In the first part of this essay the author indicates some of the problems of contemporary society related to how fragmentation of the social order affects and transforms self-identity. Today identity is chosen rather than given as it was in the past. Such freedom to choose who, how and where to be not only opens the possibility of unrestrained creativity but requires that the subject face new ethical and political issues.In the second part the author introduces these themes and questions (...) as they have been discussed by others. The problem of identity is put in the framework of space and time and approached as well with questions regarding the theory of names. Social problems of contemporary society are also discussed by using the approach proposed by Kantian philosophy. In the final essay of the present issue the question of how technology re-shapes and effects our everyday life is raised. (shrink)

Patrząc na osobnika z perspektywy jego rozwoju. można powiedzieć, że w swej najgłębszej istocie jest on nie tyle i nie przede wszystkim całościową funkcjonalną strukturą, która przejawia życie, ile jest raczej żywą dynamiką, której jednym z zasadniczych przejawów jest zintegrowane budowanie, odbudowywanie, naprawianie i modyfikowanie różnorakich skorelowanych struktur ciała, czyli maszyn molekularnych, organelli i organów, które warunkują zachodzenie różnorodnych procesów biochemicznych i fizjologicznych oraz umożliwiają selektywne interakcje ze środowiskiem abiotycznym i biotycznym. Dynamika rozwojowa — w przekonaniu Lenartowicza — jest podstawowym (...) behawiorem każdej istoty żywej i powinna być fundamentem kształtowania właściwej koncepcji życia. (shrink)

Within the historical times, which roughly corresponds with the Holocene epoch, the whole of mankind is believed to be a single species. Homo sapiens. But the human genealogical tree is populated by a really astounding number of paleontological species and paleontological genera: Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, Paranthropus boisei, Homo habilis, Homo georgicus. Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens.. In fact there are many more but Foley, quite reasonably, states (...) that the evidence for their existence is, at present, insufficient. The existence of these multiple forms is beyond any doubt. The doubt, however arises concerning the human or „prehuman" status of them. Were they really true specific forms, half-way between the apes and Holocene man? Is it possible that they constitute a number of different ecotypes within the same natural species of Homo sapiens? (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje apžvelgiamos kosmopolitizmo sąvokos sociologinės apibrėžtys ir metodologinio kosmopolitizmo taikymo migracijos tyrimuose privalumai. Apibrėžiant metodologinį kosmopolitizmą kaip tyrimais grindžiamą domėjimąsi žmonėmis, kurie saistosi ne tik nacionaliai ir / ar transnacionaliai, bet ir mato save kaip globalaus pasaulio dalyvį, straipsnyje teigiama, jog kosmopolitizmas suteikia galimybę pamatyti ne tik nacionalius / transnacionalius saistymusis, bet ir situacijas, vietas, erdves, kontekstus, kuriuose minėti saistymaisi suvokiami kaip nereikšmingi. Remiantis požiūriu, jog mobilumas ir transnacionalumas nėra pakankama sąlyga kosmopolitiškoms tapatybėms atsirasti, migracijos tyrimų erdvėje siūloma ieškoti (...) atsakymo į klausimus, kaip, kada ir kodėl mobilumo patirtis gali tapti lankstaus socialinio kapitalo forma ir sukurti socialinius santykius ir gyvenimus su daugialypėmis tapatybėmis. Straipsnis parengtas vykdant LMT finansuojamą projektą „Globalizacijos (transnacionalizmo) poveikis valstybinio ir tautinio tapatumo fragmentacijai (LIVE)“. Sutarties Nr. VAT-41/2012. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to describe and assess the energetic-metabolic activity of selected muscles of upper and lower extremities during Rotational Training (RT). The influence of RT on temperature changes in the biceps and triceps brachii muscles as well as the quadriceps and biceps femoris muscles of healthy university students were verified, in addition to temperature differences between the left and right side before and after RT. The study was conducted on 18 subjects. RT was conducted in accordance (...) with accepted forms of training methodology of collective fitness. An important part of RT was the performance of circular and rotational movements. Thermograms taken before and immediately after RT focused on 4 regions of selected agonists and synergists in the upper and lower body. The camera used was the infrared hand-held CEDIP Titanium 560M IR (USA), located at a distance of 10 m from the subject. After RT, median Tsk (skin temperature) decreased in almost all of the examined ROIs, except for the left and right Qf (the quadriceps femoris, rectus femoris, and sartorius muscles) as well as the left Tb (triceps brachii) in female subjects. In male subjects, left and right Tsk of Qf increased both for the left and right Tb. Left-Right ΔTsk (temperature difference) was statistically significant (p <0.05) for Of, Bf, Bb, Tb in female as well as male subjects. It was concluded that thermography is a non-invasive, safe, and low-cost method for the recording of physiological response of the skin to RT. (shrink)

This paper provides the theoretical analysis of forms of solidarity in academia and its relationship to academic integrity. This analysis is inspired by the Guidelines for an Institutional Code of Ethics in Higher Education drawn up by the International Association of Universities and the Magna Charta Observatory. These Guidelines refer to the principle of solidarity in the context of international cooperation between higher education institutions. However, the author of this paper believes that this principle might also be used in a (...) broader academic context, in particular, in the field of academic ethics and academic integrity. Therefore, this paper aims at revealing the relevance of solidarity in academia and argues that the principle of solidarity can be considered as one of fundamental principles of academic ethics and should be reflected in the structure and provisions of the codes of academic ethics. For this purpose the author explores the philosophical and sociological approaches towards solidarity and defines the concept of academic solidarity, discusses the conceptual connection between academic solidarity, ethics and integrity and illustrates the impact of solidarity on the development of academic integrity. This analysis allows the author of the paper to recommend embedding the principle of solidarity in the codes of academic ethics of higher education institutions as well as extending the scope of its application by linking the rights and responsibilities of different groups within the academic community in a way that best expresses their unity, shared responsibility, mutual support in meeting the standards of social ethos. (shrink)

The Automated External Defibrillator (AED) is an intuitive device used by witnesses of an incident without medical training in cases of sudden cardiac arrest. Its operation consists in delivering an electrical pulse to the cardiac conduction system, as a result of which normal heart rate is restored. The lack of awareness in society concerning the usefulness of the device and the inadequate deployment of AEDs result in their too infrequent application by witnesses of incidents. The aim of this paper is (...) to verify whether cluster analysis is the appropriate statistical method to determine the appropriate deployment of AED devices on the basis of cases of sudden cardiac arrest in out-of-hospital conditions. The initial cluster analysis showed the validity of using the method in question for planning the appropriate locations of AEDs. (shrink)

Actio immanens - as many other terms, coined by the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophical tradition - is a biological concept par excellence. It was formed as a mental result of biological observation, on the strength of studies on living beings and so, refers to them first and foremost. During the last century, the term actio immanens gradually disappeared from philosophical encyclopedias and has totally vanished from the biological and philosophical language used to describe the dynamism of life. Moreover, if this term does (...) appear at all, its meaning is rather vague. However, actio immanens belongs to the group of key concepts, without which it would seem not possible to properly describe, nor to properly understand biological phenomena. (shrink)

Information transfer implies two independent beings and two distinct, although closely tied levels of reality. In other words the „information transfer" is a multi-layer reality. The investigation of the „causal" mechanisms presupposes a proper description of the phenomenal effects. It is the phenomenal sphere of the directly observable events which provokes - in our mind - the questions driving the effort to explore the „mechanisms". It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to approach the process of description with the sufficiently unbiased means. (...) A premature narrowing on the descriptive level may fatally affect our „explanatory" ideas on the underlying mechanisms. For instance, in the realm of „information theories" there is a deeply rooted, but not too reliable conviction, that the descriptive means, used in the process of the construction and utilization of some technical devices, give us a fair chance to describe the „Information transfer" within or between the living creatures. (shrink)

This article aims to examine the Lithuanian housing policy system, with a special emphasis on social housing issues. This study is based on 20 semi-structured interviews with the decision makers and recipients of social housing. The analysis reveals the issues related to access to social housing, management and administration issues, problems related to stigmatisation of social housing recipients, and their overall satisfaction with the provided support.The study shows that accessing social housing and living in social housing is not an easy (...) task. Social housing recipients have to wait in queues for a long time, experience stigmatisation and constant fear that they may lose their social housing due to a strict income monitoring. On the other hand, the municipality tries to provide friendly strategies to solve individual cases and looks for the best solutions possible to meet the needs of social housing recipients. The findings show that massive privatisation in Lithuania created a dualistic housing market favouring home ownership and marginalising social housing as a safety net for the most vulnerable people. At the same time, a massive home ownership society formed a safety net for many, with family ties playing a crucial role. Housing safety is offered as a part of social assistance programs for the most vulnerable parts of the population. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment*Jolanta T. PekaczDuring the eighteenth century a significant shift occurred in the perception of the authority of aesthetic judgment in France, from a group usually referred to as “polite society” and widely considered the exclusive source of taste (goût) to various competing groups arrogating to themselves the right to judge artistic matters. 1 In the (...) present article I discuss the changing recognition of the genders as arbiters of taste, exemplified by Parisian salonnières on the one hand, and the philosophes on the other, during two eighteenth-century quarrels over the French and Italian operas: the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s and the controversy between Gluckistes and Piccinistes in the 1770s. I argue that by the end of the 1770s, as a result of the collapse of the old paradigm of “polite society” of which salons were a part, Parisian salon women lost the position (however illusory it might have been) which they enjoyed in the seventeenth century as arbiters of taste. While the philosophes attended feminine salons, [End Page 277] they rejected the idea of consulting salonnières on the matters of taste (and on other matters), as was previously the case, and relegated them to formal, if not merely decorative, roles of guardians of good manners and propriety, the roles accepted by salonnières.The ousting of the salonnière from aesthetic arbitration exemplified by the two operatic quarrels may be viewed as a continuation of the process of exclusion of salon women from discursive development that began in the seventeenth century, as discussed by Erica Harth in Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (1992) and, most recently, by Joan DeJean in Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (1997). In the seventeenth century the norms of feminine bienséance (decorum, propriety) allowed a woman to establish a salon but made it impossible for a salonnière to create a space intellectually comparable to that of the French Academy. After having lost a gendered competition for intellectual space with the Academy by the 1680s, the salon, as Erica Harth put it, “proved a discursive dead end for women.”In this essay I carry through this argument into the eighteenth century and demonstrate that salon women lost a competition with the philosophes not only in the intellectual but also in the aesthetic sphere. Salonnières did not choose not to make aesthetic judgments out of respect for the exclusive right of the philosophes to make such judgments 2 but rather were silenced by the philosophes and complied in order not to violate the limits of feminine bienséance in the public sphere, that is, to survive as salonnières. The seventeenth-century ideals of feminine bienséance taken over by eighteenth-century salonnières were no longer perceived as sufficient (or legitimate) to recognize women as arbiters of taste. In fact these ideals proved to be as detrimental as a source of authority for salon women in the siècle des lumières as they were ambiguous in the grand siècle.Ironically, not only were the eighteenth-century Parisian salonnières ousted from aesthetic arbitration, but neither did they succeed in their roles as guardians of propriety and good manners for the philosophes, that is, in keeping the Enlightenment discourse civil. In both operatic quarrels the dominant genre of discourse was a pamphlet, a libelle, not a salon conversation. While during the Querelle des Bouffons the philosophes were unanimously pro-Italian, the Gluck-Piccini quarrel caused a deep split among them, followed by fratricidal fighting, which seriously undermined their authority in public matters.I. The negative connotation associated with the epithets pedant, savant, and their derivatives in seventeenth-century French treatises on honnêteté indicates [End Page 278] that the authority of judgment of “persons of quality” in matters of taste resulted from the code of bienséances in social relations. Blaise Pascal probably best summarized arguments for the superiority of an honnête person (as opposed to a professional) in the realm of aesthetics; being an... (shrink)

Research on the forced migration of Lithuanians to the east of the former Soviet Union in the 1940s and early 1950s throws up a wide range of issues. Methodologically, most of such studies are similar in terms of the sample chosen, which consists of the former prisoners of gulags and exiles who have returned to Lithuania, but it usually disregards those who stayed. Accordingly, the Lithuanian diasporas that emerged in the east after the forced migration, including in Kazakhstan, have not (...) been studied in detail. In this article, our aim is to answer the questions of how and in what private and public contexts processes of the ethnic identification of the Lithuanian diaspora in Kazakhstan are determined, how ethnic boundaries are drawn, and what cultural and social resources are used for this purpose. As the research revealed, the conceptualisation of ethnicity implied by the Kazakhstan state that has been adopted by our informants eliminates its cultural content, or at most reduces it to forms evident in festive culture, as well as the need and possibilities for its expression. As a result, ethnic identity is constructed on the basis of what is almost the sole criterion: Lithuanian descent in the form of ‘root’ or ‘blood’. For most of our informants, ‘roots’ are just a fact of origin, as shown in the practice of entering Lithuanian ethnicity in personal documents, an officially required practice which does not have and does not presuppose any enactment of ethno-cultural differences. Ethnicity, which is seen as ‘in-rooted’ but also as culture-less and as muted by a doubling of roots among ethnically mixed families of origin, enables a whole spectrum of manipulations of ethnic identity. One such manipulation is attempting to profit from the Lithuanian ethnic identity by turning it into a resource for acquiring benefits. The practice of profiteering from the Lithuanian ethnic identity, and thus its transformation into a resource for gaining benefits in the forms of Lithuanian citizenship and a hope of being repatriated to Lithuania, is probably the most frequent factor in becoming Lithuanian by remembering Lithuanian roots and activating the Lithuanian ethnic identity. (shrink)

Der Artikel wird der Methode der Debatte gewidmet, die seit einigen Jahren in vielen polnischen Schulen angewandt wird. Eine Debatte ist keine freie unordentliche Diskussion, sondern sie hat eine spezifische Struktur, die von den Sprechern beachtet werden muss. Die eine Mannschaft verteidigt eine These, und die zweite stoßt diese These um. Die Mitglieder der beiden Mannschaften sollen Argumente für Verteidigung ihrer Stelle erheben, und auch damit die Argumente der Gegner umstoßen. Diese Mannschaft gewinnt, die nach der Meinung des Richters (Lehrers) (...) den richtigen, ehrlichen und mehr akzeptablen Ansichtspunkt zu dem bestimmten Thema darstellt. Der mit der Methode der Debatte geführte Unterricht ermöglicht Inhalte aus verschiedenen Fächern integrieren, ist also ein Fächer übergreifender Unterricht. Der Anteil an Debatten entwickelt bei Schülern viele Fähigkeiten, die zum Leben in der gegenwärtigen kommerziellen Welt notwendig sind, d.h. zum Beispiel kritisch zu denken, den Entschluss zu fassen und ihre eigene Stellung zu verteidigen. Debatten lehren auch erfolgreiche Teilnahme an dem Dialog und verschiedenen Verhandlungen, bilden die Bereitschaft der Arbeit im leam, die Fähigkeit der Selbstbildung. Das Debattieren bereitet junge Leute auf die Arbeit in vielen Berufen vor, wie z.B. Manager, Journalist, Lehrer, Jurist und auf die zukünftige politische Tätigkeit sowie auf aktive und bewusstsame Teilnahme am Leben der heutigen Gesellschaft. (shrink)

We have transited far from an ancient culture of hunters to the world of today when our conditions as human beings are changing. We recognize that our biological-cultural co-evolution has privileged reason. Even if it takes a tiny part of our mind; first memory and then reason have become protagonists in our relation with the landscape. It also means that pain control became a social custom for developing morality: this is the central thesis of this essay. This conclusion derives from (...) our experimental research on the symbolic image of the world, that was guided mainly by Jung’s psychology and by Aristotle’s Poetics and Ethics. (shrink)

Kluczowe w filozofii Lenartowicza było pojęcie organizmu żywego rozumianego jako cykl życiowy, który będąc powiązany z innymi podobnymi cyklami wplata się w sieć linii pokoleń danego rodzaju istot żywych. Fundamentem cyklu życiowego jest dynamika rozwojowa rozpoczynająca się w momencie poczęcia organizmu. Patrząc na osobnika z perspektywy jego rozwoju, można powiedzieć, że w swej najgłębszej istocie jest on nie tyle i nie przede wszystkim całościową funkcjonalną strukturą, która przejawia życie, ile jest raczej żywą dynamiką, której jednym z zasadniczych przejawów jest zintegrowane (...) budowanie, odbudowywanie, naprawianie i modyfikowanie różnorakich skorelowanych struktur ciała, czyli maszyn molekularnych, organelli i organów, które warunkują zachodzenie różnorodnych procesów biochemicznych i fizjologicznych oraz umożliwiają selektywne interakcje ze środowiskiem abiotycznym i biotycznym. (shrink)

Constructing dependency relations, in particular subject-verb agreement, in languages in which verbs may occupy the final position in the sentence, requires a combination of newly appearing lexical items with the existing context, such that it extends beyond the limits of the phrase. New words can be integrated only if the part of the sentence that has already been processed remains in a state of activation, being open to receive new elements. This article focuses on the question of the specificity for (...) the domain of linguistic knowledge of the working memory, as the cognitive system in which representations are temporarily stored and manipulated. (shrink)

The post-Soviet scene in Lithuania is one of rapid change in medical and nursing ethics. A short introduction to the current background sets the scene for a wider discussion of ethics in health care professionals' education. Lithuania had to adapt rapidly from a politicized nursing and ethics curriculum to European regulations, and from a paternalistic style of care to one of engagement with choices and dilemmas. The relationships between professionals, and between professionals and patients, are affected by this in particular. (...) This short article highlights these issues and how they impact on all involved. (shrink)

The present article is aimed at dealing with certain questions of compensation for damage, caused by the criminally insane person. Disposal of a civil action on compensation for damage, caused by the criminally insane person, in the criminal procedure is analyzed in the first part of the article. The subjects, who are responsible for compensating for damage, caused by the criminally insane person’s deed, are dealt with in the second part. Not only the respective rules of law, stated in the (...) Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania and in the Criminal Process Code of the Republic of Lithuania, are systemically analyzed in the present article, but the court practice is considered from the aspect of the items, which are relevant to the theme under investigation, and is systematized. (shrink)

W monografii Radical Entlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity poświęconej dziejom oświecenia brytyjski historyk Jonathan Irvine Israel sformułował nową tezę dotyczącą datowania, źródeł i charakteru tego okresu historii i przypisał filozofii Spinozy znaczącą rolę w sformułowaniu haseł oświecenia. Jego praca wywołała szereg kontrowersji i uwag krytycznych, dotyczących oceny faktów należących do obszaru historii idei. Artykuł przypomina o interpretacjach roli filozofii Spinozy i o jej wczesnej recepcji, kiedy filozof oddziaływał bezpośrednio. Wydarzenia polityczne w Niderlandach w okresie 1648–1677 oraz losy filozofii (...) Descartes’a są czynnikami wydatnie ingerującymi w kształtowanie się pierwotnej recepcji spinozyzmu i przesądzają na długo o losach tej filozofii. (shrink)

In English: Epochs and formation an attempt of adaptation reconstruction.