This is an account of the Uprising fights of a young machinegunner of the “Baszta” Unit from the “W” hour to the honorable surrender at the end of September.

In this paper, I discuss Richard Rorty’s views on intercultural hermeneutics as presented in his essay “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” and in his correspondence with the Indian philosopher Anindita Niyogi Balslev. In doing so, I focus primarily on Rorty’s presumption that instead of providing an “authentic” picture of another culture, the goal of intercultural studies or hermeneutics should be to look if there is anything “of use” that a given culture offers and that is not offered by ours.

In authoritarian states, the discourse on freedom of speech, conducted by those opposed to non-democratic governments, focuses on the core aspects of this freedom: on a right to criticize the government, a right to advocate theories arid ideologies contrary to government-imposed orthodoxy, a right to demand institutional reforms, changes in politics, resignation of the incompetent and the corrupt from positions of authority. The claims for freedom of speech focus on those exercises of freedom that are most fundamental and most beneficial (...) to citizens - and which are denied to them by the government. But in a by-and large democratic polity, where these fundamental benefits of freedom of speech are generally enjoyed by the citizens, the public and scholarly discourse on freedom of speech hovers about the peripheries of that freedom; the focus is on its outer boundaries rather than at the central territory of freedom of speech. Those borderline cases, in which people who are otherwise genuinely committed to the core aspects of freedom of speech may sincerely disagree, include pornography, racist hate speech and religious bigoted expressions, defamation of politicians and of private persons, contempt of court, incitement to violence, disclosure of military or commercial secrets, advertising of merchandise such as alcohol or cigarettes or of services and entertainment such as gambling and prostitution. (shrink)

During the last half of the twentieth century, legal philosophy (or legal theory or jurisprudence) has grown significantly. It is no longer the domain of a few isolated scholars in law and philosophy. Hundreds of scholars from diverse fields attend international meetings on the subject. In some universities, large lecture courses of five hundred students or more study it. The primary aim of the Law and Philosophy Library is to present some of the best original work on legal philosophy from (...) both the Anglo-American and European traditions. Not only does it help make some of the best work avail able to an international audience, but it also encourages increased awareness of, and interaction between, the two major traditions. The primary focus is on full-length scholarly monographs, although some edited volumes of original papers are also included. The Library editors are assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board of internationally renowed scholars. Legal philosophy should not be considered a narrowly circumscribed field. (shrink)

This article engages the considerations of imagination in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur to argue for a moral dimension of the imagination and its objects. Imaginary objects are taken to be mental representations in images and narratives of people or courses of action that are not real in the sense that they are not actual, or have not yet happened. Three claims are made in the article. First, by drawing on the category of possibility, a conceptual distinction is established between imagination and (...) fantasy, (1) I claim that imagination has a moral dimension because it is engaged in considering real-life possibilities. Second, (2) drawing on Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, it is argued that mental representations of selfhood in imagination have a moral dimension because they essentially allow people to understand the development of agency in human selfhood by means of representations of would-be selves and narrative figurations of the self. Third, (3) mental representations of human selves have a moral dimension because they form important points of reference for moral orientations in the field of human praxis (moral pointers). (shrink)

Security is one of the basic values in the life of an individual, society, nation, country, and also at the international level. However, modern security is composed of efficient utilization of the potential within diplomacy and strength, a balanced relationship between soft and hard power. This text aims at presenting an overview of security concepts included in the selected philosophical and social models. This involves bringing closer specific theories and practical actions based on them. Nowadays, this can be seen at (...) the level of relations between military and diplomatic solutions in various conflicts that took place at the turn of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This is the first collection in English devoted exclusively to pragmatist aesthetics. Its main aim is to employ the resources of that rich and exciting tradition in studying artistic phenomena such as film, sculpture, bio-art, poetry, the novel, cuisine, and various body arts. But it also attempts to provide a wider background for such studies by sketching the history of pragmatist reflection on the aesthetic and by discussing some of the main positions that this history has produced: the aesthetic conceptions (...) of C.S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Joseph Margolis, Richard Shusterman (somaesthetics in particular), and others. (shrink)

Władysław Witwicki’s suppositional conception of religious faith was presented extensively in his book La foi des éclairés [Faith of the Enlightened] (1939). The aim of this work was to investigate how so‑called enlightened people (i.e. those with at least a secondary education) reconcile secular knowledge with religious faith. The empirical research presented by Witwicki was based on a number of concepts, such as judgment, supposition, psychological principle of contradiction, sincere belief and insincere belief. Witwicki concluded that the faith of enlightened (...) people consists of suppositions which are held against secular beliefs. However, this conclusion was not sufficiently justified and can only be applied to a certain group of believers. (shrink)

Le Maitre de Claville należy do tradycji moralistycznej klasycyzmu francuskiego i stara się podołać niebagatelnemu zadaniu stworzenia portretu człowieka godnego, honnete homme’a. Usiłując zdefiniować pojęcie cnoty, odwołuje się do własnego smaku estetycznego, subiektywnych emocji radości, zachwytu i rozkoszy wynikających z obcowania z pięknem. Z dużą dowolnością wybiera to, co sam uważa za najdoskonalsze z antyku, Biblii i w najnowszych prądach myślowych swego czasu: m.in. racjonalizmu. Połączenie tych trzech elementow nie jest łatwe. W jego rozważaniach ujawnia się wysiłek moralisty starającego się (...) nadać swej koncepcji kształt logicznie uporządkowanej doktryny, z elementow swobodnie wybranych, nie zawsze ze sobą zgodnych. (shrink)

Die Aussprüche des Konfuzius sind einer der zentralen Texte der chinesischen Kultur. Dennoch ist die Geschichte ihrer Entstehung und Überlieferung weitgehend unerforscht und der heute gelesene Text samt seinem Verständnis kritiklos von der chinesischen Tradition übernommen worden. Dieses Buch unternimmt es, diese Versäumnisse nachzuholen: Durch die Analyse der Aussprüche und anderer früher Texte entsteht ein differenziertes Bild ihrer Entstehung aus mündlich überlieferten Sprüchen und Anekdoten über ein sich schnell verfestigendes Textkorpus bis hin zum Buch im heutigen Sinne. Anhand historischer Quellen (...) und der heute noch in grosser Zahl und Vielfalt greifbaren Textzeugnisse zeichnet der Autor die zahlreichen Wege nach, welche die Aussprüche in ihren verschiedenen Versionen zu uns genommen haben. Darüber hinaus beleuchtet er die geistesgeschichtlichen, politischen und kulturellen Zusammenhänge, welche die Gestalt und das Verständnis des Textes beeinflussten. Zuletzt zeichnet die Arbeit ein Bild von den Entstellungen, denen der Text und sein Verständnis im Laufe der Geschichte unterworfen waren und zeigt den Weg auf, diese zu überwinden und zu einer kritischen und streng wissenschaftlichen Lektüre zu gelangen. Was dabei an den Aussprüchen sichtbar wird, ist auch beispielhaft für die Problematik anderer konfuzianischer Klassiker und der altchinesischen Literatur überhaupt. (shrink)

We propose a non-standard interpretation of Alternating-time Temporal Logic with imperfect information, for which no commonly accepted semantics has been proposed yet. Rather than changing the semantic structures, we generalize the usual interpretation of formulae in single states to sets of states. We also propose a new epistemic operator for ?practical? or ?constructive? knowledge, and we show that the new logic (which we call Constructive Strategic Logic) is strictly more expressive than most existing solutions, while it retains the same model (...) checking complexity. Finally, we study properties of constructive knowledge and other operators in this non-standard semantics. (shrink)

Wojciech Torzewski What Kind of ‘History’ are We? – the Historicity of Human from Ethical PerspectiveThis article presents the ethical aspect of the concept of narrative identity, especially in relation to the concept of Charles Taylor. The author makes also attemption to reconstruct the two main objections that can be drawn at this concept. Namely, firstly, the complaint relativization of the ethical and, secondly, the complaint absolutizing ethical perspective. Both objections to the concept of narrative identity shall be regarded (...) as irrelevant. Keywords: ethics, narrative identity, historicity, history. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur declares that “being-entangled in stories” is an inherent property of the human condition. He introduces the notion of narrative identity—a form of identity constructed on the basis of a self-constructed life-narrative, which becomes a source of meaning and self-understanding. This article wishes to present chosen instances of life writing whose subjects resist yielding a life-story and reject the notions of narrative and identity. In line with Adam Phillips’s remarks regarding Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), such works—which I (...) refer to as fragmentary life writing—emerge out of a profound scepticism about any form of “fixing” oneself and confining the variety and randomness of experience to one of the available autobiographical plots. The primary example of the genre is Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1975)—an inventory of approximately 1,500 memories conveyed in the form of radically short passages beginning with the words “I remember.” Despite the qualified degree of unity provided by the fact that all the recollections come from the consciousness of a single person, the book does not arrange its content in any discernible order—chronological or thematic; instead, the reader is confronted with a life-in-fragments. Although individual passages could be part of a coming-of-age, a coming-out or a portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man narrative, Brainard is careful not to let any of them consolidate. An attempt at defining the characteristics of the proposed genre will be followed by an indication of more recent examples of fragmentary life writing and a reflection on its prospects for development. (shrink)

The paper characterizes axiomatically a class of temptation-driven preferences. The key (but not the only) novelty of the paper is the idea that the alternative which tempts when an item x is consumed may not be the same as the alternative which tempts when another item y is consumed. For any single item to be ultimately consumed, the other items can be ranked by how much they tempt. An individual contemplates, as an alternative consumption, only the item that tempts most. (...) The utility of a menu is then equal to the utility of the item that is consumed less a (psychological) cost of resisting temptation; this cost depends on both: the item to be consumed and the item that tempts. Unlike most of the existing literature, the axioms are imposed on deterministic menus, not on menus of lotteries. (shrink)

The most‐critical point of reproductive development in all sexually reproducing species is the transition from mitotic to meiotic cell cycle. Studies in unicellular fungi have indicated that the decision to enter meiosis must be made before the beginning of the premeiotic S phase. Recent data from the mouse1 suggest that this timing of meiosis initiation is a universal feature shared also by multicellular eukaryotes. In contrast, the signaling cascade that leads to meiosis initiation shows great diversity among species. BioEssays 29:511–514, (...) 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Technical and pharmacological revolution in contemporary medicine has not resolved the ethical problems that seem to be more relevant today than ever before. Most of the papers that concern medical ethics focus on `great' problems, such as human genome sequencing, organizms cloning and quantitative or qualitative interference with life creation. This article, however, describes practical ethical problems that the doctors face in every-day practice. First of all, the problem of how thestandards of prophilaxis and treatment should be established when the (...) costs exceed financial possibilities of a health system. Secondly, how to face the problem of rare diseases when the cost of a single patient treatment may be equal to the whole medical department budget. Thirdly, how to procede with elderly patients with multiple diseases qualified for invasive procedures. All of these examples share the common base: in these cases the technical equipment is at our disposal, yet we cannot or we do not want to use it. (shrink)

Ludwik Fleck says that a thought-collective develops a thought-style which shapes the ways of perceiving the world and thinking of the world by its members. So how could it happen that at the end of 1900 Max Planck, whose thinking was determined by classical mechanics, managed to think that energy is quantized - the idea that contradicted the principles of Newton's mechanics? My answer is that Planck did not intend to think it.

Legal philosophy must be based on a set of substantive political values about such fundamental matters as the nature of the political community and the meaning of human freedom. This general thesis is illustrated by the analysis of moral discourse about the justification and limits of liberty-rights and equality-rights.The most effective way of arguing about the liberal conception of individual liberties (consistent with the Millian Harm Principle) is by recourse to the priority of the right over the good. But this (...) conception is little more than a restatement of the Harm Principle itself hence, a more fundamental justification for it is required. This can be provided by a substantive conception of equality of individuals as moral agents who are capable of choosing, pursuing and changing their own conceptions of the good, within the parameters of avoiding harm to others. (shrink)

This book challenges the widespread view of Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic and predominantly religious position on mimesis. -/- Taking mimesis as a crucial conceptual point of reference in reading Kierkegaard, this book offers a nuanced understanding of the relation between aesthetics and religion in his thought. Kaftanski shows how Kierkegaard's dialectical-existential reading of mimesis interlaces aesthetic and religious themes, including the familiar core concepts of imitation, repetition, and admiration as well as the newly arisen notions of affectivity, contagion, and crowd behavior. Kierkegaard’s (...) enduring relevance to the malaises of our own day is firmly established by his classic concern for the meaning of human life informed by reflective meditation on the mimeticorigins of the contemporary age.​ -/- Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kierkegaard, Continental philosophy, the history of aesthetics, and critical and religious studies. (shrink)

By spelling out the affective dimension of admiration, this paper challenges the view of admiration as a trustworthy means of detecting morally desirable qualities in exemplars. Such a view of admiration, foundational for the current debate on exemplars in moral education, holds that admiration is a self-motivating emotion essentially oriented toward the good and the excellent. I demonstrate that this view ignores the affective aspects of admiration explored widely in the history of philosophy on which the debate on moral exemplars (...) substantially draws. Focusing on Spinoza, Smith, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, I bring to light their largely skeptical views of the moral value of admiration. These thinkers indicate that admiration can be influenced by, and is often conflated with, other emotions, and can arise in us through behavioral mimicry; moreover, admiration is often oriented toward the mediocre and corrupt, is contagious, self-referential, collective, and has limited motivational power. Their remarks on the affective dimension of admiration call into question admiration’s applicability and usefulness in moral exemplarity. (shrink)

We characterize all finitary consequence relations over S4.3, both syntactically, by exhibiting so-called passive rules that extend the given logic, and semantically, by providing suitable strongly adequate classes of algebras. This is achieved by applying an earlier result stating that a modal logic L extending S4 has projective unification if and only if L contains S4.3. In particular, we show that these consequence relations enjoy the strong finite model property, and are finitely based. In this way, we extend the known (...) results by Bull and Fine, from logics, to consequence relations. We also show that the lattice of consequence relations over S4.3 is countable and distributive and it forms a Heyting algebra. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new account of Richard Rorty’s interpretation of Michel Foucault, which demonstrates that in the course of his career, Rorty presented several diverse (often mutually exclusive) criticisms of Foucault’s political thought. These give different interpretations of what he took to be the flaws of that thought, but also provide different explanations as to the sources of these flaws. I argue that Rorty’s specific criticisms can be divided into two overall groups. Sometimes he saw Foucault’s rejection (...) of bourgeois democracies and bourgeois utopias as a specific case of his general critique regarding the structures of social life as inherently oppressive. At other times he seemed to attribute to Foucault a view that—while not all forms of social life are inherently oppressive—bourgeois democracies certainly are, in a very specific and radical way. In conclusion I show that Rorty’s interpretation of Foucault should be understood in the context of his approach toward the ‘American Cultural Left.’. (shrink)

We provide an algorithm for determining a categorial grammar from linguistic data that essentially uses unification of type-schemes assigned to atoms. The algorithm presented here extends an earlier one restricted to rigid categorial grammars, introduced in [4] and [5], by admitting non-rigid outputs. The key innovation is the notion of an optimal unifier, a natural generalization of that of a most general unifier.

Author: Burszta Wojciech Józef Title: SUBJECTIVE RECONSTRUCTION OF NATIONALISM (Podmiotowa rekonstrukcja nacjonalizmu) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.12, number: 2011/1, pages: 311-328 Keywords: NATIONALISM, METONYMY, METAPHOR, IDENTITY, SYMBOLIC CULTURE, PROPOSITION Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The article invokes the idea of subjective reconstruction of symbolic culture, originally proposed by Jerzy Kmita in his book Culture and Cognition (1985), and places his thesis in contemporary world of cultural flows. The author focuses (...) on demonstrating how we can apply a subjective interpretation of culture phenomena in the context of nationalism and national mythology. Renaissance of the ideology of nationalism nowadays is not so striking in the light of detailed reconstruction of a hidden normative and directive propositions which people formulate according to a proper order of the social arrangements. Subjective reconstruction of culture captures both the phenomenon of long duration processes, as well as those that are emergent. (shrink)

In [2], Bar-Hillel, Gaifman, and Shamir prove that the simple phrase structure grammars (SPGs) defined by Chomsky are equivalent in a certain sense to Bar-Hillel's bidirectional categorial grammars (BCGs). On the other hand, Cohen [3] proves the equivalence of the latter ones to what the calls free categorial grammars (FCGs). They are closely related to Lambek's syntactic calculus which, in turn, is based on the idea due to Ajdukiewicz [1]. For the reasons which will be discussed in the last section, (...) Cohen's proof seems to be at least incomplete. This paper yields a direct proof of the equivalence ofFCGs andSPGs. (shrink)

Traditional martial arts continue to be interesting and inspiring to many people around the globe. Some of their contemporary adaptations attract enthusiasts for whom they are especially important. In this article, the author bases his observations on his own long-term participation. The analysis takes into account the influence of the perspectives of Jigoro Kano and several other creators of modern varieties of Japanese budo. It can be concluded that regular, even daily, practice—cultivating martial arts and internalizing its values—co-creates the lifestyle (...) of instructors and advanced students. (shrink)

Some notions of the logic of questions (presupposition of a question, validation, entailment) are used for defining certain kinds of completeness of elementary theories. Presuppositional completeness, closely related to -completeness ([3], [6]), is shown to be fulfilled by strong elementary theories like Peano arithmetic.

In _Roman Ingarden’s Philosophy of Literature_ Wojciech Chojna makes Ingarden’s philosophy of literature more consistent with Husserl’s phenomenology and more immune to both absolutism and relativism. The latter is overcome not through falling back on essentialism but from within itself.

Author: Torzewski Wojciech Title: HERMENEUTICS AND THE QUESTION OF REASON (Hermeneutyka a kwestia rozumu) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2010, vol:.11, number: 2010/2, pages: 29-40 Keywords: HERMENEUTICS, RATIONALITY, INTERPRETATION Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:This article is an expression and an attempt to justify the belief that hermeneutic philosophy is an interpretation of the rationality’s concept. Although hermeneutics itself is a critique of a certain form of rationalism, and therefore falls under (...) charges “irrationality”, the concept of reason is an essential component of its identity as a philosophy. (shrink)