Jerzy Braun (1901–1975) began as a scout activist, in subsequent years he became known as a politician, poet, prose writer, playwright, screenwriter, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian. In the inter-war years he founded and edited the periodicals Gazeta Literacka [Literary Gazette] and Zet, he also headed the Hoene-Wroński Society which propagated the thought of Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Under the Nazi occupation he founded and headed the underground organization Unia grouping Poland’s leading intellectuals. Unia propounded a universalistic program of (...) integrating nations and states whose outlines Braun had laid down before the war. Braun’s unionism theory, in which he strove for a harmonious combination of national and universal ideas, was based on 19th-century concepts developed by, among others, Bronisław Trentowski, August Cieszkowski and, of course, Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Imprisoned by the communists after the war, in the 1960s Braun attended the Vaticanum II sessions as an unofficial ecumenism expert. (shrink)

This is the précis of Artūrs Logins book Normative Reasons: Between Reasoning and Explanation (Logins 2022).

The aim of this paper is to show that it is the explicativecharacter of Tarski's semantic definition of truth given in his study of 1933 that allows forconsideration of a philosophical background of this definition in the proper sense. Given the explicativecharacter of this definition it is argued that the philosophical tradition that should be taken intoaccount with regard to this philosophical background is the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw Schoolin its connections with the School of Brentano. As an example of (...) the explanatory power ofconsidering this tradition as far as Tarski's philosophical choices are concerned I use here thenotion of sentence-inscription, i.e., the notion of that entity of which truth is predicated inthe definition in question. One of the consequences of these statements is that philosophicaldiscussions concerning the semantic definition of truth can be regarded from two points ofview. On the one hand, they may take the perspective of its explicational function, i.e., theperspective of its philosophical background. On the other hand, they might consider the philosophicalconsequences of the definition with respect to the goal of the explication, i.e., they may considerits philosophical content independently of its historical background. (shrink)

We extend a result by Gallow concerning the impossibility of following two epistemic masters, so that it covers a larger class of pooling methods. We also investigate a few ways of avoiding the issue, such as using non-convex pooling methods, employing the notion of imperfect trust or moving to higher-order probability spaces. Along the way we suggest a conceptual issue with the conditions used by Gallow: whenever two experts are considered, whether we can trust one of them is decided by (...) the features of the other! (shrink)

We introduce the notion of a Minkowskian Branching Structure ("MBS" for short). Then we prove some results concerning the phenomenon of funny business in its finitary and infinitary variants.

The literature on listening and daily discourse often describes an overly romanticized conception of listening, meaning what it should be in its ideal form. However, at most, this ideal is realized through the ‘masks’ that listeners ‘carry’ during their performance of listening. The ideal version that is being projected through the performance of listening is not cognruent with what actually happens behind the mask and performance. Individuals do not have the cognitive capacities to realize this unrealistic and unattainable ideal, but (...) they have the capacity to act as if they do. Using Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical account this paper reveals the psychological and social world that hides behind the mask and performance of listening in order to ground the theorizing of listening in a more realistic perspective. This account gives rise to novel and indispensable listening concepts: the definition of the situation, the sincere and cynical listener, undercurrent listening, and misrepresentations of listening. These concepts demonstrate that the study of interpersonal listening cannot be isolated from the dramaturgy of listening as (expressed) manners of listening are intricately and inherently embedded in social structure. This account also strongly contests the psychocentric and simplistic definition of listening as proposed by Kluger, A. N., & Mizrahi, M. (2023). Defining Listening: Can We Get Rid of the Adjectives? Current Opinion in Psychology, 101639.). (shrink)

This paper investigates the prospects of developing a branching modal framework while keeping with the spirit of Humean Supervenience. It is argued that such an approach is bound to face hard problems regarding haecceitism and the notion of recombination. Possible directions for future philosophical developments of branching frameworks are suggested.

Author: Dobosz Artur Title: METAMORPHOSIS – METAPHOR – ANTROPOMORPHISATION – Deantropomorphisation (Metamorfoza – metafora – antropomorfizacja – deantropomorfizacja) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2010, vol:.10, number: 2010/1, pages: 25-36 Keywords: ANTROPOMORPHISATION, DEANTROPOMORPHISATION Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The author proposes a theory of a metaphor according to which the metaphor is a manifestation sign of a magical thinking in contemporaneous culture. The proposed theory enables the classification of metaphors.

I claim that objective consequentialism faces a problem stemming from the existence in some situations of a plurality of chances relevant to the outcomes of an agent’s acts. I suggest that this phenomenon bears structural resemblance to the well-known Reference Class problem. I outline a few ways in which one could attempt to deal with the issue, suggesting that it is the higher-level chance that should be employed by OC.

Este trabalho opõe o sistema espinosano tal como expresso nas partes I e II da "Ética" ao argumento da batalha naval. Faz-se isso primeiro enquanto preservadas todas as premissas, e em seguida enquanto extraída de seu sistema a explicação de Espinosa da gênese imaginativa da ideia de futuros contingentes. Examinar as implicações dessa explicação sobre o argumento da batalha naval — cuja conclusão é a realidade de futuros contingentes— é o principal objetivo do artigo. Propõe-se como resultado desse exame um (...) enfraquecimento da relevância ontológica e ética do argumento aristotélico e, mais amplamente, a manifestação de um problema a argumentos que têm a concepção vulgar de tempo como parte de suas premissas. (shrink)

Since its first introduction by Hans Reichenbach, many philosophers have claimed to refute the common cause principle. The situation is not so straightforward, though: validity of the principle remains an open question. The book traces different formulations of the principle, and provides proofs of a few pertinent theorems, settling the relevant questions in various probability spaces. It offers both philosophical insight and mathematical rigor.

We start by introducing the idea of echo chambers. Echo chambers are social and epistemic structures in which opinions, leanings, or beliefs about certain topics are amplified and reinforced due to repeated interactions within a closed system; that is, within a system that has a rather homogeneous sample of sources or people, which all share the same attitudes towards the topics in question. Echo chambers are a particularly dangerous phenomena because they prevent the critical assessment of sources and contents, thus (...) leading the people living within them to deliberately ignore or exclude opposing views. In the second part of this paper, we argue that the reason for the appearance of echo chambers lies in the adoption of what we call ‘epistemic vices’. We examine which vices might be responsible for their emergence, and in doing so, we focus on a specific one; ‘epistemic violence’. In assessing and evaluating the role of this epistemic vice, we note that it can be triggered by epistemic contexts characterized by high stakes that may turn ordinary intellectual virtues (such as skepticism) into vices (such as denialism). In the third part of this contribution, we suggest a way to deal with echo chambers. The solution focuses on advocating a responsibilist pedagogy of virtues and vices that -we claim- might be capable of preventing their emergence. (shrink)

This paper explores one way in which the view that emotions can be epistemically justified stands in tension with two common views in epistemology; namely, that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, and that propositional justification is entirely determined by the (inferential) support relations between one's evidence and a given proposition. A tentative solution to the tension is provided.

We tackle two open questions from Leitgeb and Pettigrew (2010b) regarding what the belief update framework described in that paper mandates as correct responses to two problems. One of them concerns credences in overlapping propositions and is known in the literature as the “simultaneous update problem”. The other is the well known “Judy Benjamin” problem concerning conditional credences. We argue that our results concerning the problems point to deficiencies of the framework. More generally, we observe that the method of minimizing (...) inverse relative entropy seems to work better than (or at least equally well as) its competitors in many situations. (shrink)

Studies presenting memory-facilitating effect of emotions typically focused on affective dimensions of arousal and valence. Little is known, however, about the extent to which stimulus-driven basic emotions could have distinct effects on memory. In the present paper we sought to examine the modulatory effect of disgust, fear and sadness on intentional remembering and forgetting using widely used item-method directed forgetting paradigm. Eighteen women underwent fMRI scanning during encoding phase in which they were asked either to remember (R) or to forget (...) (F) pictures. In the test phase all previously used stimuli were re-presented together with the same number of new pictures and participants had to categorize them as old or new, irrespective of the F/R instruction. On the behavioral level we found a typical directed forgetting effect, i.e. higher recognition rates for to-be-remembered (TBR) items than to-be-forgotten (TBF) ones for both neutral and emotional categories. Emotional stimuli had higher recognition rate than neutral ones, while among emotional those eliciting disgust produced highest recognition, but at the same time induced more false alarms. Therefore when false alarm corrected recognition was examined the directed forgetting effect was equally strong irrespective of emotion. Additionally, even though subjects rated disgusting pictures as more arousing and negative than other picture categories, logistic regression on the item level showed that the effect of disgust on recognition memory was stronger than the effect of arousal or valence. On the neural level, ROI analyses (with valence and arousal covariates) revealed that correctly recognized disgusting stimuli evoked the highest activity in the left amygdala compared to all other categories. This structure was also more activated for remembered vs. forgotten stimuli, but only in case of disgust or fear eliciting pictures. Our findings, despite several limitations, suggest that disgust have a special salience in memory relative to other negative emotions, which cannot be put down to differences in arousal or valence. The current results thereby support the suggestion that a purely dimensional model of emotional influences on cognition might not be adequate to account for observed effects. (shrink)

Ernest Nagel’s two-part article entitled “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe” undoubtedly played a crucial role in the development of analytic philosophy in both Europe and the United States. Nagel articulates the shared metaphilosophical assumptions embraced by philosophers from various centres, including Prague, Vienna, Lviv, Warsaw, and Cambridge. Nevertheless, it is important to note that philosophers began to describe themselves using the term “analytical philosopher,” or a similar term, particularly within the intellectual centre of Cambridge, in the early (...) 1930s in Britain. In this article, I shall compare how these philosophers conceptualized “analytic philosophy” with the metaphilosophical assumptions outlined by Nagel. Then, I shall draw a comparison between the understanding of analytic philosophy in the early 1930s in Britain, and contemporary conceptions such as “conceptual creativity” and “conceptual engineering.” As it turns out, a part of contemporary analytic philosophy is more open to social-practical issues than it was in the early 1930s in Britain, especially in the intellectual centre that was Cambridge. (shrink)

Den Prozeß der Phänomenalisierung des Seins, des Weltwerdens der Welt kann nur angemessen verstehen, wer dessen struktureller Selbigkeit mit dem Geborenwerden/Geborensein des Daseins gewahr wird und ihr philosophisch Rechnung trägt. Diese an Hannah Arendt und Hans Saner einerseits sowie an Jacques Derrida und Jean-Luc Nancy andererseits anschließende These versucht der Beitrag im zweifachen Wege eines Aufweises entsprechender Überlegungen bei Husserl und einer Kritik an Heideggers bereits von Günther Anders notierten Tilgungsbemühungen der einschlägigen Implikationen seines Denkens zu plausibilisieren. Als thematischer Leitfaden (...) dient dabei die je unterschiedliche Konzeption der Räumlichkeit des Daseins im Verhältnis zu seiner Zeitlichkeit, von dessen Gewichtung das Gepräge eines Denkens als entweder natologisch-eröffnend oder thanatologisch-schließend mit abhängt. (shrink)

In vorliegender Arbeit wird von mir die Gedanke von Nietzsche als Philosophie aufgezeigt, deren die oberste Wert und Wesen unbedingte und hinausgehende über die Rahmen des anwesendes Daseins die Schaffung ist. Meine Arbeit fange ich damit an, die Tiefe und Ausdehnung dieser Problematik im Werk "Also sprach Zarathustra" darzustellen. Dann überlege ich die Schwierigkeiten, die vor der konstitutiven für Erfahrung des Wesens von der Schaffung stehen, die Schwierigkeiten, die vor allem aus den Begrenzungen von der Natur der Sprache und des (...) Bewußtseins als die Vorstellung folgen. In Bezug auf die Auslegungen von Deleuze und Heidegger zeige ich weiter die Problematik der Schaffung in der Perspektive des Werdens und des Ereignisses, die eng mit der ahistorisch verstandenen Frage der Zeit zusammengehängt wird. Sehr wichtige Rolle spielt hier das Begriff der Zukunft, das der gesehenen im Gedächtnis und in der vergangenheit Grundlage der Zeit entgegengesetzt wird. Die Zukunft als schöpferischer und zugleich destruktiver Abgrund drückt hier eigene Sphäre von der Konstituierung der Zeit aus. Gemaß dahinter wird diesen Artikel mit den berlegungen geschlossen, die der Möglichkeit mystischen Auslegungen der Gedanken von Nietzsche im Zusammenhang mit der Frage der Schaffung betreffen. (shrink)

This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for risk-averse, (...) certainty-like states. The new proposal is compared to views within the increasingly popular debate opposing dualists to reductionists with respect to the relation between belief and degrees of belief. (shrink)

Since its introduction by Hans Reichenbach, many philosophers have claimed to refute the idea – known as the common cause principle – that any surprising correlation between any two factors that do not directly influence one another is due to some common cause. For example, falsity of the principle is frequently inferred from falsifiability of Bell’s inequalities. The author demonstrates, however, that the situation is not so straightforward. There is more than one version of the principle formulated with the use (...) of different variants of Reichenbach-inspired notions; their falsity still remains an open question. The book traces different formulations of the principle and provides proofs of a few pertinent theorems, settling the relevant questions in various probability spaces. In exploring mathematical and philosophical issues surrounding the principle, the book offers both philosophical insight and mathematical rigor. (shrink)

We investigate how Dutch Book considerations can be conducted in the context of two classes of nonclassical probability spaces used in philosophy of physics. In particular we show that a recent proposal by B. Feintzeig to find so called “generalized probability spaces” which would not be susceptible to a Dutch Book and would not possess a classical extension is doomed to fail. Noting that the particular notion of a nonclassical probability space used by Feintzeig is not the most common employed (...) in philosophy of physics, and that his usage of the “classical” Dutch Book concept is not appropriate in “nonclassical” contexts, we then argue that if we switch to the more frequently used formalism and use the correct notion of a Dutch Book, then all probability spaces are not susceptible to a Dutch Book. We also settle a hypothesis regarding the existence of classical extensions of a class of generalized probability spaces. (shrink)

Author: Szutta Artur Title: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ’S CONCEPT OF THE ‘THIRD STATES’ (Stany trzecie w ujęciu Władysława Tatarkiewicza) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 617-627 Keywords: “THIRD STATES”, LEISURE, PHILOSOPHY, THEORY, INTELLECT, SENSE OF LIFE, WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, JOSEPH PIEPER Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The article treats on the concept of “third states” (as opposed to the other two kinds of states: those of work and entertainment) introduced by (...) Władysław Tatarkiewicz in his treatise On Happiness. A thorough analysis of the passage on “third states” as well as of the very concept allows to see its relevance to the considerations on such important philosophical questions as those of the nature of doing philosophy, the meaning of life, intellectual intuition, theoria or contemplation. The paper consists of five parts. The first part is focused on Tatarkiewicz’s understanding of “third states” as well as on a phenomenological analysis of the concept itself. The second part is a kind of extension of the analysis enriched by Josef Pieper’s interpretation of the idea of leisure which I find very close to what Tatarkiewicz means by “third states”. In the light of the analysis the concept of the ‘third states’ turns out to be very inspiring and useful in dealing with a number of philosophical questions, which is shown in the fourth part of the paper. The final step consists of questioning the above conclusion by short outlining a possible naturalistic interpretation of the ‘third states’ in the light of which the picture of philosophy, human life or human cognition, based on the concept of the ‘third states’ might turn out to be a mere illusion. I do not give a final answer to this question but treat the conclusion of the paper as an invitation to a deeper consideration of the matter. (shrink)

My Ph.D. dissertation written under the supervision of Prof. Tomasz Placek at the Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In one of its most basic and informal shapes, the principle of the common cause states that any surprising correlation between two factors which are believed not to directly influence one another is due to their common cause. Here we will be concerned with a version od this idea which possesses a purely probabilistic formulation. It was introduced, in (...) the form of a general principle, by Hans Reichenbach in his posthumously published book "The Direction of Time". The central notion of the principle in Reichenbach's formulation, and of the current essay, is that of screening off: two correlated events are screened off by a third event if conditioning on the third event makes them probabilistically independent. Reichenbach's principle marks also the beginning of a new field of philosophy: namely, that of ``probabilistic causality''. For the most part, the current essay can be seen as an effort at checking how far one can go with the purely statistical notions revolving around Reichenbach's idea of common cause. In short, the answer is ``surprisingly far''; in some classes of probability spaces all correlations between ``interesting'' events possess explanations of such sort. However, this fact lends itself to opposing interpretations; more on that in the conclusion. Chapters 6 and 7 contain mathematical results concerning these issues. The screening-off condition requires an equality of a probabilistic nature to hold; chapter 8 is a short discussion of slightly weakened versions of the condition, which hold if the sides of the above mentioned equality differ to a small degree. In chapter 2, after some mathematical preliminaries, we study the various formulations of the principle which might be said to stem from the original idea of Reichenbach. We also examine a few of the most salient counterarguments, which undermine at least some of the formulations. Chapter 3 is of a formal nature, dealing with various probabilistic notions which can be thought of as generalizations of Reichenbach's concept of common cause. The next chapter concerns the relationship between the idea of common causal explanation and the Bell inequalities. In chapter 5 we briefly present the form of Reichenbach's principle which can be found in the field of representing causal structures by means of directed acyclic graphs. (shrink)

According to the knowledge view of evidence notoriously defended by Timothy Williamson (2000), for any subject, her evidence consists of all and only her propositional knowledge (E=K). Many have found (E=K) implausible. However, few have offered arguments against Williamson’s positive case for (E=K). In this paper, I propose an argument against Williamson’s positive case in favour of (E=K). Central to my argument is the possibility of the knowledge of necessary truths. I also draw some more general conclusions concerning theorizing about (...) evidence. Keywords: functions of evidence, E=K, evidential probability, probability raising. (shrink)

Peter Achinstein has argued at length and on many occasions that the view according to which evidential support is defined in terms of probability-raising faces serious counterexamples and, hence, should be abandoned. Proponents of the positive probabilistic relevance view have remained unconvinced. The debate seems to be in a deadlock. This paper is an attempt to move the debate forward and revisit some of the central claims within this debate. My conclusion here will be that while Achinstein may be right (...) that his counterexamples undermine probabilistic relevance views of what it is for e to be evidence that h, there is still room for a defence of a related probabilistic view about an increase in being supported, according to which, if p > p, then h is more supported given e than it is without e. My argument relies crucially on an insight from recent work on the linguistics of gradable adjectives. (shrink)

Neste texto perseguimos a polêmica presença do pensador francês Jean-Baptiste Roustaing no cenário espírita brasileiro, compondo-se com a obra de codificação de Allan Kardec. Tomamos, como ponto de referência, o papel de coordenador e representativo da Federação Espírita Brasileira (FEB) no processo, tanto de afirmação da presença de Roustaing ao lado de Kardec, quanto de posterior retirada da obra roustainguista, como leitura reconhecida e recomendada por aquela instituição. Concluímos pelo reconhecimento da importância da permanência da obra de Roustaing como bibliografia (...) avalizada pela FEB, o que, sem dúvida, indica para jogos de poder e de identidade no interior do movimento espírita brasileiro. (shrink)