Why obey the state? Dorota Mokrosińska presents a fresh analysis of the most influential theories of political obligation and develops a novel approach to this foundational problem of political philosophy, an intriguing combination of the elements of natural duty and associative theories. The theory of political obligation developed in the book extends the scope of the contemporary debate on political obligation by arguing that political obligation can be binding even under the jurisdiction of unjust states. The arguments pursued in (...) the book are illustrated with the results of sociological research concerning the reasons that governed people's attitudes to the authoritarian communist regimes in East Europe viz. communist Poland. This book provides the first detailed argument of how a theory of political obligation can apply to subjects of an unjust state. (shrink)

Palma Dewory Moszego Kordowera jako egzemplifikacja żydowskiej kabalistycznej doktryny etycznej pod postacią imitatio dei Artykuł podejmuje zagadnienie żydowskich kabalistycznych dyrektyw etycznych,, sformułowanych w Palmie Dewory autorstwa żydowskiego mistyka kabalisty Moszego Kordowera. Czyni to w oparciu o fundamentalną ideę mistyki judaizmu – kategorię dziesięciu sefirot, które w tutejszym systemie etycznym zostały, każda z osobna, skorelowane z pożądanymi i zalecanymi ludzkimi sposobami postępowania, zachowania się wobec bliźniego. Rezultatem zalecenia wehalachta bederachaw, tj. idei naśladowania Boga – wyrażającej się tu w regule naśladowania sefirot, (...) tj. uwewnętrz¬niania, „zaszczepiania” w sobie cnót, cech moralnych immanentnych poszczególnym sefirotycznym atrybutom – jest człowiek doskonały etycznie, ergo podobający się Bogu, co stanowi wartość najwyższą religijnego Żyda. (shrink)

Artykuł zawiera rozważania nad zróżnicowaniem tekstów eseistycznych dotyczących problematyki polskości, wynikającym z różnorodnej roli pamięci w poszczególnych koncepcjach narodowej tożsamości. Celem szkicu jest podjęcie refleksji nad relacją, w jaką wchodzą teksty, dające się określić jako tradycjonalistyczne oraz modernizacyjne, z orientacjami esencjalistycznymi i kontruktywistycznymi. Przedmiot analizy zawartej w tekście stanowią przede wszystkim dwie publikacje: Awangardowy konserwatyzm Pawła Rojka oraz Polska: wspólnota fantazmatyczna Agaty Bielik-Robson. Eseje te pozwalają się traktować jako reprezentatywne przykłady złożonych zależności ideowych występujących w obszarze refleksji nad polskością.

The study investigates the possibility of applying texture analysis (TA) for testing Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) therapies. The work is based on the Golden Retriever Muscular Dystrophy (GRMD) canine model, in which 3 phases of canine growth and/or dystrophy development are identified: the first phase (0–4 months of age), the second phase (from over 4 to 6 months), and the third phase (from over 6 months to death). Two differentiation problems are posed: (i) the first phase vs. the second phase (...) and (ii) the second phase vs. the third phase. Textural features are derived from T2-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images. In total, 37 features provided by 8 different TA methods (statistical, filter-based, and model-based) have been tested. The work focuses on finding such textural features that evolve along with the dog’s growth. These features are indicated by means of statistical analyses and eliminated from further investigation, as they may disturb the correct assessment of response to treatment in dystrophy. The relative importance of each remaining feature is then assessed with the use of the Monte Carlo (MC) procedure. Furthermore, feature selection based on the MC procedure is employed to find the optimal subset of age-independent features. Finally, three classifiers are used for evaluating different sets of textural features: Adaptive Boosting (AB), back-propagation Neural Network (NN), and nonlinear Support Vector Machines (SVM). The best subsets of age-independent features ensure 80.0% and 78.5% of correctly identified phases of dystrophy progression, for the first (i) and second (ii) differentiation problem respectively. (shrink)

Pamela Sue Anderson’s project about vulnerability and the silencing of the female speaker began with her realization of the female philosopher’s position within academia. Exposing the disavowal of the female “knower,” Anderson lays bare the mechanisms of excluding women from intellectual, artistic and religious discourse. Moving beyond the negative configuration of vulnerability associated with an openness to violence, Anderson refigures it as an openness to affection. The denial of thus refigured vulnerability has led to the literal and discursive oppression of (...) women through the “wilful ignorance” of their intellectual, emotional and sexual needs. In this article Filipczak analyses manifestations of this oppression exposed by female writers who illustrate the predicament discussed by Anderson in their fiction. Starting with Anderson’s refiguring of Antigone as a figure of dissent and marginality in her early work, Filipczak discusses Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, Morag Gunn from The Diviners by Margaret Laurence and Mary Magdalene from The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts. What connects these characters is the fact that they are disavowed as knowers in intellectual, artistic or theological endeavours by male figures of authority who deny vulnerability as an openness to affection, and rely on social collusion with such denial. The analysis also refers to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere. (shrink)

Looking at Holocaust testimonies, which in her view always involve some form of translation, the author seeks to develop an ethics of translation in the context of Levinas’ hyperbolic ethics of responsibility. Calling on Benjamin and Derrida to make explicit the precipitous task of the translator, she argues that the translator faces an ethical call or assignation that resembles the fundamental structure of Levinasian subjectivity. The author relates the paradoxes of translation in Holocaust testimony to Levinas’ silence on the problem (...) of translation—puzzling if one considers Levinas’ focus on the ethical essence of language, his multilingualism, and the fact that he wrote his texts in a second language. She proposes that the trace of the philosopher’s displacement from his linguistic community can be discerned in his exilic conception of ethical subjectivity and in the testimonial impetus that animates his work. Thus, although Levinas’ Saying is posited as a translinguistic horizon that transcends the boundaries of a particular national language, it carries the remainder of the disavowed loss of the mother tongue. (shrink)

Dilemma one, Between the theoretical concepts and authorial intention -- Dilemma two, Good manners and eristic -- Dilemma three, Between strangeness and familiarity -- Dilemma four, Between scholarly research and faith.

This study contributes to the constantly accumulating evidence on the effects of customer incivility (CI) on service employee exhaustion. Previous research has demonstrated that surface acting (SA) acts as a mediating variable in the relationship between CI and exhaustion. This study extended prior findings in two ways. The results of Study 1 (315 retail sales employees, 62.2% female) demonstrated that SA mediates the positive relationship between CI and exhaustion while controlling for employees’ trait positive and negative affectivity (NA). The results (...) of Study 2 (292 customer service representatives, 51% female) supported a moderated mediation model demonstrating that trait emotional intelligence (EI) buffers the direct and indirect (through SA) effects of CI on exhaustion. Specifically, it was found that employees exposed to many uncivil customer behaviors but high in trait EI reported using less SA and, thus, experienced fewer exhaustion symptoms than their low in trait EI counterparts. These results highlight EI as an important personal resource that mitigates the adverse effects of CI on service employees’ exhaustion, and suggest that organizations should consider implementing EI training programmes for their frontline service employees. (shrink)

One of the most influential views in privacy scholarship is that privacy protects individual autonomy. On the early liberal view, the exercise of autonomy requires detachment from social and political life and privacy facilitates it. This view of privacy still informs current legal and political practice. As this view of privacy presupposes a tension between privacy and society, it is responsible for the underrating of privacy in legal and political practice. Over the last decades, liberal reflection on autonomy has shifted (...) from the early liberal understanding of autonomy as calling for detachment from social life to the idea of autonomy as socially embedded. This development has brought about a corresponding adjustment in the liberal concept of privacy: privacy has come to be seen as a social rather than merely an individual interest. The social turn in thinking about privacy has gone a long way to change the problematic image of privacy in legal and political practice. It has not gone far enough, however, to draw conclusions regarding the political relevance of privacy. I argue that we should understand autonomy as politically embedded. Revised along these lines, privacy has a political value: when we claim privacy, we do not make a claim to withdraw from political life, but rather make a claim to protect certain forms of political engagement. (shrink)

Author: Angutek Dorota Title: ON THE ROLE OF JERZY KMITA’S SEMIOTIC CONCEPTS IN DESCRIPTION OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION (O wykorzystaniu pojęć semiotycznych Jerzego Kmity w opisie komunikowania niewerbalnego) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.12, number: 2011/1, pages: 329-346 Keywords: SEMIOTICS, SIGN, NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION, HAPTIC COMMUNICATION, CULTURE, CONVENTION Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The author discusses various approaches to nonverbal communication and tries to provide a general descriptive account of the problem in (...) order to confront it with Jerzy Kmita’s theory of culture, signs, and symbolic communication. On the base of semiotic conception of Kmita, the author sketches theoretical background which opens the possibility of conventional interpretation of nonverbal communicates and presupposes their social and cultural relativization. (shrink)

The paper presents the theological and philosophical category of Deus absconditus and shows it in the perspective of Nicholas of Cusa’s ideas contained in his dialogue De Deo Abscondito. The hidden God is the totally transcendent God that is beyond creation both ontologically and logically. Deus absconditus is God that cannot be the object of rational cognition and positive knowledge, hence the only way to acquire any knowledge of him is the method of negative theology. Therefore, the hidden God is (...) the subject of mystical epistemology. Cusanus’s Deus absconditus is also called Truth and as such he is not only incomprehensible, but also incommunicable. God’s transcendence, rational unintelligibility and inexpressibility are the aspects which the considerations presented in this paper build on. (shrink)

Many studies examine a stressors-professional burnout (PB) relation, but only few consider the role of ethical conflicts (ECs) in this context. The aim of this study was to characterize ECs' frequency and level of burden with them among nurses and to establish the relations between ECs' frequency, burden and PB. One hundred nurses participated in this study. ECs' frequency and burden were tested with an originally developed questionnaire. PB was examined with Maslach Burnout Inventory. Most frequent ECs concerned a nurse-patient (...) relationship. PB was positively related to ECs' frequency (r = .54; p = .001) and burden (r = .22; p = .03). Frequency of specific conflict did not imply burden with it and vice versa. ECs' frequency seems more important for PB than a level of burden with them. The most frequent and the most burdening conflicts may lead to development of PB but the less frequent and less burdening ones are also dangerous. (shrink)

Looking at a number of memorials, memory sites and artworks relating to the Holocaust the book uses this idea of synaesthetic perception to explore trauma, memory and the production of art in relation to painful memories.

The study was designed to examine whether trait emotional intelligence would moderate the impact of negative emotions at work on job burnout. A total of 188 female nurses participated in this study and completed measures of trait affectivity, emotional intelligence, anger and sadness at work [over five consecutive days, nurses rated the extent to which they experienced anger-related emotions (i.e., irritation, embitterment and anger) and sadness-related emotions (i.e., depression, disappointment and sadness)], and burnout. The results revealed significant and positive relationships (...) between both types of negative emotions and burnout above and beyond demographics and the nurses’ trait affectivity. Importantly, the study demonstrated that trait emotional intelligence buffers the effects of negative emotions on burnout. Specifically, anger- and sadness-related emotions predicted greater burnout among nurses with low trait emotional intelligence but not among nurses with high trait emotional intelligence. These results suggest that emotional intelligence training could be implemented to prevent the adverse effect of negative emotions felt at work on job burnout. (shrink)

This exploratory study aims at integrating the psychometric approach to studying creativity with an eye-tracking methodology and thinking-aloud protocols to potentially untangle the nuances of the creative process. Wearing eye-tracking glasses, one hundred adults solved a drawing creativity test – The Test of Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (TCT-DP) – and provided spontaneous comments during this process. Indices of visual activity collected during the eye-tracking phase explained a substantial amount of variance in psychometric scores obtained in the test. More importantly, however, clear (...) signs of methodological synergy were observed when all three sources (psychometrics, eye-tracking, and coded thinking-aloud statements) were integrated. The findings illustrate benefits of using a blended methodology for a more insightful analysis of creative processes, including creative learning and creative problem-solving. (shrink)

Rethinks the existing definitions of aesthetics and ethics and the relations between them.

The associative argument for political obligation has taken an important place in the debate on political obligation. Proponents of this view argue that an obligation to obey the government arises out of ties of affiliation among individuals who share the same citizenship. According to them, relationships between compatriots constitute basic reasons for action in the same way in which relationships between family members or friends do. As critics point out, this account of the normative force of relationships has counterintuitive implications: (...) if relationships between people sharing the same citizenship make up basic reasons for action, then relationships between people sharing other attributes, for example, relationships between racists or sexists form basic reasons for action too. In this essay, I pursue a modified version of the associative approach that is not vulnerable to this objection. (shrink)

On the Non-atheistic and Acosmic Character of Pantheistic Philosophy of Spinoza According to Salomon Maimon The article presents Salomon Maimon’s view on the pantheistic philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and Maimon’s conviction that the system in question cannot be defined as atheism. The Jewish thinker states that Spinozian philosophy should be rather called acosmism which term is suggested by Maimon due to the fact that this system of thought affirms the sole reality of God – what, on the other hand, denies (...) the credibility of defining Spinoza’s philosophy as atheism. However, the article shows that the more addequate term with regard to the pantheistic philosophy of Spinoza would be pancosmism. The last seems to better correspond to the theses of pantheism – the determinant common for both the pantheism and pancosmism is namely the real status of reality. (shrink)

In this work, a system for the classification of liver dynamic contest- enhanced CT images is presented. The system simultaneously analyzes the images with the same slice location, corresponding to three typical acquisition moments. At first, the texture features are extracted separately for each acquisition mo- ment. Afterwards, they are united in one “multiphase” vector, characterizing a triplet of textures. The work focuses on finding the most appropriate features that characterize a multi-image texture. At the beginning, the features which are (...) unstable and dependent on ROI size are eliminated. Then, a small subset of remaining features is selected in order to guarantee the best possible classification accuracy. In total, 9 extraction methods were used, and 61 features were calculated for each of three acquisition moments. 1511 texture triplets, corresponding to 4 hepatic tissue classes were recognized. As a classifier, an adaptive boosting algorithm with a C4.5 tree was used. Experiments show that a small set of 12 features is able to ensure classification accuracy exceeding 90%, while all of the 183 features provide an accuracy rate of 88.94%. (shrink)

The article offers a reading of “Through the Panama” by Malcom Lowry in light of an intertext connected with Polish literature. Lowry mentions a short story “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel prize winner for the whole of his literary output. What Lowry stresses in his intertextual allusion is the perilous illumination that the eponymous lighthouse keeper experiences. The article contends that the condition of the lighthouse keeper anticipates that of the Lowry protagonist (...) who in “Through the Panama” fears death by his own book, or, to take Lowry’s other phrase, being “Joyced in his own petard.” Basing her analysis on Mieke Bal’s idea of a participatory exhibition where the viewer decides how to approach a video installation, and can do so by engaging with a single detail, Filipczak treats Lowry’s text as a multimodal work where such a detail may give rise to a reassessment of the reading experience. Since the allusion to the Polish text has only elicited fragmentary responses among the Lowry critics, Filipczak decides to fill in the gap by providing her interpretation of the lighthouse keeper’s perilous illumination mentioned by Lowry in the margins of his work, and by analyzing it in the context of major Romantic texts, notably the epic poem Master Thaddeus by Adam Mickiewicz whose words trigger the lighthouse keeper’s experience, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose text is quoted in the margins of “Through the Panama.” This choice allows to throw a different light on Lowry’s work which is also inhabited by echoes of futurist attitude to the machine and the Kafkaesque fear of being locked in one of the many locks of the canal “as if in experience.”. (shrink)

The article engages with the protagonist of The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts, first published in 1984 as The Wild Girl. Filipczak discusses scholarly publications that analyze the role of Mary Magdalene, and redeem her from the sexist bias which reduced her to a repentant whore despite the lack of evidence for this in the Gospels. The very same analyses demonstrate that the role of Mary Magdalene as Christ’s first apostle silenced by patriarchal tradition was unique. While (...) Roberts draws on the composite character of Mary Magdalene embedded in the traditional association between women, sexuality and sin, she also moves far beyond this, by reclaiming the female imaginary as an important part of human connection to the divine. At the same time, Roberts recovers the conjunction between sexuality and spirituality by framing the relationship of Christ and Mary Magdalene with The Song of Songs, which provides the abject saint from Catholic tradition with an entirely different legacy of autonomy and expression of female desire, be it sexual, maternal or spiritual. The intertext connected with The Song of Songs runs consistently through The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This, in turn, sensitizes the readers to the traces of the Song in the Gospels, which never quote from it, but they rely heavily on the association between Christ and the Bridegroom, while John 20 shows the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden whose imagery is strongly suggestive of the nuptial meeting in The Song of Songs. (shrink)

In 2013, following the leaks by Edward Snowden, The Guardian published a number of classified NSA documents. Both leaking and publishing leaks violate the law prohibiting unauthorized disclosures. Accordingly, there are two potential targets for prosecution: the leakers and the press. In practice, however, only the leakers are prosecuted: Snowden is facing a threat of 30 years’ imprisonment; no charges have been made against The Guardian. If both leaking and publishing leaks violate the law, why prosecute only the leakers and (...) not the press? I consider and reject two arguments. The first claims that the press has special moral claims by virtue of its rights or its role. The second argument states that the leakers commit a greater wrong than the press. I conclude that the current prosecution practice is inconsistent: prosecutors should either prosecute both or neither. (shrink)

The article consists of two parts. In the first one, I discuss the idea of ecological solidarity, which is interpreted by me as solidarity sensu largo resulting from the sense of belonging to a community of living and suffering beings. In the second part of the article I answer the question: what connects animal rights with the rights of human beings? In my opinion, if the European civilisation did not develop a category of solidarity, there would be no concept of (...) human rights, and without the category of eco-solidarity there would be no concept of animal rights. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to characterize a non-standard use of the method of market basket analysis in one of the areas of economy, i.e. public transport. Generally, one of the aims of the market basket analysis method is associating the consumer's market basket – in the case of public transport this being the choice of bus stops in the city area made by passengers. Owing to a new, practical use of this method, it was possible to build an (...) efficient model characterizing the movement of flows of public transport passengers, and assess the degree of transferring, thus making it possible to adapt the routes of buses to the needs of people using this particular means of transport, as well as to plot new communication lines. The data analysis was performed using the Statistica statistical package and its SAL application, i.e. the algorithms used in Data Mining. (shrink)

The goal of the article is to offer a style-focussed description of samizdat press articles from the late-1970s, which were the textual manifestation of the independent discourse at that time. The author analysed representative microstyles and conducted a functional interpretation of identified stylistic devices and phenomena, considering how they were related to the official model of public communication. The discussed texts were stylistically diverse, which was a byproduct which came from structural and genre adaptations, and mainly play on language. On (...) the one hand, one can note an expansion of the array of stylistic devices and, on the other, an inclusion into that array of the elements of newspeak in those contexts which indicated its manipulative nature. (shrink)

Pythagorean Women Philosophers argues for a rewriting of Greek philosophical history so as to include female intellectuals. Dutsch presents testimonies regarding the role of women in the Pythagorean school as demonstrating their active contribution to the philosophical tradition.

Written by a select international group of leading privacy scholars, Social Dimensions of Privacy endorses and develops an innovative approach to privacy. By debating topical privacy cases in their specific research areas, the contributors explore the new privacy-sensitive areas: legal scholars and political theorists discuss the European and American approaches to privacy regulation; sociologists explore new forms of surveillance and privacy on social network sites; and philosophers revisit feminist critiques of privacy, discuss markets in personal data, issues of privacy in (...) health care and democratic politics. The broad interdisciplinary character of the volume will be of interest to readers from a variety of scientific disciplines who are concerned with privacy and data protection issues. (shrink)