Rüdiger Bittner argues that the aim of thinking about what to do, of practical reason, is to find, not what we ought to do, but what it is good to do under the circumstances. Neither under prudence nor under morality are there things we ought to do. There is no warrant for the idea of our being required, by natural law or by our rationality, to do either what helps us attain our ends or what is right for moral (...) reasons. While common moral understanding is committed to there being things we ought to do and to our being guilty and deserving blame if we fail to do them, we can lay aside these notions without loss, indeed with benefit. The volume also explains what it is for something to be good to do under the circumstances and argues for understanding practical reason in these terms. What is good to do we find by experience: what we go through teaches us what helps and what hinders, and helps us figure out what is prudentially useful and what is morally right to do-although ultimately this difference itself gives way, and morality turns out to be a part of prudence. (shrink)

For much of his adult life, Nietzsche wrote notes on philosophical subjects in small notebooks that he carried around with him. After his breakdown and subsequent death, his sister supervised the publication of some of these notes under the title The Will to Power, and that collection, which is textually inaccurate and substantively misleading, has dominated the English-speaking discussion of Nietzsche's later thought. The present volume offers, for the first time, accurate translations of a selection of writings from Nietzsche's late (...) notebooks, dating from his last productive years between 1885 and 1889. Many of them have never before been published in English. They are translated by Kate Sturge from reliable texts in the Colli-Montinari edition, and they are edited by Rüdiger Bittner, whose introduction places them in the context of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

In the paper, several data reduction techniques for machine learning from big datasets are discussed and evaluated. The discussed approach focuses on combining several techniques including stacking, rotation, and data reduction aimed at improving the performance of the machine classification. Stacking is seen as the technique allowing to take advantage of the multiple classification models. The rotation-based techniques are used to increase the heterogeneity of the stacking ensembles. Data reduction makes it possible to classify instances belonging to big datasets. We (...) propose to use an agent-based population learning algorithm for data reduction in the feature and instance dimensions. For diversification of the classifier ensembles within the rotation also, alternatively, principal component analysis and independent component analysis are used. The research question addressed in the paper is formulated as follows: does the performance of a classifier using the reduced dataset be improved by integrating the data reduction mechanism with the rotation-based technique and the stacking? (shrink)

RubisCO is Earth's main enzyme responsible for CO2 fixation via carboxylation of ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate into organic matter. Besides the carboxylation reaction, RubisCO also catalyzes the oxygenation of RuBP by O2, which is probably as old as its carboxylation properties. Based on molecular phylogeny, the occurrence of the reactive oxygen species -removing system and kinetic properties of different RubisCO forms, we postulated that RubisCO oxygenase activity appeared in local microoxic areas, yet before the appearance of oxygenic photosynthesis. Here, in reviewing the literature, (...) we present a novel hypothesis: the RubisCO early oxygenase activity hypothesis. This hypothesis may be compared with the exaptation hypothesis, according to which latent RubisCO oxygenase properties emerged later during the oxygenation of the Earth's atmosphere. The reconstruction of ancestral RubisCO forms using ancestral sequence reconstruction techniques, as a promising way for testing of RubisCO early oxygenase activity hypothesis, is presented. RubisCO catalyzes carboxylation and oxygenation of ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate. Carboxylating properties of RubisCO are an ancient way for CO2 fixation into organic matter. However, an evolutionary importance of oxygenase activity of RubisCO remains enigmatic. Here, we formulated RubisCO early oxygenase activity hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, RubisCO oxygenase activity appeared yet before the appearance of oxygenic photosynthesis. (shrink)

Why should we act morally? What justification is to be found in moral demands? This lucid, pithy, and eminently readable book examines the arguments in favor of the claims of moral demands to be found in contemporary ethical theory, arguments deriving from Kant's attempt to provide a foundation for morality.

Classical systems of mereology identify a maximuml set of jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint (RCC5) relations. The amount of information that is carried by each member of this set of (crisp) relations is determined by the number of bits of information that are required to distinguish all the members of the set. It is postulated in this paper, that vague mereological relations are limited in the amount of information they can carry. That is, if a crisp mereological relation can carry (...) N bits of information, then a vague mereological relation can carry only 1 ⩽ n < N bits. The aim of this paper is it to explore these ideas in the context of various systems of vague mereological relations. The resulting formalism is non-classical in the sense of quantum information theory. (shrink)

Author: Ziemiński Ireneusz Title: PHILOSOPHY AS MEDITATIO MORTIS (PLATO AND MONTAIGNE) (Filozofia jako meditatio mortis (Platon – Montaigne)) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2006, vol:.6, number: 2006/1, pages: 43-58 Keywords: MEDITATIO MORTIS, DEATH, PLATO, MONTAIGNE Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The idea of philosophy as meditatio mortis is illustrated with the examples of Plato’s and Montaigne’s views. According to Plato, life within body is a kind of evil, and death is the (...) way of release and return to divine life. Philosophy regarded as seeking the truth is at the same time an exercise in dying because it consists in taking off reason from body and senses. Philosophy as meditatio mortis is then preparing to true and eternal life. According to Montaigne, death is the necessary end of human existence, which we should accept without reservation and fear. Philosophy lies in preparing to death as a natural biological event, common to all living creatures. Human dying should be liberated from all ceremonies and cultural rituals because they are the main reasons of our fear and prevent us from accepting death as a natural event. (shrink)

Artykuł jest próbą rekonstrukcji poglądów Stanisława Judyckiego na temat człowieka. Zdaniem Judyckiego główną cechą charakteryzującą ludzki byt jest niezgoda na skończoność i śmierć, podstawowym zaś dążeniem — życie wieczne po śmierci. Drogę ku temu celowi wskazuje religia chrześcijańska, zwłaszcza idea Wcielenia Chrystusa, objawiająca z jednej strony uczłowieczenie Boga, z drugiej — przebóstwienie człowieka. Można zatem powiedzieć, że Judycki uprawia chrystologię filozoficzną, chcąc uczynić z chrześcijaństwa religię racjonalną i uniwersalną. Autor artykułu nie podziela religijnego i filozoficznego optymizmu Judyckiego, opowiadając się za (...) sceptycyzmem (w epistemologii), materializmem (w filozofii człowieka), panteizmem (w metafizyce) oraz moralnym sceptycyzmem w religii (zło istniejące w świecie falsyfikuje wiarę w istnienie doskonale dobrego Boga); równocześnie jednak autor podziwia intelektualny wysiłek racjonalizacji wiary chrześcijańskiej, podjęty przez Stanisława Judyckiego, który jest jednym z najbardziej oryginalnych filozofów religii w ostatnich latach. (shrink)

Examines an alternative understanding of doing things for reasons, Kant's conception of acting on a maxim. Having explained the Kantian idea of maxims and having defended the claim that this is indeed Kant's conception of agency, the chapter tries to find viable accounts of, first, holding a maxim and, second, acting on a maxim, in either case without success. How the agent who holds a maxim differs from an agent who does not cannot be made out. As for acting on (...) a maxim, Kant's texts support two accounts, the one relying on the practical syllogism, the other on the faculty of judgment. Notoriously, however, the practical syllogism does not yield action; and a faculty of judgment, it is argued here, does not in fact exist. (shrink)

The present reply to Peter Schaber’s critique of my paper Achtung und ihre moralische Bedeutung argues, first, that Schaber has no good grounds for maintaining that we have an obligation to respect every human being. Second, it explains why respect is not a fruitful attitude to take in the face of social divisions.

Kant opened the third section of his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten with an argument purporting to show that every free creature is subject to moral laws. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this argument and indicates its problematic points. It shows furthermore which assumptions prevented Kant from noticing these problems: first, the notion that we are, and not just have, reason; second, and more importantly, the idea that lawless freedom is terrible and the source of evil. The latter (...) idea probably derives from theological sources. (shrink)

The book is not only dedicated to linguists, but also to readers who are not familiar with notations developed in linguistics. The first part of the study presents philosophical justifications for linguistic settlements. These are based on the phenomenological reduction of Edmund Husserl, Karl R. Popper's falsificationism, the moderate rationalism of science of Izydora Dąmbska and Andrzej Bogusławski's lack of the nomological explanation in linguistics. The second part presents a re-examination of the solutions proposed in the field of linguistics, some (...) new philosophical explanations and a discussion of the truth of linguistic propositions. (shrink)

In the paper, several data reduction techniques for machine learning from big datasets are discussed and evaluated. The discussed approach focuses on combining several techniques including stacking, rotation, and data reduction aimed at improving the performance of the machine classification. Stacking is seen as the technique allowing to take advantage of the multiple classification models. The rotation-based techniques are used to increase the heterogeneity of the stacking ensembles. Data reduction makes it possible to classify instances belonging to big datasets. We (...) propose to use an agent-based population learning algorithm for data reduction in the feature and instance dimensions. For diversification of the classifier ensembles within the rotation also, alternatively, principal component analysis and independent component analysis are used. The research question addressed in the paper is formulated as follows: does the performance of a classifier using the reduced dataset be improved by integrating the data reduction mechanism with the rotation-based technique and the stacking? (shrink)

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz: about cognition -- Roman Ingarden: about the existence of the world -- Józef Maria Bocheński: on communism -- Rev. Józef Tischner: about the ethics of solidarity -- Kazimierz Twardowski: about happiness.

Thomas Hobbes’ standpoint concerning the right for death seems to be coherent as well as justifiable. On one hand he points at the fear of death as the main source of law, but on the other hand he formulates minimum basic rules which safeguard man’s life. Though nobody is obliged to rescue someone else at the cost of their own life, but at the same time nobody has a right to kill anyone. Also nowadays the same rule can be found (...) in many legal systems: even if people are obliged to help others, they are not compelled to undertake heroic deeds or risk their lives. Thus Hobbes’ position can be given the name of ethical individualism, or even egoism in which no form of instrumentalism of human life is allowed. The value of any individual is absolute, which excludes the possibility to sacrifice their life for the sake of others. Hobbes does not share assumptions of utilitarianism and his solution might seem utopian from the perspective of the strategy of social actions, but from the perspective of values and rights of an individual it seems justifiable. (shrink)

The critiques of arguments I presented in Religia jako idolatria. Esej filozoficzny o nieuchronności elementów idolatrycznych w religii [Religion as idolatry: A philosophical essay on the inevitability of idolatrious elements in religion], authored by Błażej Gębura and Marcin Iwanicki, are fundamentally inaccurate. The main reason being that the authors of the critiques have not put forth any historical example of a religious phenomenon which was not idolatry. They only referred to logically possibly examples (it is admittedly possible to conceive of (...) an act of religious worship which would not be idolatrical), yet they did not provide the conditions which would have to be fulfilled for this act to materialize; meanwhile the primary condition would be to change the ontic and epistemic status of humans as beings capable of direct contact with God. The more detailed arguments presented by my polemicians also do not disprove the claim that it is unavoidable for religion to be idolatrical. For if God accepts all acts of worship throughout history, He should be charged with defying fundamental moral principles; it is after all difficult to accept the bloody human and animal sacrifices he received. Furthermore, “religion zero” is impossible to actualize; on one hand it is a completely private phenomenon (analogous to a private language), on the other it means knowing God in a human way (and thus is idolatrical, as even the Author of the charge admits). Similarly, an unconscious act of worship (admiration for the tallest tree in the world) is an aesthetic experience, not a religious one; a theistic interpretation of this act bears the markings of symbolic violence and reduces religious experiences to experiencing beauty. There is no doubt that ontic distance as a necessary condition of non-idolatrical religion, proposed by the polemicians, actually makes it an impossibility. Even God cannot reveal Himself to us the way He is, but instead He must adhere to our cognitive limitations and thus can only reveal Himself as a non-God. Therefore, any religious act is unavoidably idolatrical; however, contrary to the claims by my Polemicians, this is not an overuse of the term “idolatry” in relation to religious phenomena, but rather an accurate description of their nature. Despite this, one should not eliminate religion entirely form social life; as long as religious people pose no harm to others and do not attempt to force their idols onto others, they have the right to freely believe and worship them. (shrink)

The paper is a discussion of Tomasz Polak’s book System kościelny, czyli przewagi pana K. [The Church System, or the Dominance of Mr. K.]. The author emphasizes the significance of Polak’s book not only for religious studies, given especially his original thesis about Christianity’s atheistic core, but also for other fields within humanities, dealing with the origins, development and fall of non-religious myths, social or national.

For much of his adult life, Nietzsche wrote notes on philosophical subjects in small notebooks that he carried around with him. After his breakdown and subsequent death, his sister supervised the publication of some of these notes under the title The Will to Power, and that collection, which is textually inaccurate and substantively misleading, has dominated the English-speaking discussion of Nietzsche's later thought. The present volume offers, for the first time, accurate translations of a selection of writings from Nietzsche's late (...) notebooks, dating from his last productive years between 1885 and 1889. Many of them have never before been published in English. They are translated by Kate Sturge from reliable texts in the Colli-Montinari edition, and they are edited by Rüdiger Bittner, whose introduction places them in the context of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

Abstract: We propose a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this semantic view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extension. We provide a new formulation of these ideas in terms of a theory of granular partitions. We show that this (...) theory provides a general framework within which we can understand the relation between vague terms and concepts and the corresponding crisp portions of reality. We also sketch how it might be possible to formulate within this framework a theory of vagueness which dispenses with the notion of truth-value gaps and other artifacts of more familiar approaches. Central to our approach is the idea that judgments about reality involve in every case (1) a separation of reality into foreground and background of attention and (2) the feature of granularity. On this basis we attempt to show that even vague judgments made in naturally occurring contexts are not marked by truth-value indeterminacy. We distinguish, in addition to crisp granular partitions, also vague partitions, and reference partitions, and we explain the role of the latter in the context of judgments that involve vagueness. We conclude by showing how reference partitions provide an effective means by which judging subjects are able to temper the vagueness of their judgments by means of approximations. (shrink)

The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851, Bergsland 1955, Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is in fact tenseless.

: This study describes a new field method, suited for investigating scope relations — and other aspects of truth conditional meaning — with native speaker consultants who may speak no other language and have no background in linguistics or logic. This method revealed a surprising scope contrast between the antipassive and the ergative construction in Greenlandic Eskimo. The results of this field work are described in detail and a crosslinguistic scope generalization is proposed based on Greenlandic Eskimo, Basque, Polish, Russian, (...) Finnish and English. (shrink)

Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to account for (...) various phenomena — including scope relations in English and Greenlandic Eskimo, internally headed relative clauses in Lakhota, serial verbs in Yoruba and VP ellipsis in English. (shrink)

Author: Koepke Ireneusz Title: ANDRZEJ WALICKI AND “WARSAW SCHOOL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS” (Andrzej Walicki i „warszawska szkoła historyków (historii) idei”) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2005, vol:.5, number: 2005/1, pages: 259-276 Keywords: ANDRZEJ WALICKI, WARSAW SCHOOL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:This article is an attempt of presenting Andrzej Walicki connections with the so called Warsaw School of the History of Ideas and his research (...) on basic methodological issues created by this “school”, which are linked with the history of ideas and the history of philosophy. The most important are research rules which has been used by A. Walicki, and their consequences on his intellectual work as well as some critical remarks. (shrink)

Author: Ziemiński Ireneusz Title: “BECAUSE THOU HAST NOT ASKED FOR THYSELF LONG LIFE...” AN ATTEMPT AT PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF SALOMON’S DREAM („Nie błagałeś dla siebie o długie życie...” – próba filozoficznej interpretacji snu Salomona) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2005, vol:.5, number: 2005/1, pages: 33-43 Keywords: SALOMON, HUMAN CONDITION, GOD FOR LONG LIFE Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The author of the article presents biblical Salomon as a man who does not (...) ask God for long life. Salomon can understand his own human condition as a mortal being. This understanding is the ground of human wisdom. To be a human being is to be a mortal being. (shrink)

Gesellschaftskritik ist Kritik an der Struktur einer Gesellschaft. Ein solches Unternehmen ist praktisch betrachtet nicht sinnvoll. Denn jedenfalls nach Marx steht die Struktur einer Gesellschaft zu ändern nicht in der Macht der in ihr lebenden Menschen, sie hängt vom Stand der Produktivkräfte ab. Tatsächlich hat die Kritische Theorie, bei Horkheimer, Adorno und Habermas, die Maßstäbe ihrer Gesellschaftskritik nicht als objektiv begründet ausweisen können. Diese Kritik blieb bloße Unmutsäußerung.Statt den Bau einer Gesellschaft insgesamt zu kritisieren empfiehlt sich, besondere Missstände aufzuweisen und (...) Wege zu ihrer Beseitigung anzugeben. Die Kritische Theorie hat diesen „Reformismus“ verachtet, und es ist wahr, eine solche Kritik und die ihr folgende Politik bleiben Stückwerk, sind zudem irrtums- und fehleranfällig. Aber sie können helfen, das Leben von Menschen zu verbessern. (shrink)

Freud’s concept of repression should be discarded because we do not understand what supposedly is being repressed, nor what is repressing, nor why it is done. Freud’s answers to the first two questions fall short of the dynamic picture of forces and counterforces implicit in the idea of repression. The answer to the last question invokes an unacceptable separation of agencies in the person.

It has long been recognized that temporal anaphora in French and English depends on the aspectual distinction between events and states. For example, temporal location as well as temporal update depends on the aspectual type. This paper presents a general theory of aspect-based temporal anaphora, which extends from languages with grammatical tenses (like French and English) to tenseless languages (e.g. Kalaallisut). This theory also extends to additional aspect-dependent phenomena and to non-atomic aspectual types, processes and habits, which license anaphora to (...) proper atomic parts (cf. nominal pluralities and kinds). (shrink)