Given the ubiquitous nature of love, numerous theories have been proposed to explain its existence. One such theory refers to love as a commitment device, suggesting that romantic love evolved to foster commitment between partners and enhance their reproductive success. In the present study, we investigated this hypothesis using a large-scale sample of 86,310 individual responses collected across 90 countries. If romantic love is universally perceived as a force that fosters commitment between long-term partners, we expected that individuals likely to (...) suffer greater losses from the termination of their relationships—including people of lower socioeconomic status, those with many children, and women—would place a higher value on romantic love compared to people with higher status, those with fewer children, and men. These predictions were supported. Additionally, we observed that individuals from countries with a higher (vs. lower) Human Development Index placed a greater level of importance on romantic love, suggesting that modernization might influence how romantic love is evaluated. On average, participants worldwide were unwilling to commit to a long-term romantic relationship without love, highlighting romantic love’s universal importance. (shrink)

The paper presents fragments of a Byzantine icon discovered in 2015 during regular archaeological excavations carried out in Chełm, eastern Poland. Iconographic analyses allow the nine surviving fragments to be interpreted as belonging to a diptych wing with the Great Feasts cycle. The icon represents archaic iconography of the subject, with the scene of Transfiguration placed after Entry into Jerusalem and before the Crucifixion. The artefact was created in the second half or at the close of the 12th century, and (...) it was made from steatite, which has been confirmed by petrographic analyses. The icon was discovered in the remains of a palace complex of King Daniel Romanovich, the greatest ruler of the Galicia-Volhynia Lands. The results of the archaeological research allow the terminus ante quem for the icon’s arrival in Chełm to be determined as before the middle of the 13th century. Various possible explanations as to how the icon found its way to Chełm are also explored in the paper. (shrink)

Article Zofia A. Brzozowska / Mirosław J. Leszka / Kirił Marinow/ Teresa Wolińska (eds.). Widmo Mahometa, cień Samuela. Cesarstwo bizantyńskie w relacji zprzedstawicielami innych religii i kultur (VII–XV wiek) was published on February 1, 2021 in the journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift (volume 114, issue 1).

The immediate inspiration for this text is Tomasz Polak's book "System kościelny czyli przewagi pana K" (The Church System or the Advantages of Mr. K). The author analyses in detail how the "system" works, claiming that it has taken over the church from the very beginning of its existence, absorbing the original vitality of the community. The conclusion he reaches is that the "system" is unreformable. In this article I compare T. Polak's basic thought with what Tomasz Węcławski (...) wrote years ago about the church. I emphasize that this is the same person who changed his name due to life circumstances. I try to analyze how far the thinking, the way of argumentation, and finally the formulated conclusions have changed. The key word for these considerations is "phantasm." In this light, the question of God "with me, in me, and over me" dies in the face of the workings of the "church system." The phantasm prevails over man and his living relationship to God. "The Church System or the Advantages of Mr. K", is a very sad story about an individual, even though told in an expert and difficult language. Religion, faith, which someone makes the determinant and meaning of life, is something that from the beginning is doomed to drift towards an unshakeable phantasm, something that, in fact, will never come true, except in the most intimate and private dimension. (shrink)

Gender differences in allocation choices made by children aged 5 to 6 The main aim of this article is to supplement gaps in current knowledge concerning the development of competences related to goods allocation choices. We conducted a study in which 158 children aged 5 to 6 made choices concerning allocations of goods between themselves and the other, anonymous child. The crucial findings point to boys as more selfish in their choices than girls. Furthermore, we provide evidence for the claim (...) that young children are aware that their choices are egoistic. Since our study adopted a similar methodology to that of the recent Swiss study, we were able to conduct cross-cultural analysis. The comparison of children's choices in the Polish study and the Swiss one pictures Polish children as displaying a stronger egalitarian preferences and revealing egoistic preferences less frequently than the children from Switzerland. (shrink)

Until very recently, normative theorizing in ethics was frequently conducted without even mentioning uncertainty. Just a few years ago, Sven Ove Hansson described this state of affairs with the slogan: “Ethics still lives in a Newtonian world.” In the new Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Probability, David McCarthy writes that “mainstream moral philosophy has not been much concerned with probability,” understanding probability as “the best-known tool for thinking about uncertainty.” This special predilection for certainty in ethics was surprising since most (...) decisions or evaluations are made both by individuals and policy-makers through the fog of a widely understood uncertainty that includes risk, ignorance, indeterminacy. Therefore, the main task of this special issue is to encourage philosophers to rethink the standard paradigm in ethics by redirecting discussions about ethical questions to problems involving different kinds of uncertainty when an individual or a policy maker does not have access to or knowledge about. (shrink)

In this article, I present the argument that educational theory has specific character, which distinguishes it from most scientific disciplines. It requires the application of not only strictly scientific methods, which essentially consist of descriptions and explanations, but also normative ones, which indicate how it is related to philosophy and ethics. Its essential connections with philosophy and ethics cause that clear and final thesis are actually impossible to claim, but from the other hand, it is the only discipline which, according (...) to its definition, tries to answer practical-moral questions.The crucial elements of this analysis are the presentation of the justification of a thesis on the specific character of educational theory, which will be accomplished with the concept of “research potential”, formulated for its purposes, and showing the consequences of this particular characteristic of the discipline being discussed. (shrink)

A shift away from exclusionary moral reductionism can be discerned in modern interpretations of Kant’s philosophy of religion. Consequently, at least since the 1970s, historical faith has been appreciated as a necessary and desirable element of Kant’s philosophy of religion. One of the reasons prompting Kant to include historical faith in his system of the philosophy of religion is what commentators on Kant’s philosophy call the ‘moral gap’ as there is a disproportion between the limited competence of man as a (...) natural being and moral goals that seem unattainable. For the believer, the content of historical faith offers a real solution to the disproportion between his limitations as a natural being and the goals set for him by practical reason. For the believer, the ‘moral gap’ is not just a theoretical problem, but an existential challenge whose solution lies beyond his own limited competence. In this article, I consider whether historical faith can also provide a theoretical supplement to the picture of one’s own life. If so, then the content of historical faith may also prove important for the non-believer. (shrink)

In this paper we present a tableau system for deontic logics with the operator of explicit permission. By means of this system the decidability of the considered logics can be proved. We will sketch how these logics are semantically defined by means of relating semantics and how they provide a simple solution to the free choice permission problem. In short, these logics employ relating implication and a certain propositional constant. These two are in turn used to define deontic operators similarly (...) as in Andersonian-Kangerian reduction, which uses different intensional implications and constants. (shrink)

In September 2010, two Polish scholars, Slawomir Czapnik and Tomasz Krawczyk, conducted an interview with Zygmunt Bauman while being hosted at his home in Leeds. The conversation in Polish was recorded, but the recording files were – it seemed irrevocably – accidentally deleted. It was not until 2023 that Slawomir Czapnik found the audio files and decided to publish the conversation, having translated it into English. It provides a better understanding of the views of arguably one of the most (...) eminent – albeit hugely controversial – contemporary sociologists in the world, who died in 2017. On the one hand, the conversation is a document of its time, of the turn of the first and second decades of the 21st century and of the international realities of the so-called ‘war on terror’, but on the other hand it raises questions that are still relevant today about the legitimacy of political power in the modern world. It shows the shift from a concern with ‘security’ (the domain of social security, characteristic of the welfare state and solid modernity) to ‘safety’ (the domain of personal security, characteristic of the neoliberal, liquid phase of modernity). Bauman's reflections are extremely valuable today, because now – after the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the rise of tensions in the Middle East and the rise of the populist right in the world – there are the issues of international problems, the weakening of the nation-state and inability to solve global issues (including such basic ones as security) locally. The response of an increasingly vulnerable state is to intensify surveillance, a mechanism for population control. Bauman also draws attention to the extremely momentous issue of the just society and the fight against injustice. For Bauman, the sociological imagination must delve into how power works and what are its consequences for freedom and moral responsibility. (shrink)

The book aims to formalise tableau methods for the logics of propositions and names. The methods described are based on Set Theory. The tableau rule was reduced to an ordered n-tuple of sets of expressions where the first element is a set of premises, and the following elements are its supersets.

The paper discusses the origin of two Germanic terms for ‘Atlantic herring, _Clupea harengus _L.’. The Proto-Germanic noun _*siled- _m. ‘herring’, attested in most North Germanic languages (e.g. ON. _sild_, Far. _síld_, OSv. _sild_, Sv. _sill_, Norw. _sil_), cannot be treated as inherited. It seems to represent a Saami (or Laponian) borrowing, cf. Saa. (Northern) _sâlled_, (Lule) _sallēt _‘herring’.

W artykule zaprezentowane zostały postaci czterech polskich historyków filozofii greckiej z okresu przełomu XIX i XX w., a także pierwszej połowy wieku XX, którzy podejmowali wyprawy do Grecji i Aten jako do kolebki filozofii. Są to, w kolejności odbytych wypraw: W. Dzieduszycki, W. Lutosławski, T. Sinko oraz W. Witwicki. Każdy z nich wyruszył do Aten na innym etapie swej naukowej kariery, każdy inaczej przeżył osobisty kontakt z ojczyzną filozofii i każdy z nich w innej formie sprawozdawał swoje wrażenia i refleksje (...) czytelnikom. (shrink)

Bruineberg and colleagues helpfully distinguish between instrumental and ontological interpretations of Markov blankets, exposing the dangers of using the former to make claims about the latter. However, proposing a sharp distinction neglects the value of recognising a continuum spanning from instrumental to ontological. This value extends to the related distinction between “being” and “having” a model.

In this interview, Tomasz Zarębski speaks with Allan Janik, co-author of _Wittgenstein’s Vienna_ (1973, with Stephen Toulmin), on the occasion of the 50 th anniversary of the publication of this pathbreaking book. The conversation concerns the circumstances, motivations and reasons for his undertaking the work on the book, as well as its reception and place in Wittgenstein scholarship. A large part of the discussion refers to his perspective of Wittgenstein, Toulmin’s philosophical writings, and Janik’s own vision of philosophy. The (...) interview took place in Innsbruck on 23 rd and 25 th August 2023. (shrink)

In _Genealogy of Obedience_ Justyna Włodarczyk provides both a historical account of the changing methods of dog training in America since the 1850s and theoretical reflections on how the understanding of training has been entangled in conceptualizations of race, class and gender.

Many studies examine a stressors-professional burnout (PB) relation, but only few consider the role of ethical conflicts (ECs) in this context. The aim of this study was to characterize ECs' frequency and level of burden with them among nurses and to establish the relations between ECs' frequency, burden and PB. One hundred nurses participated in this study. ECs' frequency and burden were tested with an originally developed questionnaire. PB was examined with Maslach Burnout Inventory. Most frequent ECs concerned a nurse-patient (...) relationship. PB was positively related to ECs' frequency (r = .54; p = .001) and burden (r = .22; p = .03). Frequency of specific conflict did not imply burden with it and vice versa. ECs' frequency seems more important for PB than a level of burden with them. The most frequent and the most burdening conflicts may lead to development of PB but the less frequent and less burdening ones are also dangerous. (shrink)

Compared to existing classical approaches to semiotics which are dyadic (signifier/signified, F. de Saussure) and triadic (symbol/concept/object, Ch. S. Peirce), this theory can be characterized as tetradic ([sign/semion]//[object/noema]) and is the result of either doubling the dyadic approach along the semiotic/ordinary dimension or splitting the ‘concept’ of the triadic one into two (semiotic/ordinary). Other important features of this approach are (a) the distinction made between concepts (only functional pairs of extent and intent) and categories (as representations of expressions) and (b) (...) the indication of the need for providing the mathematical passage from the duality between two sets (where one is a singleton) within systems of sets to category-theoretical monoids within systems of categories while waiting for the solution of this problem in the field of logic. Last but not least, human language expressions are the most representative physical instances of semiotic objects. Moreover, as computational experiments which are possible with linguistic objects present a high degree of systematicity (of oppositions), in general, it is relatively easy to elucidate their dependence on the concepts underlying signs. This new semiotic theory or rather this new research program emerged as the fruit of experimentation and reflection on the application of data science tools elaborated within the frameworks of Rough Set Theory (RST), Formal Context Analysis (FCA) and, though only theoretically, Distributed Information Logic (DIL). The semiotic objects (s-objects) of this theory can be described in tabular datasets. Nevertheless, at this stage of formalisation of the theory, lattices (not trees) can be used as working representation structures for characterizing the components of concept systems and graphs for categories of each layer. (shrink)

The article is a tentative analysis of the construction of reality created in Bolesław Leśmian’s lyric poetry; an attempt to specify its most important elements, the relationships between them and the main mechanisms which control the poetical world of the author of Łąka [The Meadow). The discussion centres on the motifs of existence and non-existence, death and nothingness, time and space, as well as the creation of Leśmian’s characters, especially God, who is presented in a variety of images (from the (...) presentation of the poetic consequences of Nietzsche’s conception of God’s death, depriving him of his omnipotence, placing him outside the world and his humanization to his pantheistic diffusion into the reality created in the poems). (shrink)