Hermann Cohen on the Way to „Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism” Breslau Stop On the way leading Hermann Cohen from his family Coswig to Marburg and — later — to Berlin, from a Jewish province to a multicultural metropolis, Breslau is a special point. The future philosopher came here in 1857, hoping for the future of fice of the rabbi, to begin studies at the newly established Jewish Theological Seminary. Here too, four years later, he enrolled (...) at the university, opening up the prospect of an academic career. A special point, which allowed him to create in the next years an “impressive system” which is a bold attempt to present German and Judaism as identical or connected. Jewish and religious content was a permanent and constant component of Cohen’s works, and Religion of Reason and System of Philosophy form a whole. Already before the creation of works devoted to Kant, some features of Cohen’s philosophy of religion are revealed, which originated in his studies at Breslau, one of the most important Haskalah centers in the middle of the 19th century. Cohen found there an atmosphere conduciveto the later shaping of the science of the universal religion of reason. After many years, Cohen assessed the Jewish Theological Seminary as “the most important educational institution [of his] youth.”. (shrink)

The central claim of this paper is the following. There are two different types of notions applied in science, and in fact in any discourse whatsoever. Some of the notions are veristic, i.e. they refer to some specific fairly well defined entities (individual objects, species, relations, systems, regularities, etc.). But there are also heuristic notions that serve the users to call attention to the fact that a specific situation can be accounted for, or even less - there is a chance (...) that it can be accounted for, in a certain way known already from some earlier application of similar ideas. On numerous occasions we argue by analogy. Now, to argue by analogy means to treat the situation accounted for as „similar” to some other already familiar situations. The similarity in question can amount to some fairly explicitly stated expectations, which go beyond the available evidence. The heuristic notions can be characterized as the notions in terms of which such expectations are stated. Since the right interpretation of those expectations should be defined anew any time when an argument by analogy is applied, also the concepts they involve share this characteristic. Thus while the veristic concepts have some fixed references, the reference of a heuristic concept should be defined anew every time when the concept is used. A theory which involves any heuristic notions is called heuristic. A theory is said to be veristic if all the descriptive notions it involves are veristic. The notion of truth can be in a straightforward way applied to veristic theories only. (shrink)

Artykuł jest szkicem odpowiedzi na pytanie: dlaczego etyka Tadeusza Kotarbińskiego, będąc w istocie typem do brze znanej filozofom etyki autonomicznej, a normatywnie bliska ideom chrześcijańskiego miłosierdzia, stała się popularna i żywo dyskutowana w Polsce drugiej połowy XX wieku. Autor omawia ówczesne dyskusje, wskazując na powody zainteresowania stanowiskiem etycznym Kotarbińskiego w kręgu polskich myślicieli chrześcijańskich. Jego źródeł upatruje w reakcji na program uniezależnienia postaw etycznych od sporów światopoglądowych. Jednocześnie zwraca uwagę, że w kręgu szkoły lwowsko–warszawskiej i jej wpływów etyka Kotarbińskiego miała (...) poparcie, ale i spotkała się z krytyką. Zastrzeżenia epistemologiczne wobec niej wysuwała Maria Ossowska. Po stronie Kotarbińskiego opowiedział się Tadeusz Czeżowski, występujący z bardziej precyzyjnie sformułowaną ideą etyki empirycznej, wykazując z czasem, że jest to etyka typu aksjomatyczno–dedukcyjnego, a nie indukcyjnego. Akceptując intuicjonizm jako epistemologiczny fundament etyki, do normatywnych idei Kotarbińskiego nawiązywali w sposób twórczy również Ija Lazari–Pawłowska i Marian Przełęcki. Autor przekonuje, że nie jest bezzasadnym przypuszczenie, że program uniwersalnej etyki, niezależnej od sporów światopoglądowych i religijnych, wpłynął także na Marka Fritzhanda interpretację etyki w marksizmie oraz korespondował z tendencjami do budowania etyki dialogu i odpowiedzialności w polskich dyskusjach etycznych w czasach dominacji etyki światopoglądowej. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to reconstruct and analyse the outline of hierarchy of goods in the ethics of Professor Władysław Tatarkiewicz, a distinguished Polish historian of philosophy and aesthetics, a well known philosopher and aesthetician, but somewhat underestimated, in the opinion of the author of this article, as a moral philosopher. In his opinion Władysław Tatarkiewicz emphasized the specific features of his philosophical position most clearly in his monographs “On the Absoluteness of Goodness”, “On Happiness”, and minor axiological papers. (...) In his philosophy ethics is equated with axiology and provides a clue for reconstruction of the whole system of his views. (shrink)

Mismatch negativity is the electroencephalographic waveform obtained by subtracting event-related potential responses evoked by unexpected deviant stimuli from responses evoked by expected standard stimuli. While the MMN is thought to reflect an unexpected change in an ongoing, predictable stimulus, it is unknown whether MMN responses evoked by changes in different stimulus features have different magnitudes, latencies, and topographies. The present study aimed to investigate whether MMN responses differ depending on whether sudden stimulus change occur in pitch, duration, location or vowel (...) identity, respectively. To calculate ERPs to standard and deviant stimuli, EEG signals were recorded in normal-hearing participants who listened to roving oddball sequences of artificial syllables. In the roving paradigm, any given stimulus is repeated several times to form a standard, and then suddenly replaced with a deviant stimulus which differs from the standard. Here, deviants differed from preceding standards along one of four features. The feature levels were individually chosen to match behavioral discrimination performance. We identified neural activity evoked by unexpected violations along all four acoustic dimensions. Evoked responses to deviant stimuli increased in amplitude relative to the responses to standard stimuli. A univariate analysis yielded no significant differences between MMN responses following violations of different features. However, in a multivariate analysis, acoustic features could be decoded from the topography of mismatch responses, although at later latencies than those typical for MMN. These results support the notion that deviant feature detection may be subserved by a different process than general mismatch detection. (shrink)