The article discusses the concept of progressive and degressive proportionality of the distribution of parliamentary seats. In the first part are presented axiological sources of the principles of proportionality and progressive and degressive proportionality and the history of degressively proportional apportionments of seats in the European Parliament. The main part of the article is devoted to the formulation of proposals for strict formal definition of degressive and progressive proportionality, and a description of the method of apportionment of seats in the (...) European Parliament based on the strict definition of degressive proportionality and maintaining maximum compatibility with former apportionments adopted in multilateral negotiations. The last part of the article consists of a discussion of the possibilities of adopting the concept of progressive proportionality in the analysis of the functioning of parliamentary electoral systems. (shrink)

Jacek Urbaniec: Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics does not necessarily imply that there are links between the temporal physical world and the eternal world of mathematics..

Jacek Filek criticizes the modern “nonethical” ethics. He points out its break with philosophy, lack of self-criticism, inanity, undue and fruitless formalism, and academism. His article makes a general request for the restitution of ethics as the independent and dignified scholarly discipline closely connected with world and life.

In contemporary literary Hindi there is an abundance of Perso-Arabic loanwords which often function similarly to words of Sanskrit origin. Despite their semantic proximity, each of them can have different connotational meanings and cultural associations. Furthermore, depending on the context, one of them will be preferred to the other. This situation can become an issue when translating from Hindi into Polish. In this paper, I will investigate whether these loanwords should be considered as a third language in translation. If this (...) is the case, they make the text a multicultural one, and, thus, raise the question of how to translate them into Polish, being at the same time focused on a monolingual recipient and their cognitive comfort while not impoverishing and distorting the process of translation. Moreover, I will propose an approach which can be of assistance in achieving this goal, relying on French and Latin loanwords used in the Polish language. (shrink)

The article attempts to address the issue of nudity and eroticism in stage and screen versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Elizabethan theatrical conventions and moral and political censorship of the English Renaissance did not allow for an explicit presentation of naked bodies and sexual interactions on stage; rather, these were relegated to the verbal plane, hence the bawdy language Shakespeare employed on many occasions. Conventions play a significant role also in the present-day, post-1960s and post-sexual revolution era, whereby human sexuality in (...) Western culture is not just alluded to, but discussed and presented in an open manner. Consequently, nudity on stage and screen in versions of Shakespeare’s plays has become more marked and outspoken. Indeed, in both filmic and TV productions as well as stage performances directors and actors more and more willingly have exposed human body and sexuality to the viewer/spectator. My aim is to look at such instances from the perspective of realism and realistic conventions that the three media deploy and the effect nudity/sex can have on the recipient. The conclusion is that theatre is most conventional and stark realism and directness of the message need to be carefully dosed. Similarly to the theatre, television, more specifically television theatre, is, too, a most direct genre, as television is inherently a live medium, the broadcasts of which occur here and now, in the present tense. Film is markedly different from the two previous forms of art: it is narrated in the past tense, thus creating a distance between what is shown and the viewer, and allowing for more literalness. Naturally, particular cases discussed in the article go beyond these rather simple divisions. (shrink)

Carey focuses her theory on initial knowledge and Quinian bootstrapping. We reflect on developmental mechanisms, which can operate in between. Whereas most of the research aims at delimitating early cognitive mechanisms, we point at the need for studying their integration and mutual bootstrapping. We illustrate this call by referring to a current debate on infants' use of featural representations.

Subfocal Color Categorization and Naming: The Role of Exposure to Language and Professional Experience The current state of the debate on the linguistic factors in color perception and categorization is reviewed. Developmental and learning studies were hitherto almost ignored in this debate. A simple experiment is reported in which 20 Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Painting students' performance in color discrimination and naming tasks was compared to the performance of 20 Technical University students. Subfocal colors were used. While there (...) was no difference in overall discrimination ability, AFA students had a much richer and specialized color vocabulary. Both groups also applied different strategies of discrimination and naming. However, naming system in neither group was coherent. This suggests that naming played primarily the role of markers for control processes rather than names for categories. It is concluded that up-to-date debate is too simplified and a complex model of interrelations between perceptual categorization and naming framed in the developmental context is needed rather than the search for a simple answer "language", "environment", or "perceptual universals". (shrink)

A direct consequence of the pandemic was the widespread occur-rence, and in many OECD countries – a growing public finance imbalance. The paper presents the results of research on the dynamics and structure of public debt, its relation to GDP and to the net borrowing of the general government sector. The main purpose of the article is to show the impact of the pandemic on the size and structure of public debt in the largest EU economies, as well as in (...) other selected OECD countries. An attempt was also made to identify factors that had a significant impact on the amount of public debt during the pandemic. The new debt was used primarily to finance net borrowing and, ultimately, to support the economy and selected social groups. However, as the article points out, the new debt to a significant extent financed the increase in liquidity in the public sector, and in some cases – a larger volume of loans granted by public sector entities and their equity investments. (shrink)

The papers in this issue were first assembled for the American Academy of Religion conference in 2022 to consider Søren Kierkegaard's analysis of the media environment of his day and the relevance of his perspective to both traditional and new media today. Each author takes a different approach to Kierkegaard's ethics of mass communication, but all agree that his ideas still retain a great deal of applicability in a vastly different media environment.

Søren Kierkegaard and Walter Lippmann wrote in very different times and places but both characterized the public as a “phantom.” Importantly, each did so within the context of a broader analysis that linked the press with specific notions about the public and democracy. This paper highlights the specific characteristics of the press that each thinker believed were responsible for the construction of the phantom public and its effects. While taking seriously the differences between Kierkegaard and Lippmann, in both their respective (...) sociopolitical contexts and their formulations of the public and the press, this paper applies their critiques to a vastly different media terrain than either thinker could have envisioned. (shrink)

Celem poniższych analiz jest eksplikacja, ujednoznacznienie i przystępne wyłożenie znaczenia pojęcia sprawiedliwość, występującego w pismach Emmanuela Levinasa. Cel to o tyle ważny, że pojęcie to – jak mam nadzieję wykazać – jest jednym z kluczowych pojęć spajających konstrukcję myślową filozofii Levinasa, a sam Levinas – jak z przekonaniem sądzę – jest jednym z ważniejszych myślicieli XX stulecia; nie wspominając już o wadze teoretycznej i politycznej samego tego pojęcia w perspektywie uniwersalnej.

In this article we consider linear isomorphisms over the field of rational numbers between the linear spaces ℝ2 and ℝ. We prove that if f is such an isomorphism, then the image by f of the unit disk is a strictly nonmeasurable subset of the real line, which has different properties than classical non-measurable subsets of reals. We shall also consider the question whether all images of bounded measurable subsets of the plane via a such mapping are non-measurable.

Neuropeptides vasopressin and oxytocin regulate a variety of behaviors ranging from maternal and pair bonding to aggression and fear. Their role in modulating fear responses has been widely recognized, but not yet well understood. Animal and human studies indicate the major role of the amygdala in controlling fear and anxiety. The amygdala is involved in detecting threat stimuli and linking them to defensive behaviors. This is accomplished by projections connecting the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) to the brain stem (...) and to hypothalamic structures, which organize fear responses. A recent study by Huber et al1 demonstrates that vasopressin and oxytocin modulate the excitatory inputs into the CeA in opposite manners. Therefore this finding elucidates the mechanisms through which these neuropeptides may control the expression of fear. BioEssays 27:869–873, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The following is an attempt to grasp synthetically the strategy and development of Jean Baudrillard’s intellectual standpoint. My view emphasizes late ideas by French Philosopher, while the earlier ones are treated from this perspective as preliminary. After having left Marxist and post-Marxist positions, Baudrillard developed an original and idiosyncratic way of thinking about contemporary world that—inspired by Nietzschean idea that the power of interpretation prevails over representation of truth—evolves around rejection of the traditional ideas of the social, reality and revolt, (...) while employing categories of mass, simulation or catastrophe. This attitude took him not only beyond good and evil, but also to affirmation of death and terror, conducting to an extreme standpoint of “intellectual terrorism”. (shrink)

Who, whom, why and how? -- The subject between extremes -- Genesis: the Socratic-Platonic deception or the irrepressible need for immortality -- Modern man: the adventures of Robinson Crusoe -- The scientific foundations of modern man -- The evolution of modern man, Nietzsche's moustache, the fittest man and the man without qualities: the four pillars of modern man -- Evolution and zoodicy: the animality of modern man -- Modernity as false consciousness -- Technology and the mind, God-machine, the individual vs. (...) Facebook -- That which returns -- The death of death and late-modern man. (shrink)

The number-line estimation task has become one of the most important methods in numerical cognition research. Originally applied as a direct measure of spatial number representation, it became also informative regarding various other aspects of number processing and associated strategies. However, most of this work and associated conclusions concerns processing numbers in a symbolic format, by school children and older subjects. Symbolic number system is formally taught and trained at school, and its basic mathematical properties can easily be transferred into (...) a spatial format of an oriented number line. This triggers the question on basic characteristics of number line estimation before children get fully familiar with the symbolic number system, i.e., when they mostly rely on approximate system for non-symbolic quantities. In our three studies, we examine therefore how preschool children estimate position of non-symbolic quantities on a line, and how this estimation is related to the developing symbolic number knowledge and cultural directionality. The children were tested with the Give-a-number task, then they performed a computerized number-line task. In Experiment 1, lines bounded with sets of 1 and 20 elements going left-to-right or right-to-left were used. Even in the least numerically competent group, the linear model better fit the estimates than the logarithmic or cyclic power models. The line direction was irrelevant. In Experiment 2, a 1–9 left-to-right oriented line was used. Advantage of linear model was found at group level, and variance of estimates correlated with tested numerosities. In Experiment 3, a position-to-number procedure again revealed the advantage of the linear model, although the strategy of selecting an option more similar to the closer end of the line was prevalent. The precision of estimation increased with the mastery of counting principles in all three experiments. These results contradict the hypothesis of the log-to-linear shift in development of basic numerical representation, rather supporting the linear model with scalar variance. However, the important question remains whether the number-line task captures the nature of the basic numerical representation, or rather the strategies of mapping that representation to an external space. (shrink)

The text contains information on the history of pedagogical thought. The author’s intention was to show universal goals and educational values and ideals throughout history.

Let J be any proper ideal of subsets of the real line R which contains all finite subsets of R. We define an ideal J * ∣B as follows: X ∈ J * ∣B if there exists a Borel set $B \subset R \times R$ such that $X \subset B$ and for any x ∈ R we have $\{y \in R: \langle x,y\rangle \in B\} \in \mathscr{J}$ . We show that there exists a family $\mathscr{A} \subset \mathscr{J}^\ast\mid\mathscr{B}$ of power ω (...) 1 such that $\bigcup\mathscr{A} \not\in \mathscr{J}^\ast\mid\mathscr{B}$ . In the last section we investigate properties of ideals of Lebesgue measure zero sets and meager sets in Cohen extensions of models of set theory. (shrink)

In this paper being a sequel to our [1] the logic with semi-negation is chosen as an example to elucidate some basic notions of the semantics for sentential calculi. E.g., there are shown some links between the Post number and the degree of complexity of a sentential logic, and it is proved that the degree of complexity of the sentential logic with semi-negation is 20. This is the first known example of a logic with such a degree of complexity. The (...) results of the final part of the paper cast a new light on the scope of the Kripke-style semantics in comparison to the matrix semantics. (shrink)

This abstract is a contribution to the paper by R. Wojcicki [2]. We use the terminology introduced there, . In this note we show that 1 0 For each n 2 there exists a logic whose degree of uniformity and degree of complexity are both equal to n. 2 0 There is a logic with the degree of uniformity equal to 2 @0 but with the degree of complexity equal to @0.

In the presented article, I have analyzed the famous Saul Kripke statement that some a priori truths are contingent. I show, that despite Kripke’s thesis, in the historical understanding of contingency, the notions of contingency and apriority are in deep conflict with each other. In this understanding of contingency, the past, which can be known a priori, is not contingent, and the future, which is contingent, has difficulty acquiring a priori knowledge. Having stated Kripke’s thesis more precisely, I propose three (...) means in order to defend it in the historical understanding of possibility: by introducing the notion of “factual” future, by replacing the notion of apriority with the notion of apriority-in-the-future; by replacing the notion of apriority with the notion of historical apriority, and the notion of contingency with the notion of once-apriority. In the annex of the article, I present the formal analysis of the problem that I have introduced and three solutions which I have proposed in the language of temporal-modal logic of predicates for models of indeterministic time. (shrink)

In this paper we present a characterization of hyper-connexivity by means of a relating semantics for Boolean connexive logics. We also show that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is Abelardian, strongly consistent, Kapsner strong and antiparadox. We give an example showing that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is not simplificative. This shows that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is not totally connexive.

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 99-156.