In this study, edited on the basis of a critical review of domestic and foreign literature, as well as authors’ own analyzes, previously presented in several articles (Słodowa-Hełpa 2015; Gorynia 2021 and 2022), mainly in two shorter texts published in popular magazines with a range of Poland (Gory-nia and Słodowa-Hełpa 2022a, 2022b), selected aspects of the concept of the common good from the perspective of the Covid-19 pandemic were presented. The authors’ conviction that in the process (...) of searching for cures to overcome civilization turbulences, the common good cannot be eliminated from the social, political, economic and moral space, was the inspiration to take up this issue. Therefore, the search for answers to the following four questions was considered leading: Will pandemic experiences catalyze a better understanding of the common good? How can they reduce its deficit? To what extent can a return to the concept of the common good, offering real forms of participation and shared responsibility, help in overcoming the painful effects of the present and future threats to civilization? Can respecting the principles of the common good be considered an imperative in the process of overcoming problems of an increasingly global scope? In view of the ambiguity of the category of the common good and the related interpretation difficulties, it was deemed necessary to place the main part of the study in the background of the most general approach to the essence of the analyzed category and its status in philosophical and economic terms. The summary outlines conclusions and postulates concerning the conditions for the functioning of global common goods and the possibility of using them in international cooperation. (shrink)

Drawing from an ethics of care, relational approaches to autonomy have recently emerged in bioethics. Unlike individual autonomy with its emphasis on patients’ rights, choice, and self-determination which has been the hallmark of bioethics consistent with the ideology of individualism in neoliberal democracies in Western countries, relational autonomy highlights the relatedness, interdependency, and social embeddedness of patients. By examining the mediating role that male Hospital Liaison Committee members in Germany play in facilitating care that supports Jehovah's Witnesses’ refusal of blood (...) transfusions, this article moves beyond ‘dyadic relations’ and contexts of caregiving. It also contributes to a deeper understanding of care and relational conceptualizations of Witness patients’ autonomy globally. (shrink)

Vietnam tries to respond to changing international situations, while attempting to stay in accordance with its own ambitions. China and the USA, the two superpowers, are the most important partners of Vietnamese strategy, which is determined by these two countries. The most important economic partner and ideological ally is China. But both sides have some serious problems to resolve such as maritime disputes. The situation imposes the need to seek counterbalance, a reliable ally who provides protection for its own interests. (...) So Vietnam looks to balance improved relations with China while seeking deeper and multidimensional relations with the USA. The United States offers many advantages that are attractive to Vietnam. Inevitably, economic ties and new projects e.g. TPP, political, cultural and scientific cooperation make up these advantages. However, the United States can only provide support for the Spratly and Paracel Islands’ dispute and improving cooperative measures in the South China Sea with the presence of U.S. naval vessels and dialogue that assists Vietnam defense. Vietnam has again become an element in the American strategy of pivoting to Asia. (shrink)

A Byzantinist specializing in the history of the Empire of Trebizond, the author presents four books of different genres written in English and devoted to the medieval state on the south coast of the Black Sea. The most spectacular of them is a novel by Rose Macaulay, Towers of Trebizond. Dąbrowska wonders whether it is adequate to the Trebizondian past or whether it is a projection of the writer. She compares Macaulay’s novel with William Butler Yeats’s poems on Byzantium which (...) excited the imagination of readers but were not meant to draw their attention to the Byzantine past. This is, obviously, the privilege of literature. As a historian, Dąbrowska juxtaposes Macaulay’s narration with the historical novel by Nicolas J. Holmes, the travelogue written by Michael Pereira and the reports of the last British Consul in Trabzon, Vorley Harris. The author of the article draws the reader’s attention to the history of a rather unknown and exotic region. The Empire of Trebizond ceased to exist in 1461, conquered by Mehmed II. At the same time the Sultan’s army attacked Wallachia and got a bitter lesson from its ruler Vlad Dracula. But this Romanian hero is remembered not because of his prowess on the battlefield but due to his cruelty which dominated literary fiction and separated historical facts from narrative reality. The contemporary reader is impressed by the image of a dreadful vampire, Dracula. The same goes for Byzantium perceived through the magic stanzas by Yeats, who never visited Istanbul. Rose Macaulay went to Trabzon but her vision of Trebizond is very close to Yeats’s images of Byzantium. In her story imagination is stronger than historical reality and it is imagination that seduces the reader. (shrink)

Accountants recently had the opportunity to celebrate 20 years of existence in Poland the regulating of accounting. The act was adopted by parliament in 1994. 500 years before the treaty about double accounting was reprinted by Pacioli. The edition of Tractatus XI. Particularis de computis et scripturis was an (epic) epoch-making event designating the beginning of a new field of economic sciences. The idea of the double accounting was known before, not only because of Pacioli, but also through Cotruglio, who (...) described it 36 years earlier. Recently in accounting, as well as in the broadly understood economy, there is a particular emphasis put on ethics, moral values and professional attitudes. It is worth considering whether and on what scale they were present in the early works of Accountancy 550 years ago, how their representatives approached the subjects the beginning of a written history of accounting. The article presents the main ideas included in the guidelines Pacioli and Cotruglio regarding double accounting, and identifies if ethical guidelines were presents among others guidelines. It turns out that the author of the essential work in the history of accounting, as well as its predecessor, devoted much attention to the moral attitude of the merchant, his appropriate behavior, attitude towards customers and other people, with whom he has a business relationship. (shrink)

Addressing trauma as a phenomenon which happens on the level of the human psyche and body, this article explores the impact of the interlocking nature of human lingual and bodily being in discovering a fuller possibility of interpreting and understanding woundedness. The non-transparent and problematic character of trauma calls for a hermeneutic investigation in order to gain a far-reaching insight into what happens with us and in us in traumatic experience. The imperative to understand the situation of affliction is an (...) unending task which not only relies upon extant understandings but continually pro-vokes new ones. I argue that the process of healing, encompassing the spoken and bodily narrative, does not establish a secure equilibrium, but rather searches for self-restoring, healing energy and commences ever new understandings of what needs to be comprehended and healed. This article offers an examination of trauma as featured in three short stories by British authors: Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, to exemplify the possibilities of literature to shed light on the intricate nature of traumatic experience. It interrogates the ways in which literature, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis meaningfully converge. (shrink)

The supple and ever-present search for the possibilities offered by the narrative form in fictional writing corresponds to the use of the narrative as a mode of understanding and explaining our being-in-the-world in philosophy. The intimate liaison between the realm of fictional imagination and that of human everydayness inspires writers to seek ways to tackle issues of temporality, the conflicting character of human drives, and the ultimately unresolvable tension between finitude and infinitude. As a literary and philosophical category, the narrative (...) remains an inexhaustible space for the exploration of the way we understand our lives. I propose a hermeneutic investigation of the interactions between the art of narration and the categories of space, presence/absence, and (be)longingness as evoked in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This article engages Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, and, more specifically, his notions of homelessness and homecoming, to shed light on the inimitable character of Woolf’s artistic representations of the spatial dimension of human existence, reality viewed as both tremulous and solid, as well as of human embodiment and the disparity/closeness between the corporeal and the spiritual. (shrink)

On the grounds of the libertarian ethics presented by Murray N. Rothbard, the state is an institution which acts against individuals and whole societies. The state steals money from its citizens (taxes), stands in the way of free market development and controls the economy, thus hindering entrepreneurship. Besides that, the state – through its rules and regulations – limits every man's right to make moral choices. The state is an immoral institution, therefore its citizens have the right to refuse to (...) pay taxes, follow orders, and even – in some circumstances – corrupt civil servants. In this paper we analyse Rothbard’s ethics and look into the arguments of critics of libertarian thought. Practical social and economic solutions that emerge from Rothbard’s point of view are also considered. (shrink)

The goal of this study was to investigate heterogeneity in clinical symptoms and cognitive functioning among children with hyperactivity-impulsivity and inattention using a novel approach that combined dimensional and person-centered perspectives. Executive, verbal and visuo-spatial functioning, hyperactivity-impulsivity, inattention, externalizing and internalizing symptoms were examined in 102 children at risk for ADHD and 62 children not at risk for ADHD in the age range of 8–10 years. We extracted seven groups with various profiles of psychopathological symptoms and cognitive functioning. We propose (...) that symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity in these groups are related to different cognitive and affective-motivational problems. (shrink)

Patterns of inattention in children: Findings from the inattention checklist for teachers This study concerns construction of a checklist for teachers designed to find out types of attention disorders in children. Inattention is not a homogenous phenomenon. Patterns of coexistence of inattention signs and other behavioral symptoms could reflect different psychological mechanisms. In first study teachers described 242 children aged 9 to 10 using Inattention Checklist for Teachers. In second study teachers described 361 children aged 8 to 10 using modified (...) version of the ICT. Factor analysis conducted in the first study resulted in extraction of five factors. In the second study previously extracted factors were validated by cluster analyses and profiles referring to co-occurring behavioral symptoms were developed. Analysis of profiles has shown that attention disorders comprise at least two groups of inattention symptoms that in relation to other factors and learning difficulties constitute different patterns of inattention. It is suggested that these patterns reflect differences between attention disorders caused by cognitive malfunctioning, impaired behavioral or emotional control. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present study was designed to address the hypothesis that differences and similarities in patterns of attentional processing in recently proposed types of anxiety and depression are connected with the dominant function they play in stimulation processing and their structural components. Participants filled out the Anxiety and Depression Questionnaire, which assesses types of anxiety and depression, and completed the Emotional Faces Attentional Test one week later. The obtained results confirmed our prediction and suggested that the proposed typology of anxiety and (...) depression is valid in the adaptive meanings of both phenomena. (shrink)

Scholars have long wrestled with the question of why the Laws of Hammurabi provide two different sanctions for the theft of temple (and palace) property: the death penalty (§6) and thirtyfold restitution (§8). While reviewing Neo- and Late Babylonian evidence on sacrilegious theft, this paper argues that Babylonian law neatly distinguished between the theft of sacred objects and the theft of nonsacred temple property, which incurred different penalties, corresponding to those that §6 and §8 of the Laws of Hammurabi impose. (...) It further seeks to identify the criteria that determined the classification of certain objects as res sacrae and the legal and cultic consequences of sacrilegious theft. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate and reconstruct the philosophical thoughts in Marian Smoluchowski’s papers. He was an outstanding Polish physicist, who lived at the turn of the XIX and XX century. Smoluchowski was particularly interested in theoretical physics. His achievements in this discipline, some even very significant, have caused him to be perceived mainly as a physicist. His work in the theory of fluctuations and kinetic theory of gases, especially in the theory of Brownian motions, is (...) well known to physicists. My attention in this paper is focused on the metascientific problems which dominated his philosophical reflections. His analysis in the fields on philosophy of science ought to be perceived in light of physics. Philosophical reflections were at the margins of science which he practiced – physics was always the background to his deliberations. An important limit to our deliberations was set by concentrating on issues typical of the philosophy of science. In Smoluchowski’s case, however, it is difficult to say that his branch of philosophy is characterized by systematic reflection. It is difficult to classify his reflection in the framework of any given philosophical trend. (shrink)

The collection of papers addresses the perennial problem of the relation between language and meaning. It proposes various theoretical approaches to the issue ranging from a synergetic theory of meaning merging the cognitive and the socio-historical perspectives, through holistic, evolutionary models and a revision of some of the assumptions of Cognitive Metaphor Theory to the discussion of the role of pragmatic competence in meaning construction. A number of papers make recourse to corpus based studies and psycholinguistic experiments. The topics of (...) specific linguistic investigations cover such diverse issues as idiom processing, emotion words in Chinese, valuation of abstract nouns, the preposition <I>at and scalar adjectives. Several papers explore the application of the reflections on the nature of meaning to lexicography and translation. One, self-reflective article investigates the consequences of the unformulated assumptions about meaning for the coherence of proposed linguistic theories. The volume firmly places the study of meaning in the centre of the linguistic research by showing its significance for linguistic theory and its applications. (shrink)

Presented studies investigated the specificity of visual and auditory modalities in attentional processing of emotion, and its association with temperamental dimensions and trait-like attentional control. During preliminary study 30 participants were presented with the paper-pencil visual search task and emotional prosody detection tasks. Results revealed visual happiness superiority and auditory sadness superiority. During the main study, in addition to attentional performance, 51 subjects were administrated two questionnaires: EPQ-R and Attentional Control Scale. Introducing individual differences into analysis limited the general pattern (...) of modality distinctiveness in attentional processing of emotional stimuli obtained in the preliminary study. Findings for all personality traits studied separately showed that Extraversion and low Neuroticism were associated with the visual sadness superiority. Whereas interactional analysis indicated effective visual threat processing in extraverts with good AC and effective friendly prosody detection when Neuroticism and AC remain in inverse relationship. Hence, we have found that processing emotional targets in both modalities is associated with temperament dimensions and their interactions with attentional control. Additionally, findings from both studies suggest that general psychological laws might be challenged by individual differences. (shrink)

The paper discusses Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the Christian notions of divine love, forgiveness and justice in The Tragedy of King Lear. In my reading I employ Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological reflection on the givenness of love and Hans-Urs von Balthasar’s theology of Paschal mystery. I take issue with the Marxist and existentialist interpretations of Shakespeare’s tragedy which prevailed in the second half of the 20th century. My aim is not a simple recuperation of the “redemptionism” of the play, but an in-depth (...) consideration of Christian allusions in the play which may tie love and forgiveness to justice and throw light on the ending of King Lear. (shrink)

The act of consuming in our new, global reality doesn’t have a lot in common with taking part in the classic ‘purchase and buy’ exchange relationship. The satisfaction of basic needs is no longer the main target of consumption. The contemporary consumer experiences a constant “hunger” and continual need for new objects and impressions, which is almost impossible to alleviate. It can cause frustration deepened by the feeling of spiritual emptiness. The article or the service itself becomes a fetish, indicating (...) a change in relations between the object and subject. This is related to the revelation of a new dimension of consumption, which itself starts taking on the features of the sacrum. The act of shopping takes on a similarity to certain more sacral rituals. The „puzzle” of sales, special offers and special occasions such as holidays, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother’s Day etc, are the remains of the liturgical year. The impression of “sacralized consumption” is experienced in even greater depth when you step inside what has become known as the “new temples of consumption”, which take on the physical shape of the perfect space, full of harmony, where everything is fully controlled and totally safe, out of the context of time and place. The model of contemporary consumption gives a promise of immediate happiness and salvation, distracting the consumer from reality and giving him an ersatz of the medicine needed to treat his existential fears. Most members of Western society now accept this situation by taking part in it. The question is when they will start to reject those individuals who refuse this lifestyle and accuse them of acting against moral standards and the common good? (shrink)

The article deals with the prosodic competence of learners of German, and more precisely with prosodic units. It is not always easy for learners to correctly determine these units and consequently to set correct sentence accents. Lack of correspondence between prosodic and syntactic units leads sometimes to prosodic errors. The article tries to analyze these discrepancies between prosodic units and syntactic phrases in order to determine certain regularities.

The paper examines changing media representations of Jacinda Ardern, former Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister, from the global broadcaster, BBC News Online, across three key milestones in the politician’s career: her appointment, re-election and resignation. Our socio-semantic analysis of this representation demonstrates how the media intersect her professional identity with age, gender, social class, and later, her identity as a mother. Whilst earlier coverage of Ardern’s career praises her successfully reconciling these aspects of her personal, social and professional identities, later (...) coverage implies that ‘having it all’ was never really possible longer term. We argue that the visibility of this discourse, and the focus on intersectional aspects of Ardern’s personal and social identities, leads to her resignation being positively evaluated as her ‘finally’ succumbing and committing to the ‘natural’ inevitabilities of heterosexual family life. The article considers what such representation means for Ardern and women politicians and leaders more broadly, and contextualises these findings in relation to existing research on media representations of women in politics and leadership. Finally, we also consider the value of a more longitudinal approach to tracking the cumulative effects of the representation of social actors and groups. (shrink)

The article examines the reduction of architecture to the dimension of utility which results in placelessness. The modern redefinition of science as “knowing-making” is essential to this reduction, although it has fundamental and forgotten importance. Drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s and George Grant’s critique of technology, and the ideas of Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Charles-Francois Viel, the significance of the complex relations between theory and practice in architecture will be explored in the context of Kimberly Dovey’s notion of the cycle of lived-space. (...) A re-definition of modern “knowing-making” reveals a semioticlevel which contains new possibilities for meaningful and environmentally attuned architecture within the technological framework. I suggest “designing-building” as an alternative, understood as a process of poetic recreation of meaningful spaces. (shrink)

Author discusses melancholy and music trying to find out what it means for a musical composition to be melancholic.

The practice of evaluating music and music works is widespread. That practice must depend on recognition of values and/or qualities in those works. However this be true it isn't always clear what these values and qualities are and how are the believes entrenched in theory and practice of evaluating musical works. In the aesthetics the most celebrated types of values are aesthetic values and qualities. Author of this paper reexamines the theory of aesthetic values as existing independently from artistic values (...) and artistic qualities. Starting from Monroe C. Beardsley, through Roman Ingarden's theory of value and coming to Nick Zangwill's understanding of evaluation of artworks, the author approaches the problem of judging musical works and the theory that is most needed to ground such practice. (shrink)

Author present Peter Kivy's understanding of music, its expressive powers and its unique status as a music alone. She explains the concept of being moved by music, which has been presented by Peter Kivy in his book Music Alone (Oxford University Press, 1990).

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, USA, mathias_risse{at}ksg.harvard.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> It is a widespread view that support for Fair Trade is called for, whereas agricultural subsidies are pegged as unjustifiable. Though one supports farmers in developing countries while the other does the same for those in already developed ones, there are, nonetheless, similarities between both scenarios. Both are economically `inefficient', upholding production beyond what the market would sustain. In both cases, supportive arguments (...) can assume two forms. First, such arguments might draw on normative claims made by producers. In the case of agricultural subsidies, farmers in developed countries assert claims against their fellow citizens, who ought to accept redistributive measures to keep them in business. In the case of Fair Trade, the claim can be made by farmers in developing nations against consumers, who ought to pay higher prices to keep them in business (under conditions deemed acceptable). Second, arguments to keep producers in business might be presented as the prerogative of both groups: even if farmers in developed countries did not have a claim to be kept in business, these countries would have the right to take measures to do so because they value their products. In the case of Fair Trade, even if farmers in developing nations had no claim against consumers, it is a consumer prerogative to pay more to keep them in business because they value their product or the process of producing it. There are, of course, differences between these scenarios as well, but in light of these parallels in the moral cases for subsidies and Fair Trade, it will be illuminating to examine the arguments for and against subsidies and Fair Trade together. Key Words: trade • subsidies • fairness • markets • development. (shrink)