James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as “Me” and the self as “I”. This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former (“Me”) corresponds (...) to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter (“I”) reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger’s (2018) theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-“I” [following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein (1958) ] can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self discussed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper has already been published in Policy Futures in Education, 0 1–14, 2017. It is freely available on Academia. We thank Jason Thomas Wozniak for the permission to republish it here.: Debt shapes subjectivity by rhythmically training indebted subjects. Stated slightly differently, there exists a debt dressage that produces indebted subjectivity. One of the principle aims of this article is to introduce rhythm into the debt analysis debates. Building on Henri - Sciences de l'éducation et de la formation – (...) Nouvel article. (shrink)

While John B. Watson articulated the intellectual commitments of behaviorism with clarity and force, wove them into a coherent perspective, gave the perspective a name, and made it a cause, these commitments had adherents before him. To document the origins of behaviorism, this series collects the articles that set the terms of the behaviorist debate, includes the most important pre-Watsonian contributions to objectivism, and reprints the first full text of the new behaviorism. Contents: Functionalism, the Critque of Introspection, and the (...) Nature and Evolution of Consciousness: Theoretical Roots of Early Behaviourism: An Anthology [1842-1914] Robert H. Wozniak (Ed) 360 pp Studies of Animal and Infant Behaviour. the Experimental and Comparative Roots of Early Behaviourism: An Anthology [1840-1911] Robert H. Wozniak (Ed) 412 pp An Introuduction to Comparative Psychology [1894 edition] Conway Lloyd Morgan 628 pp Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology [1900] Jacques Loeb 342 pp Fundamental Laws of Human Behaviour. Lectures on the foundtions of Any Mental or Social Science [1911] Max F. Meyer 264 pp Behaviour. An Introduction to Comparative Psychology [1914 edition] John B. Watson 482 pp. (shrink)

A Deontic Logic for Normative Dilemmas: Standard deontic logic does not tolerate normative conflicts. If we assume that one ought to do A and ought to do B, but cannot do them both, we get a contradiction within deontic logic. Philosophers who deny that there could be genuine moral dilemmas treat this fact as the proof that dilemmas are logically impossible. At the same time, the advocates of the possibility of moral dilemmas propose to reject or restrict standard deontic principles. (...) What consequences does it have for the resulting logic? Some of them are too strong because they contain the theorem of normative triviality or “deontic explosion,” which says that if there is any case of normative conflict, then everything is obligatory. On the other hand, some of them are too weak, since they are not able to validate more important deontic inferences especially the Smith Argument. Lou Goble introduces three criteria of adequacy that any deontic logic should meet if it is to accommodate normative conflicts successfully. First, I present these conditions and then I introduce a new logic of ought that fully meets all of them. (shrink)

The novel "Mephisto" is one of the most well-known texts by Klaus Mann. Its fame results not only from its literary virtuosity, but also and primarily from the enormous media attention which was caused by the novel’s publication. The decision of the Federal Constitutional Court, in which it dealt with the relationship between freedom of art and other constitutionally guaranteed rights of individuals, launched the unprecedented career of this novel. This article describes Klaus Mann’s political views and their development in (...) the 1920s during the time when the National Socialist movement was strengthening and the writer made the decision to emigrate. The essay deals with the circumstances of creating the novel considering both biographical and political issues. The novelist is described from the perspective of the reality of the 1930s during the National Socialist regime and the time after his emigration. The concern of the article is not a literary analysis of the novel, but to take a look at the novelist’s development up until the moment of finishing his work as a protest against National Socialism. Another goal of the essay is to analyze the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court, which regards the balance between freedom of art and other basic rights. Considering the synergy of both methodological approaches and the interdisciplinary view on the problem, the article represents a novel attempt to give a complex view on the relationship between art and the reality of a totalitarian state and between the relationship art–state in the conditions of a democratic state. (shrink)

The world or an event? Towards an ontology of war: This paper is an attempt to rethink the ontology of war. Its main object is to determine the ontological status of war and the connection between strategies of armed conflict prevention and the way this status is understood. If to overcome metaphysics we need to reconsider its basis then maybe a similar strategy should be applied in order to overcome war. The source of war is understood here not only in (...) temporal terms, but also as its essence — the ontological basis. The first part of the article invokes several conceptions from the twentieth century, according to which, war was to be overcome by variously understood progress. In those conceptions, as well as in the critical approaches from the beginning of the 21st century, war is treated as an event, a state of affairs. In the next part of my paper, based on Margaret Mead’s anthropological diagnosis, I propound a conception of war as an invention, and therefore — technology. The issue of war is further considered in the context of the twentieth-century philosophy of technology. A thesis is put forward according to which understanding the influence of techne of war over episteme should be the essence of thinking of war prevention. In this study, war is treated as a technology that determines perception. For critical reflection upon war, I use twentieth-century philosophical conceptions linking technology with cognitive processes, especially those formulated by Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present a general mechanistic framework for analyzing causal representational claims, and offer a way to distinguish genuinely representational explanations from those that invoke representations for honorific purposes. It is usually agreed that rats are capable of navigation because they maintain a cognitive map of their environment. Exactly how and why their neural states give rise to mental representations is a matter of an ongoing debate. I will show that anticipatory mechanisms involved in rats’ (...) evaluation of possible routes give rise to satisfaction conditions of contents, and this is why they are representationally relevant for explaining and predicting rats’ behavior. I argue that a naturalistic account of satisfaction conditions of contents answers the most important objections of antirepresentationalists. (shrink)

We present a temporal logic of branching time with four primitive operators: |$\exists {\mathcal {C}}$| – it may change whether; |$\forall {\mathcal {C}} $| – it must change whether; |$\exists \Box $| – it may be endlessly unchangeable that; and |$\forall \Box $| – it must be endlessly unchangeable that. Semantically, operator |$\forall {\mathcal {C}}$| expresses a change in the logical value of the given formula in every state that may be an immediate successor of the one considered, while |$\exists (...) {\mathcal {C}}$| expresses a change in the logical value of the given formula in some state that is a possible immediate successor. |$\forall {\mathcal {C}} $| and |$\exists {\mathcal {C}}$| are not normal operators, they are not mutually definable and have unusual properties: |$\forall {\mathcal {C}} A\leftrightarrow \forall {\mathcal {C}} \neg A$| and |$\exists {\mathcal {C}} A \leftrightarrow \exists {\mathcal {C}} \neg A$| are axioms. Operators |$\exists \Box $| and |$\forall \Box $| express endless unchangeability in some and all paths, respectively. Our axiomatization contains two infinitary rules that allow one to obtain |$\exists \Box A$| from infinitely many combinations of formulas with |$A, \neg, \forall {\mathcal {C}}, \land $|⁠, and to get |$\forall \Box A$| from infinitely many combinations of formulas with |$A, \neg, \exists {\mathcal {C}}, \land $|⁠. We show that our formalism is complete by presenting a bridge between our logic and logic |$\textsf {UB}$|⁠, which is a fragment of |$\textsf {CTL}$| in which until operators does not occur. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on a problem related to teleological theories of content namely, which notion of function makes content causally relevant? It has been claimed that some functional accounts of content make it causally irrelevant, or epiphenomenal; in which case, such notions of function could no longer act as the pillar of naturalized semantics. By looking closer at biological questions about behavior, I argue that past discussion has been oriented towards an ill-posed question. What I defend is a (...) Very Boring Hypothesis: depending on the representational phenomenon and the explanatory question, different aspects might be important, and it is difficult to say a priori which ones these might be. There are multiple facets to biological functionality and causality relevant for explaining representational phenomena, and ignoring them will lead to unmotivated simplifications. In addition, accounting for different facets of functionality helps dispense with intuition-based specifications of cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

A pervasive aspect of human communication and sociality is argumentation: the practice of making and criticizing reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement. Argumentation underpins and shapes the decision-making, problem-solving, and conflict management which are fundamental to human relationships. However, argumentation is predominantly conceptualized as two parties arguing pro and con positions with each other in one place. This dyadic bias undermines the capacity to engage argumentation in complex communication in contemporary, digital society. This book offers an ambitious alternative (...) course of inquiry for the analysis, evaluation, and design of argumentation as polylogue: various actors arguing over many positions across multiple places. Taking up key aspects of the twentieth-century revival of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, the polylogue framework engages a wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions necessary for adequately engaging the contemporary entanglement of argumentation and complex communication in human activities. (shrink)

A novel account of semantic information is proposed. The gist is that structural correspondence, analysed in terms of similarity, underlies an important kind of semantic information. In contrast to extant accounts of semantic information, it does not rely on correlation, covariation, causation, natural laws, or logical inference. Instead, it relies on structural similarity, defined in terms of correspondence between classifications of tokens into types. This account elucidates many existing uses of the notion of information, for example, in the context of (...) scientific models and structural representations in cognitive science. It is poised to open a new research program concerned with various kinds of semantic information, its functions, and its measurement. (shrink)

The logic of change formulated by K. Świętorzecka, has its motivation coming from the Aristotelian theory of substantial change which is undrstood as a transformation consisting in the disappearing and becoming of individual substances. The transition: becoming/disapearing (and conversely) is expressed in by the primitive operator C, to be read: it changes that …, and it is mapped by the progressively expanding language. We are interested in attributive changes of individual substances. We consider a formalism with two non-normal and not (...) mutually definable operators of possible and necessary change, inspired by Aristotelian distinction of accidental and essential attributes. From we adopt the idea that temporal concepts are defined via change operators, and the idea of an expanding language. In what follows, We axiomatise our new logic and describe its semantics, giving the proof of its completeness. We compare our formalism with selected modal logics. (shrink)

Since 1989, clinical ethics consultation in form of hospital ethics committees was established in most of the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Up to now, the similarities and differences between HECs in Central and Eastern Europe and their counterparts in the U.S. and Western Europe have not been determined. Through search in literature databases, we have identified studies that document the implementation of clinical ethics consultation in Central and Eastern Europe. These studies have been analyzed under the following (...) aspects: mode of establishment of HECs, character of consultation they provide, and their composition. The results show that HECs in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe differ from their western-European or U.S. counterparts with regard to these three aspects. HECs were established because of centrally imposed legal regulations. Little initiatives in this area were taken by medical professionals interested in resolving emerging ethical issues. HECs in the transition countries concentrate mostly on review of research protocols or resolution of administrative conflicts in healthcare institutions. Moreover, integration of non-professional third parties in the workings of HECs is often neglected. We argue that these differences can be attributed to the historical background and the role of medicine in these countries under the communist regime. Political and organizational structures of healthcare as well as education of healthcare staff during this period influenced current functioning of clinical ethics consultation in the transition countries. (shrink)

The discussion around dignity in nursing philosophy has been underway for many years. The literature still lacks philosophical arguments that would justify the thesis that all people have dignity. Scholars who defend dignity as an intrinsic value most often refer to Kant. However, Kant does not seem to be the most suitable candidate to defend the thesis that all human beings possess dignity. In this paper, I attempt to show that Aristotle's and Aquinas's views can help justify this thesis. To (...) this end, I distinguish between actual dignity, potential dignity, and existential dignity. I state that all human beings have existential dignity or potential dignity. (shrink)

Dialectical fallacies are typically defined as breaches of the rules of a regulated discussion between two participants. What if discussions become more complex and involve multiple parties with distinct positions to argue for? Are there distinct argumentation norms of polylogues? If so, can their violations be conceptualized as polylogical fallacies? I will argue for such an approach and analyze two candidates for argumentative breaches of multi-party rationality: false dilemma and collateral straw man.

In the paper we investigate Birkhoff’s conditions and. We prove that a discrete lattice L satisfies the condition ) if and only if L is a 4-cell lattice not containing a cover-preserving sublattice isomorphic to the lattice S*7. As a corollary we obtain a well known result of J. Jakub´ık from [6]. Furthermore, lattices S7 and S*7 are considered as so-called partially cover-preserving sublattices of a given lattice L, S7 ≪ L and S7 ≪ L, in symbols. It is shown (...) that an upper continuous lattice L satisfies if and only if L is a 4-cell lattice such that S7 ≪/ L. The final corollary is a generalization of Jakubík’s theorem for upper continuous and strongly atomic lattices. Keywords: Birkhoff’s conditions, semimodularity conditions, modular lattice, discrete lattices, upper continuous lattice, strongly atomic lattice, cover-preserving sublattice, cell, 4-cell lattice. (shrink)

Article enumerates memoirs and diaries written between the late 16th and the middle of the 17th century in which Russian threads occur. As the review of source texts, it acts as an introduction to research on rich and detailed image of Russia and Russians, emerged from many relics of Old Polish memoirism. Paper debriefs also a current studies related to this issue.

W 1983 roku Benjamin Libet wraz ze współpracownikami po raz pierwszy wykazał, że w prostym działaniu dobrowolnym świadoma intencja nie pełni funkcji inicjującej. Czasowy przebieg tego typu działania wskazuje również, że intencja oraz samo działanie to produkty procesów nieświadomych. Na podstawie wyniku Libeta oraz wybranych koncepcji psychologicznych Daniel Wegner zaproponował teorię pozornej mentalnej przyczynowości, w ramach której intencja to rodzaj konstruktu umożliwiającego agentowi zrozumienie własnego zachowania w kategoriach przyczynowych, gdzie jego stan mentalny (intencja) jawi mu się jako przyczyna, a działanie (...) jako skutek. Ujęcie Wegnera rodzi jednak pytanie, jaka jest faktyczna relacja pomiędzy intencjami, a celami kształtującymi nasze decyzje. Biorąc pod uwagę wyjaśnienie amerykańskiego psychologa, nie możemy być pewni, że te dwa elementy mają ze sobą jakiś związek. Może to prowadzić do zaskakującego wniosku, że nasza świadoma wola jest w gruncie rzeczy iluzją. Korzystając z wyników badań Read’a Montague nad mechanizmami ustanawiania i osiągania celów wskazuję na alternatywną możliwość rozumienia roli intencji. Zgodnie z analizą Montague, możemy postulować, że przynajmniej w wybranych przypadkach treść intencji działania oraz przebieg zachowań celowych oparte są na tej samej abstrakcyjnej reprezentacji. Znaczy to, że interpretacja świadomej woli, jako przydatnej iluzji jest za szeroka, gdyż znamy (wskazane w tekście) przypadki, kiedy treść intencji jest tożsama z reprezentacją pełniącą rolę nagrody w systemie ustanawiania i osiągania celów. (shrink)

M. Resnik (2019) suggests a new version of structuralism which he calls non-ontological structuralism. In the present short article I discuss this view-point in the context of the Frege-Hilbert controversy about meaning of primitive notions in deductive theory, with special regard to the original views of K. Ajdukiewicz, Hilbert’s student. Following the proposed differentiations, I introduce a new type of structuralism which I call hypothetical structuralism, close to Resnik’s non-ontological structuralism.

In early March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the situation of thousands of higher education institutions around the world. The spreading virus not only imposed remote education, but it also brought tremendous changes in university management. The introduction of new educational and administrative solutions was a huge logistical and financial challenge for public and private universities. It was not easy for students either. It also posed a problem for the faculty. Remote learning generated many problems even in highly developed countries. (...) Therefore, the number of students was expected to slowly decline. It was a surprise that private universities saw an increase in interest in their offer right after the outbreak of the pandemic. The article presents the situation of private universities in Poland, the complex problems related to the management of the academic environment in the absence of proper preparation for on-line education as well as for remote management of higher education organizations. (shrink)

If a meteorite had not fallen on the earth sixty-five million years ago, we would not be where we are now; or more exactly we would not be here at all. If icebergs had not covered a third of the globe's surface three hundred million years ago, this collision some two hundred and thirty-five million years later would have been of no benefit to us. If drought had not swept over the Eurasian continent some ten million years ago, we would (...) still be in the trees, and nothing would encourage us to come down from them. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present the 1951 dicussion on Czesław Miłosz’s escape from Poland. Wirpsza’s poem, published in January 1951, was dedicated to Czesław Miłosz. It was was commented on in a literary cultural newspaper over the next few months. Miłosz is shown as a deserter and a traitor, who has lost his poetic talent. The analysis of censorship documents shows that instructions for Miłosz’s texts and texts about him must have been issued in May 1951.

In his 1913 behaviourist manifesto John B Watson urged psychologists to adopt "a unitary scheme of animal response...(that) recognizes no dividing line between man and brute." His call was heeded. By the 1930s, methodological behaviourism and animal behaviour research were dominant features of the psychological landscape. To document the origins of behaviourism, this series collects the theoretical and empirical articles that set the terms of the behaviourist debate. It includes the most important pre-Watsonian monographic contributions to objectivism and reprints the (...) first full text of the new behaviourism. (shrink)

In most accounts of realization of computational processes by physical mechanisms, it is presupposed that there is one-to-one correspondence between the causally active states of the physical process and the states of the computation. Yet such proposals either stipulate that only one model of computation is implemented, or they do not reflect upon the variety of models that could be implemented physically. In this paper, I claim that mechanistic accounts of computation should allow for a broad variation of models of (...) computation. In particular, some non-standard models should not be excluded a priori. The relationship between mathematical models of computation and mechanistically adequate models is studied in more detail. (shrink)

The article describes Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec's perspective on four classic philosophical images of man and the resulting theoretical and practical implications for the nursing profession. The first three images, namely man as a set of elements, man as a soul imprisoned in the body and man as a rational animal, are regarded by Krąpiec as reductionist anthropologies and are thus inadequate for nursing. The first image reduces man to a biological element. The second one reduces man to a soul and (...) treats a body as something an obstacle in personal development. The third image absolutizes reason in man. While the body is not rejected in this image, it is viewed as an indifferent mass. The last image, which regards man as a person, is an adequate image for nursing. The exceptional character of man emphasized in this image is determined by the following personal qualities: the ability for cognition, freedom, love, religiousness, dignity, subjectivity to law and completeness. These characteristics reveal the specificity of personal being in both the body and the spirit. By viewing man as a person, a nurse discovers a wide range of possibilities of providing effective help to the patient. (shrink)

We present the logic$${\mathsf {LCB}}$$LCBwhich is expressed in a propositional language constantly enriched by new atomic expressions. Our formal framework is the propositional doxastic logic$${\mathsf {KD45}}$$KD45with the belief operator$${\mathcal {B}}$$B, extended by the$${\mathcal {C}}$$Coperator, to be readit changes that.... We describe the changing beliefs of an agent who uses progressively expanding language. The approach presented here allows us to weaken pragmatic objections to the so-called principle ofnegative retrospectionaccepted in$${\mathsf {KD45}}$$KD45and the problem oflogical omniscience. In what follows, we present the expanding (...) propositional language used in our formalism, interpreted using an epistemic version of Kripke semantics. Next, we give a syntactic characterization of logic$${\mathsf {LCB}}$$LCBand prove the soundness and completeness of$${\mathsf {LCB}}$$LCBin respect to our semantics. Finally, we compare the idea of expanding language with the notion ofagent awarenessand we relate our formalism to two epistemic temporal logics. (shrink)

Explanations in cognitive science and computational neuroscience rely predominantly on computational modeling. Although the scientific practice is systematic, and there is little doubt about the empirical value of numerous models, the methodological account of computational explanation is not up-to-date. The current chapter offers a systematic account of computational explanation in cognitive science and computational neuroscience within a mechanistic framework. The account is illustrated with a short case study of modeling of the mirror neuron system in terms of predictive coding.

The author presents a model of moral responsibility based on the actual sequence and the notion of reason-responsiveness, and draws an analogy between this model and Robert Nozick’s model of knowledge based on the actual sequence. In addition, the concept of semicompatibilism is introduced and explained.

The text introduces a translation of Ilyenkov’s famous text “On the State of Philosophy,” which was meant as a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU and expressed his exasperation with the development of Soviet philosophy. In our introduction, we describe the historical context of the emergence of the letter, including the main changes in Soviet philosophy in the 1960s (esp. rise in popularity of cybernetics), and the institutional details of Ilyenkov’s biography. We point to the contemporary relevance of (...) the letter by emphasizing how Ilyenkov’s dialectical account of science can enrich contemporary discussions in the sociology of science and STS. (shrink)

The paper is devoted is to the problem of philosophical method in the late writings of Nikolai Berdyaev, in which he began to criticize ontology for rationalising concrete existence. Berdyaev calls his new project “phenomenology of spiritual experience”, and his works of that period betray a growing interest in Hegelian philosophy as a first philosophy of spirit and a new, more dynamic way of philosophising. Because of it, I aim to compare both philosophical projects. In the first part of the (...) text, I reconstruct Hegel’s description of dialectics and phenomenology; in the second, I confront them with Berdyaev’s conceptualisation of new, existential philosophy, rooted in his epistemology. As I argue, Berdyaev puts emphasis on symbolical character of philosophy, and the main features of the new philosophical method he stresses are not directly inspired by Hegel, but rather by far less known phenomenological project by Henri-Frédéric Amiel. (shrink)

The paper discusses the role of systemic means of persuasion in argument evaluation. The core class of systemic means of persuasion is regress stoppers, whose fundamental function is to halt the infinite regress of justification by making claims, premises, or overall position expressed in a persuasive message more acceptable to a recipient. The paper explores how systemic means of persuasion contribute to the structure of arguments in the Toulmin model and serve as cues for heuristic processing of persuasive messages. It (...) also presents the results of the stylometric analysis and statistical data on the usage of systemic means of persuasion in three corpora which suggest that systemic means of persuasion constitute strategies independent of the strategy based on explicit argumentation marked by inference indicators. (shrink)