Każdy człowiek funkcjonuje w jakimś systemie - rodzina, polityka, religia, to tylko niektóre z nich. Trudno określić, na ile pozostajemy niewolnikami systemów, do czasu, w którym zadamy sobie pytanie o prawdę. Jest to jednocześnie pytanie o istoty człowieczeństwa, stanowiące punkt zwrotny w pojmowaniu własnego miejsca na ziemi, w przestrzeni i w czasie, w świecie materii i poza nim. Jesteśmy współtwórcami sieci interakcji i wzajemnych zależności. Aby mimo to określić proporcje naszej wolności do konieczności, jak im podlegamy, musimy poznać prawdy o (...) osobie ludzkiej. Pytanie to przenosi nas w obszary wartości podstawowych - obok prawdy znajdujemy piękno i dobro, stanowiące o treści i jakości życia. Istnieje przy tym duży problem z hierarchizacją wartości, jeszcze większy zaś ze stworzeniem systemu, w którym czerpiąc z pojmowanych prawd nasycalibyśmy egzystencję głębią autentycznego istnienia. Max Scheler - gdyż to jego spojrzenie nas tu interesuje, ukazał nową i odmienną perspektywę widzenia wartości, a mianowicie jako obiektywnej, samodzielnej i nieredukowalnej jakości. To także Scheler wprowadził kategorię iluzji aksjologicznej, będącej poniekąd antytezą ukształtowanego przez pozytywizm przekonania o identyczności wyobrażeń o wartościach z samymi wartościami. (shrink)

Urschemata des nördlichen Weltbildes -- Der Norden in der Patristik -- Das Bild des Nordens im Mittelalter.

The paper deals with the problem of digital restitution of art to post-colonial and postdependency countries. A new model of digital restitution composed of two elements: creation of a digital copy with a NFT attached and creation of new property right in a physical and digital object has been proposed. A system of balances between the rights and duties based on the prior user concept has been developed.

Stoicism is coming back in a big way. Seen as a remedy for the craziness of the times we live in, it is experiencing a great surge in academic and cultural interest. Yet, can one live stoically and be a creative artist at the same time? Delving into its underlying tenets, obscure restrictions and limits of applicability, Stankiewicz critically explores Stoicism and its complex association with artistic creativity. Stoicism and artistic creativity are two great displays of the human spirit. Yet, (...) there are multiple reasons to suspect that they are at odds with each other. Popular culture encapsulates this problem in the figure of the rational, yet emotionally remote Stoic, who achieves serenity through withdrawal, and the contrasting figure of the “cursed poet,” “tormented artist,” or simply a rock star, who lives in a whirl of creative energy, yet falls short of quietude. Is this contrast valid? Other disciplines, including psychology, have explored this problem. But it has never been done philosophically. Pioneering in its philosophical approach, this book discusses how artistic creativity and its problems of identity, expression and self-creation serve as a great testing ground for Stoicism, as well as its theoretical challenges and practical limits. Stankiewicz presents a detailed investigation into the stereotypes of Stoic life that seeks to explain the cause of Stoicism’s modern revival. This book is an essential read for anyone captivated by Stoicism’s complex allure. (shrink)

This book is a manifesto of reformed Stoicism. It proposes a system of life which is bullet-proof, universal, viable and effective in every cosmic setting. It holds in every possible universe, under any government and within any economic system. We can be reformed Stoics no matter what we believe in. Reformed Stoicism is about enjoying and exercising our agency. In other words, it's about the flow of making autonomous and right decisions, and about celebrating our ability to make them. With (...) no reliance on nature, with the recalibration of metaphysical positions, with skepticism towards grand discourses and universal answers, with an emphasis on the usefulness instead of truthfulness of narratives, with no reference to the vanity argument, with criticism of both conservative and ascetic misinterpretations of Stoicism, with an overall softer and more empathic approach, we can no longer be defined by the generic term "Stoicism". Our time, in short, calls for a fresh interpretation of Stoicism. It is time for a new generation of Stoics. Thus: reformed Stoicism. (shrink)

The articles in this collection focus on philosophical approaches to proper names. The issues discussed include abstract names, empty names, naming and name-using practices, definite descriptions, individuals, reference, designation, sense and semantics. The contributions show the importance and lasting influence of theories proposed by John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Donald Davidson, and Saul Kripke. Individual chapters assess traditional analyses and modern controversies, and contribute to the debate on proper names in contemporary philosophy of language.

The papers in this collection discuss broadly understood cognitive turns in the philosophy of language, inspired by the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics, Langacker's and Lakoff's Cognitive Linguistics, but also phenomenology, Relevance Theory and Classical Indian Philosophy. The individual texts investigate, from different angles, the relations between philosophy of language and linguistics, and contribute to the development of theoretical frameworks for studying language. Most of the contributions were presented at the first International Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, PhiLang2009 (University (...) of Łodź, May 2009).". (shrink)

This article describes the slight impact of Lysenkoism upon Polish botany. I begin with an account of the development of plant genetics in Poland, as well as the attitude of scientists and the Polish intelligentsia toward Marxist philosophy prior to the World War II. Next I provide a short history of the introduction and demise of Lysenkoism in Polish science, with a focus on events in botany, in context with key events in Polish science from 1939 to 1958. The article (...) outlines the little effects of Lysenkoism upon botanists and their research, as well as how botanists for the most part rejected what was often termed the "new biology." My paper shows that though Lysenko's theories received political support, and were actively promoted by a small circle of scientists and Communist party activists, they were never accepted by most botanists. Once the political climate in Poland altered after the events of 1956, Lysenko's theories were immediately abandoned. (shrink)

Topic modeling—a text‐mining technique often used to uncover thematic structures in large collections of texts—has been increasingly frequently used in the context of the analysis of scholarly output. In this study, we construct a corpus of 19,488 texts published since 1971 in seven leading journals in the field of bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and we use a machine learning algorithm to identify almost 100 topics representing distinct themes of interest in the field. On the basis of intertopic correlations, we (...) group the content‐based topics into eight clusters, thus providing a novel, fine‐grained intellectual map of bioethics and philosophy of medicine. Moreover, we conduct a number of diachronic analyses, examining how the “prominence” of different topics has changed across time. In this way, we are able to observe the distinct patterns in which bioethics and philosophy of medicine have evolved and changed their focus over the past half a century. (shrink)

Predictive processing (PP) has been repeatedly presented as a unificatory account of perception, action, and cognition. In this paper, we argue that this is premature: As a unifying theory, PP fails to deliver general, simple, homogeneous, and systematic explanations. By examining its current trajectory of development, we conclude that PP remains only loosely connected both to its computational framework and to its hypothetical biological underpinnings, which makes its fundamentals unclear. Instead of offering explanations that refer to the same set of (...) principles, we observe systematic equivocations in PP‐based models, or outright contradictions with its avowed principles. To make matters worse, PP‐based models are seldom empirically validated, and they are frequently offered as mere just‐so stories. The large number of PP‐based models is thus not evidence of theoretical progress in unifying perception, action, and cognition. On the contrary, we maintain that the gap between theory and its biological and computational bases contributes to the arrested development of PP as a unificatory theory. Thus, we urge the defenders of PP to focus on its critical problems instead of offering mere re‐descriptions of known phenomena, and to validate their models against possible alternative explanations that stem from different theoretical assumptions. Otherwise, PP will ultimately fail as a unified theory of cognition. (shrink)

The article presents a thought experiment aimed at indicating a possibility for thinking education beyond the logic of progress. In its first part, the argument reconstructs the entanglement of the modern idea of progress (as found in Francis Bacon and Comenius) and education, while tracking down the specific coupling of obedience and conquest at work. Through such an analysis a link between the ideas of progress and of emancipation is determined, which leads to the acknowledgement of the difficulty of the (...) task of imagining education outside of the logic of progress. In the second part an attempt is made to match this task by suggesting that when studying with a teacher, the logic of progress is deactivated. A phenomenological analysis of the practices involved in studying with a teacher points to a specific way of living together that such a collective study involves. This way of living together is formed by continual exercises in the humble equality realized through shared attention to something worthy of study: this stems from attentiveness to what exists, and it develops an attitude of care and respect for being as such. (shrink)

Blumenthal-Barby and her colleagues (2022) situate their discussion of philosophy and bioethics in the context of (reportedly) widely held assumption that, when compared to the early days of bioethics, the role of philosophy is now diminished across the field – the assumption we call the Disconnection Thesis. This assumption can be summarized, to use the authors’ own words, by the phrase “philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over“. While in no place of the article they explicitly endorse the Disconnection Thesis, (...) at least some of the authors had previously endorsed it in print (Savulescu 2015). Such expressions of collective expert wisdom might be a valuable source of information on the discipline's history, but they should not be accepted uncritically. Given the explosion in the size and scope of bioethical research in recent decades, any scholar’s familiarity with the area is necessarily based on selective reading and might be biased. Hence, in this commentary, we examine what kind of more rigorous evidence could corroborate the Disconnection Thesis. In other words, if the role of philosophy in bioethics has been indeed diminishing, what kind of observable patterns should we expect to see? Drawing on our previous research (Bystranowski, Dranseika, Żuradzki 2022), here we focus on two useful perspectives: citation analysis and topic modeling. While the first approach allows us to indirectly measure the level of engagement of bioethicists with philosophical literature (by measuring the proportion of references from articles published in journals in bioethics that cite philosophy journals), the latter provides a window into the content and argumentative style of bioethical texts. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 1, January 2022.