Joshua Greene has argued that the empirical findings of cognitive science have implications for ethics. In particular, he has argued (1) that people’s deontological judgments in response to trolley problems are strongly influenced by at least one morally irrelevant factor, personal force, and are therefore at least somewhat unreliable, and (2) that we ought to trust our consequentialist judgments more than our deontological judgments when making decisions about unfamiliar moral problems. While many cognitive scientists have rejected Greene’s dual-process theory of (...) moral judgment on empirical grounds, philosophers have mostly taken issue with his normative assertions. For the most part, these two discussions have occurred separately. The current analysis aims to remedy this situation by philosophically analyzing the implications of moral dilemma research using the CNI model of moral decision-making – a formalized, mathematical model that decomposes three distinct aspects of moral-dilemma judgments. In particular, we show how research guided by the CNI model reveals significant conceptual, empirical, and theoretical problems with Greene’s dual-process theory, thereby questioning the foundations of his normative conclusions. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty has serious consequences for human lives, social values, and economy. The main aim of the study was to explore a model of relations between personal and cultural variables and academic dishonesty. The participants in the study were N = 2,586 individuals from nine countries (Pakistan, Israel, Italy, India, the USA, Peru, Romania, Ghana, and Poland). The authors administered the Academic Dishonesty Scale to measure academic dishonesty, the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale to measure distress, the Almost Perfect Scale – (...) Revised to measure perfectionism, the Brief Self-Control Scale to measure self-control, and the Singelis Scale to measure independent self-construal. The results showed that the theoretical model was well fitted to the dataset in six countries: Pakistan, the United States, Romania, Ghana, Israel, and Poland. However, it was not well fitted in Italy, India, and Peru. Our results also showed that perfectionism significantly predicted academic dishonesty, but not in all countries. Self-control significantly predicted cheating, falsification, and plagiarism in the USA. Moreover, we found that distress was related to cheating o0nly in Ghana. Finally, independent self-construal predicted academic dishonesty. Our findings provide a cross-cultural contribution to the debate on academic dishonesty by highlighting its significant predictors and may inform interventions aimed at eliminating it. Our results can be used in preventing and curbing academic dishonesty. Knowledge on cross-cultural differences can be useful in international education for example, as an indicator accepting or relaxing attitude toward academic dishonesty in students from different countries. (shrink)

Ageing populations are a major consideration for socio-economic development in the early twenty first century. This demographic change is mainly seen as a threat rather than as an opportunity to improve the quality of human life, especially in Europe, where ageing has resulted in a reduction in economic competitiveness. Economic Foundations for Creative Ageing Policy mixes the silver economy, the creative economy, and the social economy to construct positive solutions for an ageing population. Klimczuk covers theoretical analyses and case study (...) descriptions of good practices to suggest strategies that could be internationally popularized. Contents: Foreword by Harry R. Moody Foreword by Kathrin Komp Introduction 1. Old Age as a Stage in the Life Course and the Life Cycle 2. Forms of Older People’s Capital 3. Creativity and Ageing: Concepts and Controversies 4. Mixed Economy and Multisectoral Approach to Population Ageing 5. Silver, Creative, and Social Economies as Positive Responses to Population Ageing 6. Benefits at the Interface Between Economic Systems Conclusion Afterword by Lukasz Tomczyk. (shrink)

We classify two of Bertrand Russell's theories of events within the point-free ontology. The first of such approaches was presented informally by Russell in ‘The World of Physics and the World of Sense’ (Lecture IV in Our Knowledge of the External World of 1914). Based on this theory, Russell sketched ways to construct instants as collections of events. This paper formalizes Russell's approach from 1914. We will also show that in such a reconstructed theory, we obtain all axioms of Russell's (...) second theory from 1936 and all axioms of Thomason's theory of events from 1989. Russell's work certainly influenced the works of Stanisław Leśniewski, his student Alfred Tarski, and Czesław Lejewski – prominent members of the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS). We see our work in the tradition of the research of Leśniewski and Tarski. Building on the technical tools developed in this environment and in the spirit of the traditional research of the LWS, we engage here, in particular, with two classic works by Russell on fundamental ontology. (shrink)

Mysticism and life. Religious relationship in Michel Henry’s phenomenologyThis article discusses the concept of mysticism in the phenomenology of Michel Henry, which involves the relationship of life and the living, as set against two opposing views on the connection of life to the living: Arthur Schopenhauer’s naturalistic philosophy of life and the religious doctrine of Master Eckhart. In the first approach, life is identical with the will to live, a natural force inherent to everything that is alive. In the other (...) one, life is identified with the Christian God, encompassing all individual livings and constituting the foundation for all creation existing out of him. Hermeneutic analyses carried out in the article consider those texts by Michel Henry which comment on the works of Master Eckhart and Schopenhauer and provide for his own interpretations of them. They aim to show that Henry’s thought involves the religious understanding of mysticism as pertaining to the connection of life and the living identified with the relationship of God and humans. Moreover, the mysticism of life should be distinguished from Schopenhauer’s naturalistic metaphysics of life, while its main inspiration are the Christian teachings of Master Eckhart, therefore the former may be considered as one of the interpretations of the latter. Irrespective of its Christian background, Henry’s thought can be also of interest to non‑Christians, as it presents a way of accessing life through the experience of a living body underlying self‑affectivity, largely forgotten in modern times but which can be revived by communing with art, because aesthetic experience is one of the forms of feeling one’s own being. In Henry’s thought, aesthetics, ethics and religion are closely interrelated, providing an effective remedy for the contemporary cultural crisis. (shrink)

The paper proposes a new definition of the conception of effectiveness . A good name for this version of effectiveness is discernibility. The definition is based on the fact that every computation may be reduced to the operation of discerning the fundamental symbols and concatenation of formulas. This approach to effectiveness allows us to formulate the proof of undecidability in such a way that arithmetization of the syntax may be replaced by the use of concatenation in metalogic.

Let us consider an arbitrary semantical relation. It holds between some linguistic entities and pieces of reality referred to. We may call it meaning. The controversy between psychologism and antipsychologism therefore may be exhibited as an ontological dilemma:Antipsychologism PsychologismThe relation of meaning is independent of human beings The relation of meaning is established by human beingsWhen we describe the meaning of words we do not need to refer to human behavior When we describe the meaning of words we need to (...) refer to human behaviorIt seems to be safe to assume that reality is not contradictory and a good description of reality cannot lead to the contradiction. All presentations of semantical antinomies rest on antipsychologistic description of semantical relations. Thus we can blame the contradictions called semantical antinomies on the antipsychologistic description. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Hermann Cohen: An Attempt to SystematizeThe article adressess the problem of evolution of Hermann Cohen’s thinking. In the first part, the evolution is shown in the historical-problematic context and the main idea is to show the basic concepts organizing the author’s most important books. Part two is an attempt to capture the motives of his understanding of philosophy and the central concept is the logic of validity Geltungslogik. As a result it is shown that throughout his whole (...) life Cohen struggled with the problem of such an understanding of philosophy. (shrink)

The paper contains an exposition of some non standard approach to gentzenization of modal logics. The first section is devoted to short discussion of desirable properties of Gentzen systems and the short review of various sequential systems for modal logics. Two non standard, cut-free sequent systems are then presented, both based on the idea of using special modal sequents, in addition to usual ones. First of them, GSC I is well suited for nonsymmetric modal logics The second one, GSC II (...) is devised specially for symmetric, i.e. Blogics. GSC I and GSC II are not different formalizations, from the theoretical point of view GSC I may be seen as a simplification of the more general approach present in GSC II. They are considered separately, mainly because Blogics demand different, and more complicated, strategy in completeness proof, whereas non symmetric logics are easily and uniformly characterised by means of Fitting's Consistency Properties. The weakest modal logic captured by this formalization is minimal regular logic C, but many stronger logics are obtainable by addition of suitable structural rules, which conforms to Do en's methodology. Both variants of GSC satisfy also other, besides cut-freedom, desirable properties. (shrink)

We provide an application of a sequent calculus framework to the formalization of definite descriptions. It is a continuation of research undertaken in [20, 22]. In the present paper a so-called free description theory is examined in the context of different kinds of free logic, including systems applied in computer science and constructive mathematics for dealing with partial functions. It is shown that the same theory in different logics may be formalised by means of different rules and gives results of (...) varying strength. For all presented calculi a constructive cut elimination is provided. (shrink)

Les règlements de compte en Pologne après la chute du communisme ont pris un tour particulier. Entre les désirs d'une réconciliation nationale et d'une justice publique, les Polonais ont oscillé. A partir de 1997, s'est finalement mis en place un processus dit de « lustration » qui consiste à demander aux diffé­rents titulaires de responsabilité publique de déclarer leurs activités sous le communisme. Un débat s'est instauré à ce propos, dans lequel les médias, s'appuyant sur les sondages ont joué un (...) rôle important. Autre signe du désir de la Pologne de changer de mémoire, la modification des noms des villes et des rues : où l'on voit que l'on n'efface pas facilement le passé.The settling of accounts in Poland after the fall of Communism took a specific turn as the Polish popu­lation hesitated between its desire for national reconciliation and for public justice. Eventually, from 1997, the process known as "lustration" was introduced, whereby the various holders of public office were required to state their activities under Communism. This gave rise to a debate in which the media, drawing on opinion polls, played an important part. Another sign of Poland' s desire to alter its memory was the changing of street and city names, which shows that it is not so easy to erase the past. (shrink)

Giving an essential and accessible overview of social theories of space, this books shows why it matters to understand these theorists spatially.