Determinism fails easily if spacetimes with points removed from the spacetime manifold are taken to be physically reasonable representations of a way the world could be according to classical general relativity. I discuss a recently proposed condition for determining which spacetimes have holes—epistemic hole freeness—and show that epistemic hole freeness gives the correct verdict in some non-globally hyperbolic spacetimes with a closed subset removed, certain spacetimes with genuinely indeterministic features count as having an epistemic hole, which implies that the requirement (...) of epistemic hole freeness enforces a form of determinism, and there is a large class of spacetimes that intuitively are radically indeterministic and unphysical due to containing a hole, but are free from epistemic holes. I show that a few natural ways of remedying are not satisfactory. (shrink)

The inherent complexity of modern financial systems, and their basis in human behavior, make it hard to establish unequivocally the “who, what, where, when, and why” of the global financial crisis. However, after almost a decade, we know enough to discard much of what has, in the meantime, become folk wisdom about the causes of the debacle, including Wall Street bonus culture, bankers’ greed, the moral hazard of “too big to fail,” government intervention (“too much government”) and deregulation (“not enough (...) government”). While each of these factors may have played some role, the crisis can be much more accurately described as one of ignorance than malevolence. The common thread tying the emergence of the bubble to the disastrous consequences of its bursting is the misunderstanding of correlation and causation links in three key domains: economic policy, financial modeling, and the regulatory framework. These misunderstandings helped fuel the housing bubble and introduced fragility into the system, making it vulnerable to the bubble’s subsequent, unavoidable burst. (shrink)

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

I discuss candidates for definitions of determinism in the context of general relativistic spacetimes, and argue that a definition which does not make recourse to any particular region of spacetime should be preferred over alternatives; one such notion is discussed in detail in the light of various physical examples. The emerging picture of determinism is a pluralist one: sometimes there is no unique way of making our intuitive concept of determinism precise. Instead, what is crucial for assessment of determinism of (...) the theory are auxiliary conditions under which it counts as deterministic or indeterministic, and justification for using them in a given situation. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has underscored the possibility that capital-adequacy regulations may have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis by privileging highly rated asset-backed securities, such as mortgage-backed securities. The same regulations gave an even more privileged position to sovereign debt, leading to the question of whether they helped cause the European sovereign-debt crisis. There is little question that the regulations encouraged European banks to invest in European governments' bonds, but it does not appear that this encouragement led to more government borrowing (...) by significantly reducing the yield governments needed to pay on their debt. However, it does appear that capital-adequacy regulations—along with post-2008 liquidity regulations—concentrated sovereign risk in the European banking system, aggravating the sovereign-debt problem by requiring government bailouts that, in turn, required the issuance of more sovereign debt, further jeopardizing the governments' fiscal position and banks' solvency. Exacerbating the situation, in the midst of a panic, the European Banking Authority imposed new capital requirements on banks and effectively forced them to realize mark-to-market losses on sovereign exposures. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Capital regulations stemming from the Basel accords created incentives for banks to securitize mortgages, even risky ones; hold them at a correspondingly low Basel risk weight; or shift them off of banks' balance sheets to obtain even greater leverage. Securitization was praised by economists and regulators for dispersing risks to investors across the world, providing greater resilience to the financial system. However, since in reality banks tended to hold onto securitized assets—either on their balance sheets or off of them, (...) in off‐balance‐sheet entities—the accumulated credit risk remained with the banks, especially in the “shadow banking sector.” This explains the heightened vulnerability of the financial system to a sudden collapse. (shrink)

General relativity cannot be formulated as a perturbatively renormalizable quantum field theory. An argument relying on the validity of the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy formula aims at dismissing gravity as non-renormalizable per se, against hopes that d-dimensional GR could turn out to have a non-perturbatively renormalizable d–dimensional quantum field theoretic formulation. In this note we discuss various forms of highly problematic semi-classical extrapolations assumed by both sides of the debate concerning what we call The Entropy Argument, and show that a large class (...) of dimensional reduction scenarios leads to the blow-up of Bekenstein–Hawking entropy. (shrink)

Taking as a background the Plato’s model of two worlds and some categories closely associated with it, the author describes three paradigms: Tradition, Reception and Renaissance. They are linked with the human condition as means by which humans, or rather: human communities try to overcome their changeable and temporal existence.

Philosophy in antiquity was conceived not as mere theory but as a way of life; but it lost its 'practicist' cast through a process that begins in the patristic era and peaks with its conversion into an academic discipline in the medieval universities under the influence of 13th-century scholasticism. Juliusz Domański sets out the reasons behind that process and shows how traces of the 'practicist' orientation survived, ultimately leading to a recovery of the ancient notion among the humanists of (...) the Renaissance. A foreword by Pierre Hadot relates Domański's research to his own vision of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Punktem wyjścia rozważań są cztery hipotezy: dwie leksykalne, gramatyczna i historyczna: 1. Wyrażenie „rozumieć" jest polisemem i to podwójnie: a) wieloznacznością właściwą wielu predykatom mentalnym (tj. może mieć w szczególności sens aktualny, habitualny, sekwencyjny lub procesualny); b) wieloznacznością swoistą (tj. może w szczególności mieć sens intuicyjny, identyfikacyjny, indulgencyjny lub inskrypcyjny). 2. Wyrażenie „rozumieć” w sensie identyfikacyjnym występuje w kontekstach eliptycznych (może mieć wówczas sens esencjalny, strukturalny, funkcjonalny, kauzalny, kategorialny lub konceptualny). 3. Wszelkie (niemetaforyczne) konteksty i derywaty wyrażenia „rozumieć" dadzą się (...) sparafrazować za pomocą wprowadzonych rozróżnień. 4. Różnice zdań w sprawie rozumienia albo biorą się z pomieszania znaczeń, albo są empirycznie testowalne. Przedstawione hipotezy pozwalają usunąć nieporozumienia, dotyczące kolejno: argumentów relacji rozumienia, kategorii semantycznej „rozumienia", relacji między poszczególnymi pojęciami „rozumienia" oraz. między rozumieniem a innymi funkcjami mentalnymi, warunkami poprawności definicji „rozumienia konceptualnego", na koniec kryteriów kompetencji językowej. (shrink)

Erasmus of Rotterdam is not typically associated with the discipline of philosophy. Yet, he would himself employ the category of philosophia Christi in the sense of authentic Christianity which had not been contaminated by the abstractness and pedanticism of paganized mediaeval scholasticism. Does this reveal a contrarian attitude to philosophy in general or rather a special understanding of what a "true' philosophy as a way of life should be? This study attempts to answer this question by assembling and closely studying (...) from Erasmus' extensive oeuvre his scant and occasional remarks on the concept of philosophy. (shrink)

Academic ethos is a set of norms that are binding for a scholar as such. (1) A scholar should especially take up useful research, do it guardedly (so without infringing higher values), formulating well asked questions, using effective methods of searching for true and sufficiently justified answers to those questions — and expressing the research results in an exact, adjusted to the object of the research, simple, forcible, concise and beautiful language. (2) A scholar should undertake vital, i.e. new, fundamental, (...) creative and difficult research. (3) Conducting research should be accompanied by passion, concentration, reliability, imagination, and self-criticism. 4) A scholar should be a guide,minder and supervisor for his pupils and co-workers. (5) A Catholic scholar should also be expected to behave in a morally impeccable way, and if he does not meet this expectation, at least he should feel ashamed of it. (shrink)

The paper depicts the philosophical views of F. Bochwic (1799-1856) which are as follows: ontology, anthropology, epistemology, ethics, and education. The world, according to Bochwic, was created by God (creationism) and is divided into two spheres: spiritual and carnal (ontological dualism). The factor that unites them is man. His purpose, as a free creature, is his tendency to perfection. The sources of human knowledge are the following: unreliable senses and reliable conscience (intuitionism). Conscience is the source of our presentiments with (...) regard to: the existence of God, immortality of the soul, God\'s justice, and moral orders obligatory for all people (axiological absolutism): the order to make good and avoid evil, the order to love oneself and the neighbour, and the order to obey one\'s parents and superiors. The philosophical views of Bochwic lay at the grounds of his educational doctrine. According to it, education should instil civil virtues in adolescents and be versatile, balanced, varied, imitative, kind, and permanent. (shrink)

Contents: POSSIBLE ONTOLOGIES. Jacek Juliusz JADACKI: Preface. Book I: Zdzis??l??aw AUGUSTYNEK: Point Eventism. An Outline of a Certain Ontology. Book II: Jacek Juliusz JADACKI: Ontological Minimum. DISCUSSIONS. Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA: Carnap and Leibniz on the Problem of Being. Piotr PRZYBYSZ: Polish Discussions about Reism.

The genesic philosophy of Juliusz Słowacki, sometimes called his mysticism, is structured and constituted around four basic historiographic concepts as regards mankind. They are: the idea of spiritual progressive development, the concept of spiritual leadership, influence of the world of spirits on human doings, and the aggregation (that is collective) form of the spirit. Progress is the fundamental element of the genesic work of spirits who have been appointed by God to do it. Those form-creating efforts are the nature (...) and the task of the spirits of the “World”. The principle of progress is sacrifice. It means that a spirit has to sacrifice something of its present form in order to receive a more perfect one from God. And thus, on the border of organic forms, a spirit sacrificed its immortality, it sacrificed itself to death. In the genesic system, death is only a break dividing two lives; just like a dream is a break between work of the two days. The spirit that first rose the highest is benefactor to all creation because it shows the way up to everything else. Such a spirit, progressing ahead of others, is the natural guide of the creation, King Spirit. The most fundamental statement of Stowacki’s genesic philosophy is “Everything has been created for the spirit and by the spirit, and there is nothing to exist for the material purpose”. This seems to be most beautifully expressed tribute to the spiritual element of the human nature. (shrink)

This essay is an exploratory reflection on a theme drawn from the work of Pierre Hadot and Juliusz Domański regarding “philosophy as a way of life.” I approach the matter from the naturalistic outlook of classic pragmatism and its own limitations. This approach stresses the possible improvement of the analysis of normativity by way of some neglected contributions regarding the nature of history and the evolution of Homo sapiens applied to the formation of the human self or person. I (...) take Hadot’s proposal seriously, therefore, as contributing to a mature conception of philosophy. But I deliberately restrict my own conjectures to naturalistic constraints, which begins to suggest an enlargement of pragmatism itself and an assessment of Hadot’s Greco-Roman and Christian themes. (shrink)

The subject of this essay is the medieval castle present in Juliusz Siowacki’s literary works. I am interested in the ways оf its presentation, attempting to recall the climate of antiquity and the evolution of the picture of the castle. Therefore, I discuss the image of the castle created in the early works: the poetic novel Hugo (1829), the drama Mindowe (1832), as well as in the later works belonging to the so called mystical period: Wallenrod and Konrad Wallenrod. (...) Helsztyński lies beyond the scope of my interests as its research requires a different perspective. I present in Hugo a stereotypical model of forming architectural space Słowacki draws a very sketchy picture of the castle. He leads the reader into the interiors of a pagan temple and a representative hall with only one decorative element: famous pseudo-classical pillars. The picture of the castle is considerably enriched in Mindowe. First of all, the author enlarges its space. He adds a secret passage and furniture, mentions a treasury and a representative hall. This way he slightly violates the stereotype of an interior subordinated to the tragedy convention. Moreover, I emphasize here the way Słowacki compares the Gothic style to the creations of nature e.g. a hall with pillars is compared to a forest, rose windows to stars, a castle to an eagle’s nest. These comparisions tend to illustrate the architectural style - the Gothic and the atmosphere of Middle Ages. This essay shows that the picture of the castle was conceived in opposition to Mickiewicz’s castle presented in Grażyna and Konrad Wallenrod. The image of the castle in Wallenrod and Konrad Wallenrod varie from the early works. However, the fragmentation of these texts precludes any profound analysis of the problem The poet in Wallenrod associates architectural space with characters' personality: Wallenrod - gloomy Malbork, vindictive Jagiełło - bloody Vilnius, Kiejstut and noble Witold - sunny Troki. In the drama Wallenrod the characters’ “interiors” are somehow reflected in the interiors of the castle. The castle is given different significance in the fragments of Konrad Wallenrod, where it becomes the place of recognition of God’s truths. The pictures of Lithuanian castles is created mainly by stereotypes and poetic imagination hardly ever by descriptions of existing buildings. Słowacki did not manage to show the specific type of the castle in Troki in Hugo, although he was personally acquainted with the castle. The image of the castle in Nowogródek was influenced by the tragedy convention and Mickiewicz’s castle in Grażyna. In the later texts the poet lost his interests in architectural details. He focused on the character’s inside, or as in Konrad Wallenrod, on the importance of the word spoken by the prophet. (shrink)

Under the sign of Libitina, the Roman goddess of burials and funerals invoked in Horace's Ode 3.30, this essay provides a celebratory introduction to the work of the Polish Jewish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka, situating her within the cultural history of commemoration and consecration of the dead in Poland and the painful confrontation with the unburied dead of the Holocaust, of whom Ginczanka is one. Her best-known poem, a bitter parody of Juliusz Słowacki's “My Testament,” turns the Horatian notion of (...) poetry as the most precious and enduring legacy on its head by construing the author's meager household possessions, looted after her denunciation to the Nazis in wartime, as the only offering her fellow citizens will cherish, while the text itself was actually brought as evidence in a postwar trial of the Polish woman she accuses in the poem and contributed to a conviction for collaboration. Using historian Thomas Laqueur's terms necro-sociability and necronominalism as competing impulses in a seemingly intractable struggle, this essay argues that it is possible to find in Ginczanka's joyful defiance of traditional accounts of body and spirit the point of departure for a poetics that claims a new freedom of imagination in the attempt to transcend the most stubborn of memory wars. (shrink)

The conception of performative utterances proposed by John Langshaw Austin is unclear and provokes many fundamental questions. We compare this proposal with Jacek Juliusz Jadacki's conception of performatives, being much more precise one. We develop Jadacki's intuitions and propose to characterize performatives as expressions fulfilling a specific semantic function: A type-expression W is a performative generating an intentional state of affairs S iff there is a convention K and circumstances C such that the convention K says: if somebody utters (...) a token-expression W in circumstances C, so the state of affairs S will take place. Subsequently, we analyze the problem of correctness of performative utterances and relations between different criteria of correctness of performative acts. On the basis of these analyses, the paradox of annulled marriage is formulated and the problem of perfomatives in law is sketched. (shrink)

-/- Medytacje filozoficzne, Fundacja na Rzecz Myślenia im. Barbary Skargi, Warszawa 2015. -/- Publikacja współfinansowana przez Muzeum Łazienki Królewskie w Warszawie. -/- Zbiór tekstów powstałych na podstawie wykładów, które zostały wygłoszone w ramach cyklu "Medytacje filozoficzne w Łazienkach" w latach 2013-2015. -/- -/- Spis treści: -/- Cezary Wodziński, Premedytacja Krzysztof Pomian, O wyjątkowości człowieka Zygmunt Bauman, O miłości i nienawiści… Tropami Barbary Skargi Tadeusz Sławek, Ciemne liturgie. Język, historia i gest błogosławieństwa Lech Witkowski, Rozprawa z autorytetem: w strone autorytu przejścia (...) Władysław Stróżewski, Doświadczenie czasu, doświadczenie istnienia Juliusz Domański, „Pradawna waśń filozofów z poetami” a kłopoty z dziedzictwem antycznym Serhij Żadan, Wolność jako odpowiedzialność Marcin Poręba, Co to jest rzeczywistość? Szymon Wróbel, Co to jest historia filozofii? Magdalena Środa, Moralność życia publicznego Kostiantyn Tyszczenko, Po co językoznawstwu metateoria? (shrink)

Background: The magnitude of bullying and harassment among psychiatrists is reportedly high, yet no peer-review published studies addressing this issue could be found. Therefore, it was decided to conduct a pilot study to assess the degree of the problem, the types of bullying/harassment and to provide some insights into the situation.Methods and Principal Findings: Following multiple focus group meetings, a yes/no response type questionnaire was developed to assess the degree and type of bullying and harassment experienced by psychiatrists. Over a (...) 3-month period the questionnaire was administered to a random sample of 60 psychiatrists. 57 out of the 60 psychiatrists reported harassment and bullying. Frequencies of the following response variables are presented in descending order: rumours 40% ; defamation 20% ; passing remarks 20% ; false accusations 15% ; threats 13.3% ; verbal abuse 13.3% ; unjustified complaints 13.3% ; promotion blocked 13.3% ; humiliation 13% ; bad reference given 10% ; credentials questioned 8.3% ; physical attacks 5% ; termination 5% ; derogatory remarks 1.7% and 1.7% were subjected to personal work. As a result of being subjected to harassment, 66.7% of the psychiatrists did not take any action, whereas 33.3% confronted the person they believed responsible. Asked whether the bullying and harassment caused distress, 18.3% of the psychiatrists did not report any effect, 30% reported mild distress, 40% moderate distress and severe distress was reported by 11.7%.Conclusions: It was concluded that the magnitude of bullying and harassment among psychiatrists may be quite high, as evidenced by this pilot study. There is a need for extensive systematic studies on this subject and to establish strategies to prevent and address this issue at a national and regulatory level. (shrink)

Recent work has argued that there may be cases where no attitude – including withholding – is rationally permissible. In this paper, I consider two such epistemic dilemmas, John Turri’s Dilemma from Testimony and David Alexander’s Dilemma from Doubt. Turri presents a case where one’s only evidence rules out withholding (without warranting belief or disbelief). Alexander presents a case where higher order doubt means one must withhold judgment over whether withholding judgment is rational. In both cases, the authors conclude that (...) no doxastic attitude is warranted. In this paper, I argue against the possibility of these epistemic dilemmas. I argue that withholding cannot be irrational in either case. But meditating on the dilemmas gives us an important – and overlooked – insight into the nature of rational withholding. First, rational withholding is a function of evidence failing to sufficiently support belief or disbelief. As a result, withholding is not symmetrical to belief and disbelief. Second, there can be two distinct grounds for rational withholding. First, propositional withholding, which arises when our evidence does not support belief or disbelief in p. And second, doxastic withholding, which arises when we cannot determine whether our evidence supports belief or disbelief in p. Accepting two grounds of rational withholding licenses a kind of Weak Permissivism. But this Weak Permissivism should not be troubling to anyone. (shrink)

Contents: Preface. SCIENTIFIC WORKS OF MARIA STEFFEN-BATÓG AND TADEUSZ BATÓG. List of Publications of Maria Steffen-Batóg. List of Publications of Tadeusz Batóg. Jerzy POGONOWSKI: On the Scientific Works of Maria Steffen-Batóg. Jerzy POGONOWSKI: On the Scientific Works of Tadeusz Batóg. W??l??odzimierz LAPIS: How Should Sounds Be Phonemicized? Pawe??l?? NOWAKOWSKI: On Applications of Algorithms for Phonetic Transcription in Linguistic Research. Jerzy POGONOWSKI: Tadeusz Batóg's Phonological Systems. MATHEMATICAL LOGIC. Wojciech BUSZKOWSKI: Incomplete Information Systems and Kleene 3-valued Logic. Maciej KANDULSKI: Categorial Grammars with (...) Structural Rules. Miros??l??awa KO??L??OWSKA-GAWIEJNOWICZ: Labelled Deductive Systems for the Lambek Calculus. Roman MURAWSKI: Satisfaction Classes - a Survey. Kazimierz _WIRYDOWICZ: A New Approach to Dyadic Deontic Logic and the Normative Consequence Relation. Wojciech ZIELONKA: More about the Axiomatics of the Lambek Calculus. THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS. Jacek Juliusz JADACKI: Troubles with Categorial Interpretation of Natural Language. Maciej KARPI??N??SKI: Conversational Devices in Human-Computer Communication Using WIMP UI. Witold MACIEJEWSKI: Qualitative Orientation and Grammatical Categories. Zygmunt VETULANI: A System of Computer Understanding of Texts. Andrzej WÓJCIK: The Formal Development of van Sandt's Presupposition Theory. W??l??adys??l??aw ZABROCKI: Psychologism in Noam Chomsky's Theory . Ryszard ZUBER: Defining Presupposition without Negation. PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE AND METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCES. Jerzy KMITA: Philosophical Antifundamentalism. Anna LUCHOWSKA: Peirce and Quine: Two Views on Meaning. Stefan WIERTLEWSKI: Method According to Feyerabend. Jan WOLE??N??SKI: Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language. Krystyna ZAMIARA: Context of Discovery - Context of Justification and the Problem of Psychologism. (shrink)

The most interesting, and problematic, claim made by film-philosophy, for me, is the proposition that film thinks. This claim is interesting because it asserts that film has something philosophical to offer that philosophy itself lacks. It is problematic because we tend to think that where there is thinking, there must be a someone doing that thinking. And whatever film is, it is not a someone. This paper brings Karl Poppers model of objective knowledge what he calls knowledge in the absence (...) of a knowing subject to bear on the proposition that film thinks, in order to sketch out an account of film as a process of objective thinking distinct from that of philosophy or any other merely human mode of thought. (shrink)

In section 96 of Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit offers his now familiar tripartite distinction among candidates for ‘what matters’: (1) Relation R with its normal cause; (2) R with any reliable cause; (3) R with any cause. He defends option (3). This paper tries to show that there is important ambiguity in this distinction and in Parfit's defence of his position. There is something strange about Parfit's way of dividing up the territory: I argue that those who have followed (...) him in viewing the choice among (1)–(3) as the (or an) important question in thinking about ‘what matters’ are mistaken, and that they bypass what seems to be a more important, even crucial, set of options and considerations. I am less concerned with what he does say than with what he ought to say, given his intuitions and arguments, and the general framework within which he is working. And I am particularly concerned to show that whether or not I am correct about what he is doing with his tripartite distinction, it is a distinction with which we should not be particularly concerned in the analysis either of what matters or of psychological continuity. (shrink)

Книга рассчитана на тех, кто по своей специальности занимается философией, литературоведением и в дальнейшем углубят свои знания в этом вопросе, а также для широкого круга читателей.

I would like to begin with the role of philosophy in solving ecological problems, emphasizing two aspects of its role: the struggle against hostile ideology and the organizing and guiding of activity in the sphere of the development of science and the shaping of its problems. This role of Marxist-Leninist philosophy clearly appears in the complex interdisciplinary problem of the interaction between nature and society.

T. 1. Ot antichnoĭ fiziki do Mendeleeva.