From 19th January 2013 there have been changes in the operation of driver training centres due to the legislation regarding vehicle drivers coming into force. Changes related to the conduct of driving schools concern four major areas. The first one is a new form of enrolment on driving courses by candidates for drivers, which is done by using the so-called Profile of Candidate for Driver (PCD) generated by the county authorities. The second aspect is the new formula of the theoretical (...) state examination. The third issue is the introduction of cash registers for the operators conducting drivers’ education. The fourth feature is the introduction of new categories of the driving license, in particular a category including two-wheeled vehicles. The existing regulations, as well as the huge competition in the market, have contributed to the fact that the activity of training of candidates for drivers has been dominated by the principle according to which the service must be performed in a cheap and fast way. It automatically translates into the low quality of training and the disregard of procedural steps associated with it. In practice, the lack of adequate control on the part of the state is the reason for the fact that driving has become an arbitrary function based on ruthless marketing and low-cost services. In this situation, ethical dilemmas arise that, in the author’s opinion, will not necessarily be resolved by the new legal standards for drivers. (shrink)

Professional Ethics Code in Accounting constitutes a set of principles and values of everyday conduct of people whose work is connected with accounting. Accounting is an information system of enterprises, so it forms the basis of reliable management. Therefore information generated by accounting must be credible. Otherwise, the managing process would be based on false reports, which in consequence could lead to a fall of an economic subject, or it would at least cause the loss of clients, cooperators and associates` (...) trust. Accounting Association in Poland as an organization with more than one hundred years` tradition for people connected with enterprise accounting out of concern for reliability and fairness of carried out and registered economic transactions, recommended the first in Poland ethics code directed to accountants as a professional group. Professional Ethics Code in Accounting is a set of norms which aim is to help people connected with accounting solve ethical dilemmas appearing in their job. It can be said that this code is, so to speak, an answer to unfair accusations formulated against accountants being (in some people`s opinion) a group of “criminals in white collars”. It is obvious that there are different people with different characters in each society. Pathologies were and will be present everywhere. Accountants` environment is not free of them, which is proved by accounting scandals in Poland and abroad (for example the case of Enron company in the United States). In order to avoid generalizing, it must be underlined that among the ones connected with accounting, there are a lot of honest people caring about the company`s good name. (shrink)

I argue that on Aristotle’s account practical thinking is thinking whose origin (archē) is a desire that has as its object the very thing that one reasons about how to promote. This feature distinguishes practical from productive reasoning since in the latter the desire that initiates it is not (unless incidentally) a desire for the object that one productively reasons about. The feature has several interesting consequences: (a) there is only a contingent relationship between the desire that one practically reasons (...) about how to satisfy and the action one decides on; (b) practical thinking and action cannot be separated from the agent, whereas productive thinking and production can be outsourced to someone else. The view has consequences also for the distinction between action and production. Finally, I illustrate the usefulness and correctness of my account of practical thinking by using it to shed new light on Aristotle’s claim that the virtuous agent must decide on her virtuous actions ‘for themselves’. (shrink)

Józef Lipiec proposes his typology of axiological subjectivities according to levels of their commitment to values. He distinguishes 6 types of them in the order from complete passivity to full creativity. He also discusses ontological conditions of the axiological creativity. As for the problem of the origins of this kind of creativeness, the author opts for moderate determinism: the outer world provokes man to create values, but itself it is only a reservoir with raw material of which values can be (...) made out. (shrink)

The presented paper focuses on the analysis of strategic documents at the level of the European Union concerning the regulation of artificial intelligence as one of the so-called disruptive technologies. In the first part of the article, we outline the basic terminology. Subsequently, we focus on the summarizing and systemizing of the key documents adopted at the EU level in terms of artificial intelligence regulation. The focus of the paper is devoted to issues of personal data protection and cyber security (...) included in these strategic documents. The final part contains recommendations for future research and evaluation of its key features. (shrink)

After the unexpected death of Professor Józef Kałuża at the age of 74 on the 26th of July 2003, not only Polish neuropathology but also Polish philosophy of medical investigations lost one of its most renowned minds. Beginning in 1949, Professor Kałuża studied medical sciences for five years at the Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. He did his Ph.D. thesis in neuropathology in the Department of Neuropathology of the Polish Academy of Science. In 1962 he received a (...) Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and spent one year at the National Institutes of Health. In 1981 Professor Kaluza was promoted to a tenured professorship in neuropathology. He is the author of more than 110 articles published in medical periodicals and coauthor of many chapters in medical handbooks. (shrink)

I argue that, for Aristotle, virtue of character is a state of the non-rational part of the soul that makes one prone to making and acting on decisions in virtue of that part’s standing in the right relation to (correct) reason, namely, a relation that qualifies the agent as a true self-lover. In effect, this central feature of virtue of character is nothing else than love of practical wisdom. As I argue, it not only explains how reason can hold direct (...) authority over non-rational desires but also why Aristotle defines virtue of character as hexis prohairetikē. (shrink)

Where you have freedom, the meaning of the word increases, where the word is meaningful, you presuppose freedom." Józef Tischner.

The paper addresses the following question: why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond, and often against, their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality. In particular, it is the presence of theoretical reason that necessitates the limitless nature of (...) human non-rational desires. (shrink)

The main purpose of the paper is to criticize materialism in the philosophy of mind and to search for alternative approaches to the problems of mind, consciousness and body. According to the author, materialism does not present a satisfactory explanation of the mental life of human beings, because it fails to explain phenomena such as conscious experience, sleep, unconsciousness, death. These phenomena point to the fact that consciousness is not identical with the body and can be detached from it. The (...) author adopts the conclusion that the solution to the problem of consciousness is closely connected to the problem of identity of a human individual. A human being plays certain social roles, he or she possesses a body, he or she possesses a mind, but is not identical with them. In its essence, the human being is identical with consciousness. (shrink)

The primary goal of this article is to get to the specifics of Zbigniew Herbert’s work. The poet had formal philosophical education and cannot be treated merely as a writer raising existential issues. The consequence of his studies in philosophy with the most eminent Polish philosophers of the time was that he took up important philosophical questions rather than used the answers that philosophers of the past had given. This is an important feature of his poetry and distinguishes Herbert from (...) those writers who subscribed to the worldview of their era. Failure to distinguish between these two stances has led to one-sided readings of his poem To Marcus Aurelius. The interpretations of the last sixty years quoted in the article lead to the conclusion that we are dealing with a kind of “contemporary”, or modified, “stoicism”. Later scholars interpreted the work as existential. A comparison of the poem with the work of Marcus Aurelius, and above all, an analysis of the differences between the ancient and modern understanding of such concepts as “nature”, “fate”, “self”, or “suffering”, allowed us to show the internal intellectualemotional tension in Herbert’s poem, and above all, the general idea of philosophizing poetry. The poet himself believed that it resembles primary reflection, such as that of the early Ionian thinkers. This is not about philosophizing on the basis of an elaborate conceptual apparatus, but about philosophical intuition and “philosophical experience”, an intellectual and emotional tension, in which – thanks to poetic talent – beauty is born. The dialog in To Marcus Aurelius is precisely a record of such poetic agitation. (shrink)

De Franse schrijver en denker Albert Camus (1913-1960) was een van de voornaamste intellectuele stemmen van de twintigste eeuw. Zijn vertolking van de ervaringen van absurditeit en revolte in essays, romans en toneelstukken vonden brede weerklank in het naoorlogse Europa en daarbuiten. Camus’ scepsis ten aanzien van de grote ideologieën, zijn gevecht met het nihilisme en zijn onvermoeibare verdediging van het leven en de menselijkheid zijn nog altijd voor velen een bron van inspiratie. Dit boek geeft een beknopt overzicht van (...) het leven en de belangrijkste werken van Camus. Maar vooral wordt de ontwikkeling van zijn denken van absurditeit naar revolte geschetst in een historische en literair-wijsgerige context. Daarbij komt ook de vraag naar de overkoepelende eenheid van zijn werk aan bod. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the widely held view that Aristotle's vicious agent is a principled follower of a wrong conception of the good whose soul, just like the soul of the virtuous agent, is marked by harmony between his reason and non-rational desires is an exegetical mistake. Rather, Aristotle holds – consistently and throughout the Nicomachean Ethics – that the vicious agent lacks any real principles of action and that his soul lacks unity and harmony even more than (...) the soul of the uncontrolled agent. (shrink)

Socrates’ final argument in the Protagoras is premised on the surprising identification of the pleasant with the good and argues that virtue is the “art of measurement” that can be easily taught to the Many. The view that virtue can be taught is also espoused by Socrates elsewhere, notably in the Phaedrus. However, while the Protagoras identifies virtue with the art of calculating the greatest pleasure, which is identified with the greatest good, in the Phaedrus virtue is shown to consist (...) in the ceaseless search for the good. I argue that the picture of virtue presented in the Protagoras is in agreement with that of the Phaedrus in that the Protagoras depicts the first stage of the process of learning genuine virtue, which is outlined as a whole in the Phaedrus. The argument of the Protagoras then works as a protreptic: it teaches an elementary way of thinking about the ends of one’s actions and opens up the way toward genuine virtue. (shrink)

The use of target baselines or reference states for conservation and restoration has become increasingly problematic and impractical, due to rapid environmental change, the paradigm shift in ecology from a static to a dynamic view of nature, and growing awareness of the role of cultural traditions in the reconstruction of baselines. The various responses to this crisis of baselines will to a significant extent determine the future direction of nature conservation. Although some hold onto traditional baselines and others try to (...) refine or re-define the reference concept, the debate is currently dominated by two widely diverging reactions to the crisis: while the so-called ‘new environmentalists’ or ‘new conservationists’ declare the whole baseline notion obsolete, replacing a backward-looking approach with a forward-looking one, the ‘re-wilders’ push the baseline back to a deeper, more distant past. This article provides a critical assessment of the debate on these conversation options, with a special focus on the differences between Old World and New World perspectives. (shrink)

The Outline of Simon Budny’s Social and Ethical Views Simon Budny is the one of the most significant Antitrinitarian cogitators. He enunciated his views on the grounds of the Bible contents. By the incisive interpretation, he found out the rationale for the Republic of Nobles polity and for some of the values, which should exist in the society. In this area he emphasized such qualities as: religious tolerance, justice, charity and diligence.