Scientific theories are hard to find, and once scientists have found a theory, H, they often believe that there are not many distinct alternatives to H. But is this belief justified? What should scientists believe about the number of alternatives to H, and how should they change these beliefs in the light of new evidence? These are some of the questions that we will address in this article. We also ask under which conditions failure to find an alternative to H (...) confirms the theory in question. This kind of reasoning is frequently used in science and therefore deserves a careful philosophical analysis. 1 Introduction2 The Conceptual Framework3 The No Alternatives Argument4 Discussion I: A Quantitative Analysis of the No Alternatives Argument5 Discussion II: The Number of Alternatives and the Problem of Underdetermination6 ConclusionsAppendix AAppendix B. (shrink)

część 1. Józef Władysław Bychowiec, Anna z Zamoyskich Sapieżyna, Jan Śniadecki, Franciszek Wigura -- część 4. Konkurs na Katedrę Filozofii w Uniwersytecie Wileńskim w 1820 roku -- część 5. Józefa Władysława Bychowca przekład "Sporu fakultetów" Immanuela Kanta.

Władysław Witwicki was first of all a psychologist, but he graduated in philosophy from Lvov University, being one of the earliest pupils of Kazimierz Twardowski. He was a representative of the descriptivistic branch of the Lvov-Warsaw School. In the area of phsychology he put into practice the important postulate of his teacher, who persuaded his students to write original handbooks, giving Polish scholar contributions their due: it is how the work on Witwicki's Psychology began. In the area of philosophy (...) he was particularly interested in the foundations of (descriptive) psychology. Witwicki's ontological and epistemological views are close to realism. In ethics he defended the absolute character of moral norms against scepticism and relativism. In general, Witwicki subscribed to anti-irrationalism, the common standpoint in his School. (shrink)

Author: Lipski Dawid Title: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ’S ANALYSIS OF ARISTOTLE’S PHILOSOPHY SYSTEM (Władysława Tatarkiewicza analiza systemu filozofii Arystotelesa) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 521-534 Keywords: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, METAPHYSICS OF ARISTOTLE’S Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The paper attempts to present and critique the original analysis of Aristotle’s philosophy system, especially the layout and meaning of basic concepts in this system, which was performed by Władysław (...) Tatarkiewicz in his dissertation. The author, trying to conceive the overall philosophy of Aristotle through analysis of its key concepts, advanced thesis that Aristotle’s philosophical views on the “science of being” do not form a single compact system, but rather a plural and multi-layered model, in which each of the individual “layers” has an appropriate system of concepts. Although this diversity causes certain pluralism of principles within the system, there is one point – νοũς, which remains the principle uniting the whole order. It is the guarantor of order, unity of the system, but at the same time it also allows differences of entities. Divine νοũς becomes the last word in metaphysics. Keywords: Władysław Tatarkiewicz, metaphysics of Aristotle’s. (shrink)

Sixty years that have passed since the Warsaw Uprising are meaningful on the life scale of human generations. The Uprising, planned for 2 or 3 days, lasted in fact for 63 days. That fact astounded the military experts and was even noticed by the German high command, which has to be mainly ascribed to the exceptional tension of patriotism of the soldiers and the population.The Germans suffered especially great losses on the average around 1,900 weekly, almost twice as many as (...) during the highest intensity of fighting in 1944/45. On our side the losses were estimated at 18,000 dead and about 6,500–7,000 wounded insurgents. However, the Warsaw Uprising and the whole nation counted around 150,000 dead among the civilians.During the two months of the uprising 25% of the pre-war buildings in Warsaw were destroyed, mainly due to the barbarian practice of burning the whole streets. Against the conditions of the capitulation agreement just signed, the majority of historical monuments were burned down.In Warsaw, the tradition of sacrifices and solidarity in action, bravery and the deep attachment to liberty, manifested in September 1939, was alive and brought results all the time of war through the acts of the patriotic resistance organizations. The leaders of the Warsaw Uprising belonged to the resistance fighters before World War I and during it. The battle for independence was their curriculum vitae, and the majority of the uprising participants, the youth, was educated in the independent Polish Republic, in respect for patriotic traditions of independence fights and insurrections.Jerzy Kirchmajer believes that the Warsaw Uprising was an error, as it did not suit the Soviets; Jan Ciechanowski from London—that it was against the plans of the British ally. It is said sometimes that the Uprising started without calculating the possibility of a helping hand.Faith played a major role during the Uprising. The clergy helped the community every way they could. (shrink)

La conception de la philosophie pratique de Jan Majorkiewicz : p.122-125.

Wprowadzenie -- Roman ingarden -- Antoni kępiński -- Karol wojtyła -- Władysław stróżewski -- Józef tischner.

The defence of The No Alternatives Argument in a recent paper by R. Dawid, S. Hartmann and J. Sprenger rests on the assumption that the number of acceptable alternatives to a scientific hypothesis is independent of the complexity of the scientific problem. This note proves a generalisation of the main theorem by Dawid, Hartmann and Sprenger, where this independence assumption is no longer necessary. Some of the other assumptions are also discussed, and the limitations of the no-alternatives argument (...) are explored. (shrink)

The first part of the article contains a logical reconstruction and a methodological analysis of some aspects of the famous Władysław Witiwcki’s work “Faith of Enlightened”. In particular, the classifications of believers and the principles of these classifications are analyzed; methodological errors committed by Witwicki are indicated. In the second part of the text, Witwicki's distinctions are illustrated by attitudes towards God and faith represented by four representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School: Kazimierz Twardowski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, and Józef (...) Maria Bocheński. (shrink)

This book provides for the first time a complete history of the doctrine of the transcendentals and shows its importance for the understanding of philosophy in the Middle Ages.

“The influence of [Kazimierz] Twardowski on modern philosophy in Poland is all-pervasive. Twardowski instilled in his students a passion for clarity [. . .] and seriousness. He taught them to regard philosophy as a collaborative effort, a matter of disciplined discussion and argument, and he encouraged them to train themselves thoroughly in at least one extra-philosophical discipline and to work together with scientists from other fields, both inside Poland and internationally. This led above all [. . .] to collaborations with (...) mathematicians, so that the Lvov school of philosophy would gradually evolve into the Warsaw school of logic [. . .]. Twardowski taught his students, too, to respect and to pursue serious research in the history of philosophy, an aspect of the tradition of philosophy on Polish territory which is illustrated in such disparate works as [Jan] Łukasiewicz’s ground-breaking monograph on the law of non-contradiction in Aristotle and [Władysław] Tatarkiewicz’s highly influential multi-volume histories of philosophy and aesthetics. [. . .] The term ‘Polish philosophy’ is a misnomer [. . .] for Polish philosophy is philosophy per se; it is part and parcel of the mainstream of world philosophy – simply because [. . .] it meets international standards of training, rigour, professionalism and specialization.”– Barry Smith, “Why Polish Philosophy does Not Exist”. (shrink)

EN: Selection of Marczyński's interviews on philosophy and literature which were recorded in early 2007 for the purpose of his radio broadcast "Hortus (In)Conclusus." Includes interviews with: Marek Bieńczyk, Józef Bremer, Ihor Byczko, Andrij Dachnij, Anna Dziedzic, Mateusz Falkowski, Tadeusz Gadacz, Michał Głowiński, Dorota Hall, Serhij Jospenko, Wachtang Kebuładze, Zbigniew Kloch, Andrzej Kołakowski, Wasyl Lisowyj, Ołeksandr Majewskyj, Anton Marczynski, Julia Marczyńska, Wadym Menżulin, Zbigniew Mikołejko, Monika Milewska, Andrij Okara, Ihor Paśko, Adam Pomorski, Myrosła Popowycz, Jerzy Prokopiuk, Iryna Puchta, Barbara Skarga, (...) Dmytro Stepowyk, Władysław Stróżewski, Myrosław Trofymuk, Tomas Venclova, Jan Woleński, Taras Wozniak, Arkadiusz Żychliński. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to two Polish philosophers and logicians Henryk Struve and Władysław Biegański. They represented the traditional pre-mathematical approach to logic and stood on the threshold of the new paradigm of logic as formal mathematical logic. Their views concerning logic and its philosophy as well as its relations to philosophy and mathematics will be analyzed. Those views will be compared with views of their contemporaries and with views of Jan Łukasiewicz—one of the main leaders of Warsaw School (...) of Logic who represented the new paradigm. (shrink)

Kazimierz Twardowski was the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School, one of the greatest phenomena in the European culture. The School had its representatives in all scientific disciplines, logic and mathematics including. Among his pupils are such great figures of European philosophy like: Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Władysław Tatarkiewicz and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The paper presents his life and various fields of his rich activity, as well as the list of his main works and the greatest achievements in philosophy. (...) He is best known in the world as the author of the distinction presentation-object-content, act-product, as well as the supporter of the postulate of clarity of thought and speech and the critic of psychologism, relativity of truth, symbolomania and pragmatophobia in science. (shrink)

Mathematical models are an important tool in the development ofsoftware technology, including programming languages and algorithms.During the last few years, a new class of such models has beendeveloped based on the notion of a mathematical game that isespecially well-suited to address the interactions between thecomponents of a system. This paper gives an introduction to thesegame-semantical models of programming languages, concentrating onmotivating the basic intuitions and putting them into context.

The main purpose of this article is to show the general development of Władysław Sebyła’s works in his next tomes Pieśni szczurołapa (Song of the ratcatcher), Koncert egotyczny (Egotic concert), Obrazy myśli (Views of thoughts). Poetry for Sebyła is the way of finding a man, showing the truth about himself by means of a literal word. Like also expressing a beauty of a nature, world by leading a dialog with himself. Besides he is looking for new people with whom (...) he could talk about the significance of life. He supports on the authority of Cyprian Kamil Norwid and Jan Lechoń. His poetry is not to give any answer to the problems but to ask neverending questions. (shrink)

The thesis of this essay is that Gertrude Stein plays an important role in The Differend, the brevity of her appearance in the book notwithstanding. Scarcely one and a half pages long, Lyotard’s discussion of a string of quotations from Stein is the most sustained consideration of a female author in his text. Lyotard is intrigued by Stein’s efforts to conceive of la phrase less as a form or building block than an event—or rupture—of language. Characterizing her work as écriture (...) féminine, he cannot decide whether her “vagabond prose” is one genre among others or a uniquely disruptive verbal praxis that unsettles his most basic ideas about phrases and genres. In the final analysis, the precise status of Stein in Lyotard’s thought remains uncertain, as if her unruly presence might simply be a quirk of the signifier stein. (shrink)

This book interprets and reflects on the conception of God that is implied by the Lord’s Prayer. It explains the epistemic status and ontological implications of the Christian faith in God and proposes a non-essentialist account of central identity-defining attributes of God.

Professor Heath’s thesis that Canada is “The Efficient Society” has shock value. In contemplating our country, the image of efficiency is not the first one that comes to mind. But in this engagingly—indeed, breezily—written book, that is just what we are told. The claim is that we have discovered the virtues of good government, and other more hapless places such as the United States, have not. Contrary to what we might suppose, government is efficient! The idea certainly tickles the intellect, (...) as does Professor Heath’s working-out of it. (shrink)

I suppose I’m writing this because of my 1965 paper on Pacifism. In that essay I argued that pacifism is self-contradictory. That’s a strong charge, and also not entirely clear. Let’s start by trying to clarify the charge and related ones.Pacifism has traditionally been understood as total opposition to violence, even the use of it in defense of oneself when under attack. I earlier maintained (in my well-known “Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis” (Narveson, Ethics, 75:4, 259–271, 1965)) that this position is (...) contradictory, if it is intended to mean that one has no right to use violence. While that is perhaps going too far, pacifism as so characterized is surely, as I have later argued, self-defeating in an obvious sense of that expression. But in any case, contemporary theorists who describe their views as pacifist profess to hold no such doctrine—they regard that familiar characterization of pacifism as a caricature. They do express strong opposition to war, but even that is not unlimited. If the chips are genuinely down, they will approve going to war-level self-defense—but they deny that it ever is really necessary, or at least that it is necessary nearly as often as actual war-making behavior among nations would suggest.In this it is not clear that we have a purely philosophical disagreement. How much opposition to war qualifies a view as “pacifist”? That is now very hard to say. After all, all decently liberal thinkers are against violence as a standardly available way of pursuing one’s ends. We all agree that if violence is to be justified, it takes something special. It should be a “last resort,” Just War theorists have classically said, and while ‘last’ is very difficult to pin down, at least, violence should be very far from the first thing a responsible nation thinks of. What’s more, the “something special” is not just that one’s ends are so important. It has to be that the violence would be employed in defense, of self or of other innocent parties under threat. So if there is genuine disagreement, it must be along this line: that we are morally required to make very substantial sacrifices in the pursuits of our otherwise legitimate interests, including our interests in security, in order to avoid using the violence of war.Is this reasonable? I think not. We should, of course, be reasonable, and that includes refraining from violence—except when the violence is necessary to counter the aggressive violence of others. For we reason, on practical matters, in terms of benefits and costs. Agents, especially political agents, can, alas, benefit from violence where that violence is unilateral. Thus it is rational to see to it that it won’t be unilateral. And when it is not unilateral, then the balance is in favor—strongly in favor—of peace. It remains that we must, alas, be able to make war in the possible case that we can’t have peace. When everybody shares the preference for peace, then we can scale down and hopefully even eliminate war-making capability. (Contemporary nations have already scaled down considerably—there have been few wars in the classic sense of military exchanges between states as such in recent times.) But until the scaling down is universal and includes a genuine renunciation of the use of warlike methods to achieve ends other than genuine self-defense, what most of us think of as “pacifism” is a non-option in the near run. (shrink)