Herbert Spencer is one of the most distinguished representatives of Nineteenth-Century liberalism. Originality of his doctrine is based on combined concepts of social evolutionism with postulates of conservative liberalism. Ethics of an individual were the conceptual point of his philosophical reflection. Thus he believed that a free market economy is the economic foundation of ethical and material development of every individual. Material development may be summarized as achieving ever improving results of performed actions. According to Spencer, the free market critically (...) assesses the quality of goods through increasing demand for goods of better quality. In this manner effective producers develop, because they achieve greater gain from their work. Moral development of an individual is in turn focused on continuous self-improvement. Through developing his skills a man increases the quality of actions carried out by him or of objects that he creates. The “law of equal freedom” – also described by Spencer – is in direct connection with the aforementioned issues. This rule states that every man has the right to do anything, as long as his actions do not infringe upon the freedom of another man which is defined in exactly the same manner. Thus the law of equal freedom can be characterized as a negative freedom if juxtaposed with relations that occur between individuals themselves or between individuals and the state. Combining of ethical and economic topics leads to the presentation of inhibitions that, according to Spencer, should be placed upon the activity of the State in the field of economy. Spencer believed that the State should not interfere with the economy, since all individuals should be granted full freedom of participating in comply with their own interests. (shrink)

National healthcare systems in all countries do not act effectively. Therefore, especially strategies for introducing organizational innovation to public organization should be considered. The problem is how to organize the research in this field. One of the generally accepted solutions is the systemic approach to healthcare systems. In this paper multiagent systems theory and autonomous systems theory are applied to the analysis of main types of healthcare systems. Such analysis allows us to consider the system properties: the level of the (...) autonomy, energy dissipation in the system, the payoff specificity, functional role of the agents in the system, the level of the agents’ cooperation, and delays in flows of money, requests, rules, and controls. As a result, some new functionalities of the healthcare system on the national level have been found and analysed. The aforementioned parameters are good tools to analyse the system functionality. (shrink)

The letters that were found after years are the evidence of hard intellectual work that had been conducted under very infavourable conditions. They refer to the time when Wittgenstein was writing "Tractatus" while Frege was working on his articles "Thought" and "Negation". Correspondence between Frege and Wittgenstein prove the common will of communication and mutual understanding. Thus remains the question why those two close and well known to each other thinkers have not realized that willingness.

The formalist point of view maintains that formal derivations underlying proofs, although usually not carried out in practice, contribute to the confidence in mathematical theorems. Opposing this opinion, the main claim of the present paper is that such a gain of confidence obtained from any link between proofs and formal derivations is, even in principle, impossible in the present state of knowledge. Our argument is based on considerations concerning length of formal derivations. Thanks to Jody Azzouni for enlightening discussions concerning (...) the subject of this paper and to anonymous referees whose important remarks permitted us to correct the arguments and improve presentation. The remaining flaws remain, of course, solely the responsibility of the author. This research was partially supported by NSERC discovery grant and by the Research Chair in Distributed Computing at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Metafizyczny kreacjonizm a paradoksy teizmu ewolucyjnego: przyczynek do dyskusji w ramach współczesnego tomizmu Autor artykułu dowodzi, że metafizyczny kreacjonizm, z którym spotykamy się w filozofii św. Tomasza z Akwinu, w odróżnieniu od kreacjonizmu amerykańskiego oraz teologiczno-‑biblijnego, jest teorią, która wyrasta z czysto filozoficznego wyjaśnianie początków świata i człowieka. Nie jest zatem ideą biblijną przeniesioną na teren filozofii. Podobnie jak teizm metafizyki Arystotelesa, a także teizm metafizyki św. Tomasza z Akwinu nie jest teizmem religijnym, lecz teizmem czysto filozoficznym, gdyż wyrasta z (...) metafizycznego wyjaśniania rzeczywistości. Kreacjonizm metafizyczny jest ostatecznym wyjaśnieniem źródła istnienia bytów, które dane są nam w doświadczeniu, jako niekonieczne w istnieniu i zmienne. Natomiast kreacjonizm amerykański, jest interpretacja biologiczno-kosmologiczną biblijnej prawdy o stworzeniu świata w określonym przedziale czasowym i w punkcie wyjścia odwołuje się do danych Objawienia, które chce naukowo potwierdzić Artykuł został podzielony na dwie części. W części pierwszej zostały przedstawione węzłowe elementy metafizycznej teorii stworzenia ex nihilo i jej rozumienie. W drugiej zaś części artykułu zostały przywołane elementy teizmu ewolucyjnego, które z punktu metafizycznego kreacjonizmu są źródłem różnych paradoksów, a niekiedy i absurdów oraz domagają się ponownego przemyślenia. (shrink)

In this article, the author notes that Thomas Aquinas, in his brief work entitled De Ente et Essentia, proved that at the base of understanding the world, the human being, and God in particular, there is our understanding of being and its essence. When we make a small mistake at the beginning in our understanding of being and its essence, it will turn to be a big one in the end. And what is “at the end” of our knowledge is (...) the discovery of the First and Ultimate Cause of all things, known as: Ipsum Esse, God, the Absolute, The Most Perfect Substance, on whom everything depends, and who depends not on anything else. These present inquiries about the proper understanding of being and its essence are aimed at formulating proof of the necessity of existence of a Being that is the First Cause, and which, existing as Ipsum Esse, is the source and reason of existence of all beings. Without these inquiries, the proof itself would be incomprehensible, and more importantly it would be a purely a priori one. Furthermore, without the existential conception of being, which Thomas first formulated, one could not discover the First Cause which, as Ipsum Esse, is the source of the existence of every being. This issue seems to have escaped the attention of the author of the book Aquinas’s Way to God. The Proof in “De Ente et Essentia.”. (shrink)

Biology tries to answer the central theoretical question of ethics, namely the question of the origins of the moral behaviour. Biologists formulated three different conceptions: classical etiology, sociobiology and cognitive etiology which tried to answer the problem. Classical etiology has been falsified by the progress made in biology in recent years. Sociobiology denies the altruistic behaviour among the animals and thus excludes the possibility of biological explanation of the origins of ethics. Cognitive etiology, on the contrary, points out some phenomena (...) which can serve as the testimony of the presence of the beginnings of the moral behaviour among the animals. (shrink)