Where you have freedom, the meaning of the word increases, where the word is meaningful, you presuppose freedom." Józef Tischner.

After the unexpected death of Professor Józef Kałuża at the age of 74 on the 26th of July 2003, not only Polish neuropathology but also Polish philosophy of medical investigations lost one of its most renowned minds. Beginning in 1949, Professor Kałuża studied medical sciences for five years at the Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. He did his Ph.D. thesis in neuropathology in the Department of Neuropathology of the Polish Academy of Science. In 1962 he received (...) a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and spent one year at the National Institutes of Health. In 1981 Professor Kaluza was promoted to a tenured professorship in neuropathology. He is the author of more than 110 articles published in medical periodicals and coauthor of many chapters in medical handbooks. (shrink)

The use of target baselines or reference states for conservation and restoration has become increasingly problematic and impractical, due to rapid environmental change, the paradigm shift in ecology from a static to a dynamic view of nature, and growing awareness of the role of cultural traditions in the reconstruction of baselines. The various responses to this crisis of baselines will to a significant extent determine the future direction of nature conservation. Although some hold onto traditional baselines and others try to (...) refine or re-define the reference concept, the debate is currently dominated by two widely diverging reactions to the crisis: while the so-called ‘new environmentalists’ or ‘new conservationists’ declare the whole baseline notion obsolete, replacing a backward-looking approach with a forward-looking one, the ‘re-wilders’ push the baseline back to a deeper, more distant past. This article provides a critical assessment of the debate on these conversation options, with a special focus on the differences between Old World and New World perspectives. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the views on the Turing test of four influential thinkers who belong to the tradition of analytic philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Putnam and John Searle. Based on various beliefs about philosophical and/or linguistic matters, they arrive at different assessments of both the significance and suitability of the imitation game for the development of cognitive science and AI models. Nevertheless, they share a rejection of the idea that one can treat Turing test as a (...) test for “machine thinking.” This seems to stem from a concern for the proper use of language —one that is a fundamental methodological commitment of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Excerpt from A History of Formal Logic In this edition of the most considerable history Of formal logic yet published, the Opportunity has Of course been taken to make some adjustments seen to be necessary in the original, with the author's full concurrence. Only in 36, however, has the numeration of cited passages been altered owing to the introduction of new matter. Those changes are as follows. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. (...) Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

My reflection is dedicated to a universalist and personalistic conception of Andrzej Grzegorczyk and his main idea on deriving the sphere of spiritual values from vital ones. I try to interpret Andrzej Grzegorczyk’s ethics in a broad way, that is, as a universalistic philosophy of life. I mean by “philosophy of life” the basic aspect of the practical realization of values, that is, social life as an attitude to fate. I use Martin Heidegger’s concept of human handiness, filtered through its (...) use by Grzegorczyk, as a tool of exposing vitality values which grow into universal spiritual values. (shrink)

A brief account of the first - unsuccessful - attemps to create research centers in the field of technical (applied) physics in Poland in the period before the outbreak of World War is given. Outstanding physicists such as Mieczysław Wolfke, Stanisław Kalinowski, Aleksander Jabłoński and Wacław Dziewulski took part in this trials. Activities in this direction continued after the war, especially after the establishment of the Polish Academy of Sciences, within whch several institutes dealing with the application of physics were (...) established. The most important of them incude the Institute of Physics and Institute of Fundamental Technological Research in Warsaw, as well as the Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery in Gdańsk and Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków. Outside the structure of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Industrial Institute of Electronics and the Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion were established, both in Warsaw. Technical Physics center establised at the Warsaw, Wrocław and Poznań Universities of Technology and at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń are also discussed. Spectacular examples of medical applications include photodynamic therapy based on the Jabłoński diagram, optical tomography and proton radioteraphy for eye cancer. (shrink)

The presented paper focuses on the analysis of strategic documents at the level of the European Union concerning the regulation of artificial intelligence as one of the so-called disruptive technologies. In the first part of the article, we outline the basic terminology. Subsequently, we focus on the summarizing and systemizing of the key documents adopted at the EU level in terms of artificial intelligence regulation. The focus of the paper is devoted to issues of personal data protection and cyber security (...) included in these strategic documents. The final part contains recommendations for future research and evaluation of its key features. (shrink)

The recent widespread shift in governance from the state to the market and to civil society, in combination with the simultaneous shift from the national level to supra-national and sub-national levels has led to a significant increase in the numbers of public and private players in nature policy. This in turn has increased the need for a common vocabulary to articulate and communicate views and values concerning nature among various actors acting on different administrative levels. In this article, we will (...) examine the role of concepts of nature as communicative devices in public debates and political decision-making. We try to show that the now dominant functionalist approach to concepts of nature, due to its focus on interests, threatens to narrow public and political communications to purely strategic negotiations. Instead of this functionalist approach we put forward a structuralist approach, which focuses not on interests but on values. (shrink)

W artykule przedstawiono niektóre wątki interesujących analiz filozoficzno-etycznych Roberta Spaemanna na temat świata zwierząt, podejmowanych przezeń w duchu arystotelesowskim. Dotykają one kwestii, które wydają się być szczególnym przedmiotem zainteresowania zarówno znawców zagadnienia, jak i współczesnego człowieka. Są to: natura i status ontyczny zwierząt, cierpienie i jego źródła, zabijanie tych stworzeń oraz jedzenie ich mięsa. Spaemann nie tylko nie podważał, ale w duchu myśli klasycznej i współczesnej oryginalnie podkreślał istotową wyższość człowieka nad zwierzęciem. Czynił to m.in. przez zaakcentowanie zdolności człowieka do (...) samorelatywizacji. Według wybitnego myśliciela niemieckiego zasady etyczne normujące nasze odniesienie do zwierząt łączą się ściśle z metafizycznym rozumieniem ich bytowości. Zasady te bowiem mają swoją podstawę w teleologicznej naturze naszych mniejszych braci i podmiotowej formie ich egzystencji. Spaemann akcentował rolę życzliwości, odpowiedzialności i troski, utylitarystyczną zasadę rachunku korzyści i strat, imperatyw kategoryczny Kanta oraz normę personalistyczną. Natomiast obowiązek ochrony zwierząt i odpowiedzialności za nie rozwijał w kontekście godności ludzkiej. Podjęto próbę wykazania, jak doniosła jest teleologiczna perspektywa, której nikt tak wyraziście i przekonująco nie ukazał w odniesieniu do zwierząt we współczesnej niemieckiej filozofii jak właśnie Spaemann. Dokonano także porównania jego stanowiska na temat świata zwierzęcego z wizją Petera Singera. Przede wszystkim w artykule podjęto próbę rekonstrukcji Spaemanna myśli dotyczącej etycznych i metafizycznych aspektów stosunku człowieka do zwierząt. (shrink)

Doubtless that which strongly links Karol Wojtyła’s Laborem exercens encyclical with Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is not so much philosophy of work as the personalistic anti-feudalism that is equally alive in both works. The personalistic trait, in Marxism merely an (unpursued) option mentioned in the Manuscripts, was taken further—philosophically, and not just ethically—in Laborem exercens, where the person becomes an ontological category (in light both of the transcendent existence of a tri-personal God and the transcendence of (...) the communities created by human beings, who are only able to live in communities). Also, the person acquired an ontological-social dimension by determining the boundaries of humanity’s co-creative (also in the world-creating sense) communion with God as the ideal of community-based material and social existence. And this is also the guiding perspective of my initial analysis of the personalization process underway in Polish society and the post-Vatican-II Church. Both are gradually—if not without some difficulty—learning to part with the non-personalistic models characteristic for the previous, still considerably feudalism-influenced era, which manifested themselves as much in the institutionalismof official Marxism as the socially (not religiously!) motivated doctrines of the Church. (shrink)

Karin Peter and Nikolaus Wandinger, James G. Williams, and Mathias Moosbrugger give in their essays in this volume of Contagion some basic information about the correspondence between these two “beautiful minds”: René Girard and Raymund Schwager. I would now like to go “step-by-step” along the way of some selected letters, and this only insofar as they discussed the question of sacrifice.1 Going this way the reader can get an idea how these two men were dealing with each other. These excerpts (...) show on the one hand the dynamic of their correspondence, on the other hand the different positions of the partners. Girard is not a theologian, so he shows uncertainty with regard to theological questions. Schwager is firmly .. (shrink)

Exposition of philosophical contribution of Slovak philosopher and logician Vojtech Filkorn.

Socrates’ final argument in the Protagoras is premised on the surprising identification of the pleasant with the good and argues that virtue is the “art of measurement” that can be easily taught to the Many. The view that virtue can be taught is also espoused by Socrates elsewhere, notably in the Phaedrus. However, while the Protagoras identifies virtue with the art of calculating the greatest pleasure, which is identified with the greatest good, in the Phaedrus virtue is shown to consist (...) in the ceaseless search for the good. I argue that the picture of virtue presented in the Protagoras is in agreement with that of the Phaedrus in that the Protagoras depicts the first stage of the process of learning genuine virtue, which is outlined as a whole in the Phaedrus. The argument of the Protagoras then works as a protreptic: it teaches an elementary way of thinking about the ends of one’s actions and opens up the way toward genuine virtue. (shrink)

The paper addresses the following question: why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond, and often against, their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality. In particular, it is the presence of theoretical reason that necessitates the limitless nature of (...) human non-rational desires. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the widely held view that Aristotle's vicious agent is a principled follower of a wrong conception of the good whose soul, just like the soul of the virtuous agent, is marked by harmony between his reason and non-rational desires is an exegetical mistake. Rather, Aristotle holds – consistently and throughout the Nicomachean Ethics – that the vicious agent lacks any real principles of action and that his soul lacks unity and harmony even more than (...) the soul of the uncontrolled agent. (shrink)

Die in der analytischen Philosophie vorgeschlagenen Lösungen des Leib-Seele-Problems, d.h. des Problems, in welchem Verhältnis der menschliche Geist zu dem Leib steht, sind überwiegend materialistischer bzw. physikalistischer Art. Hinter der Bezeichnung „physikalistische Art“ steckt normalerweise eine reduktionistische These, die besagt, daß alle realen Dinge und Ereignisse in der letzten Analyse nichts anderes sind als mikrophysikalische Partikel oder Ereignisse und sich allein mit Hilfe von rein physikalistischen Methoden und Prinzipien beschreiben bzw. erklären lassen. Ein so verstandener Reduktionismus ist keine naturwissenschaftliche, sondern (...) eine philosophische Theorie. Die jetzt folgende Darstellung der geschichtlichen Entwicklungsstufen dieser Theorie soll in die unten ausgearbeiteten reduktionistischen Thesen von W. Sellars einführen. Diese Darstellung konzentriert sich auf die in der analytischen Philosophie vorgeschlagenen Lösungen des Leib-Seele-Problems, oder in unserem Fall Leib-Sensorium-Problems, da wir uns vor allem auf die Reduktion der Sinneseindrücke konzentrieren wollen. (shrink)

deel 1. De zedelijkheid als menselijk fenomeen.

The author points out that Reichenbach made a mistake in his famous argument for the conventionality of the definition of simultaneity. Then a remedy for this difficulty is proposed, and afterwards Reichenbach's thesis is reconsidered.

The author reflects on the peculiarity of European integration suggesting that its unique characteristics calls for a completely new approach which demands a great deal of creativity in our thinking. Such creativity is needed, first of all, in a very discourse applied to the European integration. Conceptual creativity must help us to depart from the centuries old ideas which do not allow us to see the specificity of the new political reality in Europe. Next, there is a need to overcome (...) two dilemmas that limit our imagination in building new conceptual framework of integrating Europe. These are: the dilemma of liberal or social Europe and the dilemma of federal or intergovernmental Europe. Neither of these two oppositions takes into consideration the unprecedented nature of European Union. In conclusion the author suggests that the way out of the mentioned dilemmas is also through a radical rebuilding of a European integration discourse which must concentrate rather on “solidarity” than on “democracy” as its organizing concept. (shrink)