, in the circumstances of war it protects human life to a certain extent; second, it makes no false claims about the moral justification of individual conduct in combat operations; and, third, it fulfills morally important functions of law. However, the criterion of military necessity interpreted on the basis of the St. Petersburg assumption does not directly replicate fundamental moral prescriptions about the preservation of individual rights. (shrink)

Insight is a cognitive feature that is usually regarded as being generated by the neocortex and being present only in humans and possibly some closely related primates. In this essay we show that especially corvids display behavioral skills within the domains of object permanence, episodic memory, theory of mind, and tool use/causal reasoning that are insightful. These similarities between humans and corvids at the behavioral level are probably the result of a convergent evolution. Similarly, the telencephalic structures involved in higher (...) cognitive functions in both species show a high degree of similarity, although the forebrain of birds has no cortex-like lamination. The neural substrate for insight-related cognitive functions in mammals and birds is thus not necessarily based on a laminated cortical structure but can be generated by differently organized forebrains. Hence, neither is insight restricted to mammals, as predicted from a “scala naturae”, nor is the laminated cortex a prerequisite for the highest cognitive functions. (shrink)

In response to stakeholder pressure, companies increasingly make ambitious forward-looking sustainability commitments. They then draw on corporate policies with varying degrees of alignment to disseminate and enforce corresponding behavioral rules among their suppliers and business partners. This goal-based turn in private sustainability governance has important implications for its likely environmental and social outcomes. Drawing on paradox theory, this article uses a case study of zero-deforestation commitments in the Indonesian palm oil sector to argue that goal-based private sustainability governance’s characteristics set (...) the stage for two types of paradoxes to emerge: performing paradoxes between environmental, social, and economic sustainability goals, and organizing paradoxes between cooperation and competition approaches. Companies’ responses to these paradoxes, in turn, can explain the lack of full goal attainment and differential rates of progress between actors. These results draw our attention to the complexities hidden behind governance through goal setting in the corporate space, and raise important questions about the viability of similar strategies such as science-based targets and net-zero goals. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present the results of an analysis of the terminology of the Polish Criminal Code and its equivalents taken from three translations of the code into German. Scientific corpus includes Polish Criminal Code and the following three translations: DE-IURE-PL (2019), C.H. Beck (2012) and Max-Planck-Institut (1998). The method used is comparative legal analysis. The results of the analysis may find application in academic teaching and be used in the develop­ment of courses in legal translation.

While it has been omitted by numerous critics in their otherwise comprehensive readings of Yeats’s oeuvre, “Beautiful Lofty Things” has been placed among the mythical poems, partly in accordance with Yeats’s own intention; in a letter to his wife, he suggested that “Lapis Lazuli, the poem called ‘To D. W.’ ‘Beautiful Lofty Things,’ ‘Imitated from the Japanese’ & ‘Gyres’... would go well together in a bunch.” The poem has been inscribed in the Yeats canon as registering a series of fleeting (...) epiphanies of the mythical in the mundane. However, “Beautiful Lofty Things,” evocative of a characteristically Yeatsian employment of myth though it certainly is, seems at the same time to fuse Yeats’s quite earthly preoccupations. It is here argued that the poem is organized around a tightly woven matrix of figures that comprise Yeats’s idea of the Irish nation as a “poetical culture.” Thus the position of the lyric in the poet’s oeuvre deserves to be shifted from periphery towards an inner part of his cultural and political ideas of the time. Indeed, the poem can be viewed as one of Yeats’s central late comments on the state of the nation and, significantly, one in which he is able to proffer a humanist strategy for developing a culturally modern state rather than miring his argument in occasionally over-reckless display of abhorrence of modernity. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 95-121.

Morphogenesis is one of the fundamental processes of developing life. Gastrulation, especially, marks a period of major translocations and bustling rearrangements of cells that give rise to the three germ layers. It was also one of the earliest fields in biology where cell movement and behaviour in living specimens were investigated. This article examines scientific attempts to understand gastrulation from the point of view of cells in motion. It argues that the study of morphogenesis in the twentieth century faced a (...) major dilemma, both epistemological and pictorial: representing form and understanding movement are mutually exclusive, as are understanding form and representing movement. The article follows various ways of modelling, imaging, and simulating gastrular processes, from the early twentieth century to present-day systems biology. The first section examines the tactile modelling of shape changes, the second cell cinematography, mainly the pioneering work of the German embryologists Friedrich Kopsch and Ernst Ludwig Gräper in the 1920s but also a series of classic, yet not widely known, studies of the 1960s. The third section deals with the changes that computer simulation and live-cell imaging introduced to the modelling of shape change and the study of cell movement at the turn of the twenty-first century. Although live-cell imaging promises to experiment upon and represent the living body simultaneously, I argue that the new visuals are an obstacle rather than a solution to the puzzle of understanding cell motion. (shrink)

This issue ofScience in Contextis dedicated to the question of whether there was a “cinematographic turn” in the sciences around the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1895, the Lumière brothers presented their projection apparatus to the Parisian public for the first time. In 1897, the Scottish medical doctor John McIntyre filmed the movement of a frog's leg; in Vienna, in 1898, Ludwig Braun made film recordings of the contractions of a living dog's heart (cf. Cartwright 1992); in 1904, Lucien (...) Bull filmed in slow motion a bullet entering a soap bubble. In 1907 and 1908, respectively, Max Seddig and Victor Henri recorded Brownian motion with the help of a cinematograph (Curtis 2005). In 1909, the Swiss Julius Ries was one of the first to film fertilization and cell division in sea urchins (Ries 1909). In that same year in Paris, Louise Chevroton and Frédéric Vlès used a film camera to observe cell division in the same object (Chevroton and Vlès 1909). As early as 1898, the Parisian surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen began filming several of his operations, among them the spectacular separation of the Siamese twins Doodica and Radica (Bonah and Laukötter 2009). And in England, the scientist and zoologist Francis Martin Duncan produced an array of popular-scientific films for Charles Urban: “The unseen world: A series of microscopic studies” was presented to the public in the Alhambra Theatre in London for the first time in 1903 (see Gaycken in this issue). (shrink)

The first part deals with the problem of the external form of ostensive definition. It is concluded that the definition statement is not complete. The proper form of this statement is not a sentence, but a sentential function, namely a sentential function of the type: ``Π x [N(x)=x is in the respect R and in the degree D such as A, B... and not such as K, L...]" where "N" stands for the term being defined. Thus the ostensive definition informs (...) about the criteria of applicability of the defined term in a partial way only, and the rest must be supplied by the addressee for whom the given definition was destined. In the second part the conditions are analysed on which depends the possibility of solving that problem, and consequently the conditions on which depend the informational value and the efficacy of ostensive definition. The concluding remarks deal with the properties of the terms introduced by the ostensive method. (shrink)

With the recent advent of systems biology, developmental biology is taking a new turn. Attempts to create a ‘digital embryo’ are prominent among systems approaches. At the heart of these systems-based endeavours, variously described as ‘in vivoimaging’, ‘live imaging’ or ‘in totorepresentation’, are visualization techniques that allow researchers to image whole, live embryos at cellular resolution over time. Ultimately, the aim of the visualizations is to build a computer model of embryogenesis. This article examines the role of such visualization techniques (...) in the building of a computational model, focusing, in particular, on the cinematographic character of these representations. It asks how the animated representation of development may change the biological understanding of embryogenesis. By situating the animations of the digital embryo within the iconography of developmental biology, it brings to light the inextricably entwined, yet shifting, borders between the animated, the living and the computational. (shrink)

How do civilians react to being harmed in war? Existing studies argue that civilian casualties are strategically costly because civilian populations punish a belligerent who kills civilians and support the latter's opponent. Relying on eighty-seven semi-structured interviews with victims of coalition attacks in Afghanistan, this article shows that moral principles inform civilians’ attitudes toward their own harming. Their attitudes may therefore vary with the perceived circumstances of an attack. Civilians’ perception of harm as unintended and necessary, in accordance with the (...) moral principles of distinction and necessity, was associated with narratives that cast an attack as relatively more legitimate and with a partial or full release of the coalition from blame. The principle of proportionality, which requires that civilian casualties are caused in pursuit of a legitimate war aim, informed their abstract attitudes toward civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Two rules of international law, which accord with the moral principles of distinction and necessity, were reflected in the civilians’ attitudes. The legal rule of proportionality, which diverges from the namesake moral principle, failed to resonate with the civilians. The article explores whether compliance with the legal rules of distinction and necessity can contribute to mitigating the strategic costs of civilian casualties. (shrink)

How will the Holocaust be remembered as its survivors disappear? In this article Janina Bauman reflects upon her own work on the Holocaust in the context of the Holocaust's broader reception. She offers her own views about the genre with reference to contemporary documents and testimonials, secondary work, scholarly work, fiction and film. These observations and stories all circulate around her own 1986 landmark text, Winter in the Morning.

This chapter contains sections titled: Nothing Wants to Die An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth Solution 1: Keep Your Powder Dry Solution 2: Pretend It Wasn't You Solution 3: Give, and Ye Shall Receive Solution 4: Take Only What You Need Solution 5: Cheat Death The Keepers of the Game as a Moral Authority Notes.

Peter Koslowski’s project of ‘ethical economy’ can be understood as an effort to search for human face of late capitalism. In his perspective ‘ethical economy’ is not a simple combination and connection between economy and ethics but is a new approach which includes three fields: theory of ethical premises of economy, concept of ethics profiled towards needs of economy and ethical and economical theory of goods and cultural values. Koslowski reinterprets problems of maximization found in classical economy. He criticizes the (...) model of homo oeconomicus as the model of a reactive man not understood as activated. According to Koslowski, economical theory of market balance also requires reinterpretation. Without assuming that teleology belongs internally to social reality and therefore to market as well, so to create environment for development of human subjectivity, there cannot exist any theory of legitimization of individualistic economic institutions which protect freedom. Without that, Koslowski claims, there can only be theory of social process authority in which the strongest reinforce their positions. Taking subjectivity and auto-referential character of a human being into consideration is the ontological basis, which allows to reach ethical dimension of decision-making processes and responsibility. By analogy, the mechanism of ‘invisible hand’ requires referring to common good. In the age of globalization ‘invisible hand’ is a source of evil. (shrink)

When comparing aesthetic with moral values Ingarden does not define their mutual relation but tries to determine generic moments of various types. Neither aesthetic nor moral values can exist autonomously but require a vehicle. Aesthetic values appear as some qualifications of aesthetic objects, whereas moral values are some qualifications of conscious subjects and a proper structure both of subjects and of the world which must admit free actions is indispensable for the realisation of moral values. Ingarden admits the possibility of (...) a different mode at existence for moral values than for aesthetic ones, the former being more firmly rooted in their foundation. Values form hierarchies. Theory serve nothing but themselves and depend on no evaluation, Ingarden tries to demonstrate the objectivity of values, listing the conditions on which it depends, and postulates that a necessary correlation be sought between the properties of the vehicle and the values of determinate qualities. The main difference between aesthetic and moral values is that the latter are obligatory in character. This may be read from the content of their ideas. Values only partly go into the general ontology developed by Ingarden, but this ontology was no closed system even for himself and there is evidence that he may have expended his conception to embrace also the sphere of values. Ingarden described accurately neither the mode of existence nor the formal structure of va1ues. His closest interest belonged to their matter because in it he thought he might find the principle of grouping values into various genera. He regarded the study of the laws of co-existence of various value, as a major task of material ontology. Moral values may be credited with a higher dignitas than other values and their realisation is not without influence on the acting subject’s personality. In conclusion the authoress proposes to define value as a new qualitative dimension of the object serving as its vehicle. The value dimension of objects might go in various directions depending on the kind of value involved. (shrink)

Fidelity as a moral value which may qualify persons or determinate modes of behaviour is discussed. Some examples of fidelity are given to show that fidelity may have various forms depending on whom or what it concerns and how deeply one is engaged. Fidelity is determined as a personal value consisting in a persistent approval of some chosen ensembles of values, in connection with the willingness to serve them in the way required by them in various situations. If fidelity is (...) one of moral values there are applicable to it all the statements concerning moral values in general. The difference between fidelity and other moral values lies in the qualitative specificity which may be grasped intuitively. The realization of fidelity must be accomplished consciously and the corresponding acts must spring from the centre of our „ego”. The fidelity to the ensembles of values preferred to others should not violate the objective hierarchy of values, i.e., it should appear within orderly relations to the whole system of values. (shrink)

Niccolo Machiavelli’s way of understanding the notions of good and evil rely on his theory of the origins of communities, according to which their basic structure is build around the figures of founders. Communities are kept alive by the constant effort make by their members to take care of common good and practice of crafts of peace. Forces opposed to the founders and disarraying the social life can be described as the figures on the continuum stretched between traitors, as Brutus (...) or Judas, and lazy-bones or cowards, parasiting on the fruits of common labor. This way of understanding the good and the evil has its roots in the age of Athenian Enlightenment – in the conception of virtue ethics based on workmanship metaphor as presented in the philosophy of sophists, Socrates, cynics and Aristotle. (shrink)

Notes on Cynical Speech. Callicles and Thrasymachusas Cynical SpeakersCynical speech is a proper form of manifestation of what we call cynicism. It takes the form of a persuasive strategy which assumes the achievement of the rhetorical consubstantiation of a cynical speaker and her/his auditorium. Cynical speech is a game that takes place between three sides: a cynical speaker posing as an immoralist, a moralist and an auditorium, the acquisition of which is the aim of both interlocutors. At the outset, the (...) cynical speaker gives the identity of naive dilettantes’ to both the members of the auditorium and the moralist and then tries to persuade the audience to side with him and take on the role of the students of a cynical expert. This is what can be described as cynical modulation. In its course, the initial opposition of a professional versus dilettante turns into an opposition of master versus student, while the unattractive identity of a dilettante is transferred to a moralist. In this way, the speaker achieves what Kenneth Burke thinks is the right goal for any rhetorical act: the speaker’s consubstantiation with the auditorium. This process is presented based on the example of the disputes between Socrates, as a moralist on the one hand, and sophist-politicians Thrasymachus and Callicles, who personify the type of cynical speakers, on the other. The analysis of cynical speech carried out in the paper leads to an indication of some basic features of this way of speaking, as well as the relationship that exists between them and the content of viewpoints voiced by cynical speakers. These viewpoints have been described as aristocratic democratism and people’s anti-democratism. These are two forms of what has been described as the cynical counter-ideal. The adoption of these positions is an indirect expression of the same systematic ambiguity that lies in the form of cynical speaking, which belongs to the very essence of cynicism as a cultural phenomenon. (shrink)