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)

Folk psychology's usefulness extends beyond its role in explaining and predicting behavior, i.e., beyond the intentional stance. In this paper, I critically examine the concept of phenomenal stance. According to this idea, attributions of phenomenal mental states impact laypeople's perception of moral patiency. The more phenomenal states we ascribe to others, the more we care about their well-being. The perception of moral patients—those affected by moral actions—is hypothesized to diverge from the perception of moral agents, those who perform moral actions. (...) Despite its appeal, especially considering its exploration of the established relationship between folk psychology and moral cognition, the idea of the phenomenal stance faces significant challenges. It relies on laypeople recognizing the phenomenality of experience, yet experimental philosophy of consciousness suggests that there is no folk concept of phenomenal consciousness. Moreover, proponents of the phenomenal stance often conflate phenomenal states with emotional states despite the existence of both non-emotional conscious states and, arguably, non-conscious emotional states. Additionally, attributions of conscious mental states impact the perception of both moral agency and patiency. I report on experimental results indicating that some of these attributions lower the perceived moral patiency. Besides providing reasons to reject the idea of the phenomenal stance, I argue that the perception of moral patiency is guided by attributions of affective states (affects, emotions, moods). I call such attributions the affective stance and explore this concept’s relationship with empathy and other psychological concepts. (shrink)

The paper presents an argument for respecting conscientious refusals based on the Thomistic account of conscience; the argument does not employ the notion of right. The main idea is that acting against one’s conscience necessarily makes the action objectively wrong and performed in bad faith, and expecting someone to act against his or her conscience is incompatible with requiring him or her to act in good faith. In light of this idea I also examine the issue of obligations imposed on (...) objectors as well as the claims that conscientious objectors should change their profession. (shrink)

My preoccupation with witnessing mutated through several phases before it turned into the book you are holding. It germinated while I was writing my PhD dissertation at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, when the gulf between the theory of testimony that so enchanted contemporary thinking around the ethics of memory on the one hand, and the humanitarian practice of witnessing I was studying on the other, first struck me as (...) philosophically awkward and politically suspect. (shrink)

Quality Space Theory is a holistic model of qualitative states. On this view, individual mental qualities are defined by their locations in a space of relations, which reflects a similar space of relations among perceptible properties. This paper offers an extension of Quality Space Theory to temporal perception. Unconscious segmentation of events, the involvement of early sensory areas, and asymmetries of dominance in multi-modal perception of time are presented as evidence for the view.

From the perspective of philosophy of science and technologies, we firstly attend to the issue of the role of nanotechnologies within the evolution of technologies. We recognize their utmost importance in the respect that they are technologies of life itself. We further explain that the nano-level is the domain of intersection of the rules of quantum physics and traditional Newtonian physics. This is our starting point from which we discuss the issue of conditions under which minimizing things also changes their (...) functional essence. We use the example of the Drexler vs. Smalley debate to demonstrate the paradigmatic incomparability of the two perspectives and the physical-chemical and engineering-related limits of nanotechnologies. We discuss to what extent are the dangers and ethical implications emerging from Drexler’s contemplations real, be it what he calls the “grey goo” problem or the issues of molecular production. We regard certain problems linked to synthetic biology as more serious. We conclude our text with the consideration that the human civilization should think of the possibilities of nanotechnologies in the development of life as an existential challenge. (shrink)

The book is a systematic study of the issue of self-individuation in the scholastic debate on principles of individuation. The point of departure is a general formulation of the problem of individuation acceptable for all the participants of the scholastic debate: a principle of individuation of x is what makes x individual. The book argues against a prima facie plausible view that everything that is individual is individual by itself and not by anything distinct from it. The keynote topic of (...) the book is a detailed analysis of the two competing ways of rejecting the Strong Self-Individuation Thesis: the Scotistic and the Thomistic one. The book defends the latter one, discussing a number of issues concerning substantial and accidental forms, essences, properties, instantiation, the Thomistic notion of materia signata, Frege’s Begriff-Gegenstand distinction, and Geach’s form-function analogy developed in his writings on Aquinas. In the context of both the scholastic and contemporary metaphysics, the book offers a framework for dealing with issues of individuality and defends a Thomistic theory of individuation. (shrink)

The study aims at exploring the salience and functions of media and television contents in children’s lives by focusing on their uses as a discursive resource in naturally occurring peer talk. We observed and recorded Israeli children talk in everyday, natural settings in two separate studies, in 1999–2002 and in 2012–2013. Detailed discourse analysis of television-based interactions from an ethnographic, child-centered perspective reveals the enduring centrality of television as an enjoyable, available, and shared cultural resource with valuable social, cognitive, and (...) discursive affordances: it is frequently mentioned during everyday adult-free interactions; utilized as the basis for drawing and negotiating boundaries and hierarchies within the peer community; and facilitates experiencing a variety of discursive literacy skills, ranging between practicing adherence to original texts and creativity and distancing from them. These findings provide further evidence for the mediatization of everyday life, and may have educational implications, which are discussed. (shrink)

In the paper I discuss Geach’s rejection of volitions (inner acts of the will) both in the exegesis of Aquinas and in systematic action theory – a rejection followed by some analytical commentators of Aquinas (like Davies and Kenny). I claim that Geach’s interpretation of Aquinas’s action theory in terms of tendencies (treating the will as a special kind of tendency) enables – pace Geach – a sound defense of volitionism both in the exegesis of Aquinas and in the action (...) theory. In other words, I offer arguments in favour of volitions (inner acts of the will) starting from some insights to be found in Geach, and I response to some standard objections against volitionism. Moreover, I try to sketch a framework (based on an ontology of tendencies suggested by Geach) suitable to discuss some other volitionist claims. I proceed in four steps: first I introduce the definition of a volition or inner act of the will that may be ascribed to various camps in the volitionism debate; then I discuss three main arguments of Geach against volitionism – the argument from trying, the argument from voluntary omissions, and the argument from natural theology. I pay special attention to the issue of the timing of volitions. (shrink)

W literaturze przedmiotu poświęconej intelektualnemu dorobkowi Karola Linneusza (1707-1778) rozpatruje się jego wpływ na rozwój nauki w dwóch kontekstach. W pierwszym przyjmuje się optykę, w której Linneusz opisywany jest jako samotny geniusz i tytan pracy, który samodzielnie dokonał reformy nauk przyrodniczych w zakresie taksonomii. W drugim, oprócz oczywistego wkładu przyrodnika, bierze się pod uwagę również inne postacie, partycypujące w naukowym świecie osiemnastowiecznej historii naturalnej. W artykule przedstawiono założenia interpretacji Linneusz-badacz i Linneusz-twórca stylu badawczego oraz ustalono, czy dają one komplementarny obraz (...) rozwoju praktyki badawczej przyrodnika. W tym celu posłużono się zaproponowanym przez Ludwika Flecka rozróżnieniem kolektywów myślowych, na które składają się dwa kręgi: ezoteryczny i egzoteryczny. ---------------------------------------- Zgłoszono: 16/03/2024. Zrecenzowano: 15/05/2024. Zaakceptowano do publikacji: 6/08/2024. (shrink)

The following paper discusses John of St. Thomas’ study of the way in which a habit (moral or epistemic virtue or vice) is a cause of an action it prompts. I begin with contrasting the question of causality of habits with the general question of the causal relevance of dispositions (2). I argue that habits constitute a very peculiar kind of dispositions marked by the connection with the properties of being difficult and being easy, and there are some special reasons (...) to admit the irreducibility of dispositions of this kind. I argue also that there is a special sort of causal connection between a habit and an action it actually prompts. Then I present an analysis of four theses of John of St. Thomas on the causality of habits, which, I think, constitute the most mature and reliable study of the causality of habits in the scholastic tradition: (i) Habits are efficient causes of actions they prompt (3.1). (ii) Virtues do determine the very natures of actions they prompt (3.2); (iii) Virtues do not have a proper counterpart among the characteristics of actions they prompt (3.3); (iv) The formal object of causality of virtue is a masterpiece performance of an action (3.4). In my analyses of John’s arguments for these theses I make three claims: not all powers are “in state of readiness for action”; habits are powers of powers or dispositions of powers; the general concept of a strategy is the key to grasp the properties of being difficult and being easy, and habits should be analysed as a kind of strategies. (shrink)

In this paper we study the status of the arithmetical completeness of dynamic logic. We prove that for finitistic proof systems for dynamic logic results beyond arithmetical completeness are very unlikely. The role of the set of natural numbers is carefully analyzed.

In this paper we argue that one-way quantum computation can be seen as a form of phase transition with the available information about the solution of the computation being the order parameter. We draw a number of striking analogies between standard thermodynamical quantities such as energy, temperature, work, and corresponding computational quantities such as the amount of entanglement, time, potential capacity for computation, respectively. Aside from being intuitively pleasing, this picture allows us to make novel conjectures, such as an estimate (...) of the necessary critical time to finish a computation and a proposal of suitable architectures for universal one-way computation in 1D. (shrink)

The interaction between syntax and its semantics is one which has been well studied in categorical logic. The results of this particular study are employed to understand how the brain is able to create meanings. To emphasize the toy character of the proposed model, we prefer to speak of the homunculus brain rather than the brain per se. The homunculus brain consists of neurons, each of which is modeled by a category, and axons between neurons, which are modeled by functors (...) between the corresponding neuron-categories. Each neuron has its own program enabling its working, i.e. a theory of this neuron. In analogy to what is known from categorical logic, we postulate the existence of a pair of adjoint functors, called Lang and Syn, from a category, now called BRAIN, of categories, to a category, now called MIND, of theories. Our homunculus is a kind of “mathematical robot”, the neuronal architecture of which is not important. Its only aim is to provide us with the opportunity to study how such a simple brain-like structure could “create meanings” and perform abstraction operations out of its purely syntactic program. The pair of adjoint functors Lang and Syn model the mutual dependencies between the syntactical structure of a given theory of MIND and the internal logic of its semantics given by a category of BRAIN. In this way, a formal language and its meanings are interwoven with each other in a manner corresponding to the adjointness of the functors Lang and Syn. Higher cognitive functions of abstraction and realization of concepts are also modelled by a corresponding pair of adjoint functors. The categories BRAIN and MIND interact with each other with their entire structures and, at the same time, these very structures are shaped by this interaction. (shrink)

We discuss the role of the notion of information in the description of physical reality. We consider theories for which dynamics is linear with respect to stochastic mixing. We point out that the no-cloning and no-deleting principles emerge in any such theory, if law of conservation of information is valid, and two copies contain more information than one copy. We then describe the quantum case from this point of view.

Physics is inseparably connected with western philosophy. From the seventieth century, physics began to play the role similar to that of ontology. Moreover, many notions and problems moved from philosophy to physics. That way it came into being something that is now called „philosophy in physics”. It means that some traditional philosophical questions, like for example the problem of individualization, emerge in physics in a new, exact and mathematical form. Therefore, physics will in the future become gradually philosophy.