Pediatric cancer can be considered an event potentially leading to posttraumatic stress symptoms as well as posttraumatic growth. While clinically significant levels of PTSS are rare in childhood cancer survivors, PTG is common in this population. However, the relationship of PTG to overall adaptation and quality of life in pediatric cancer patients is not clear. Therefore, our study aims to analyse the relationships of PTSS and PTG with QOL in childhood cancer survivors. In this study, 172 childhood cancer survivors completed (...) measures of quality of life, posttraumatic stress and posttraumatic growth. Correlation analyses were carried out separately for the child and adolescent groups and each QOL dimension. In the adolescent group, the relationship of PTSS and PTG with QOL was further verified by regression analyses while controlling for age, gender, and time off treatment. In children, negative relationships between PTSS and QOL were found, but the relationships between QOL and PTG were not significant. In adolescents, significant relationships were found for all dimensions of QOL and PTSS and also for several dimensions of QOL and PTG. The relationships between PTSS and QOL dimensions were negative in both groups, and the relationships between PTG and QOL in the adolescent group were weakly positive. In adolescents, regression analyses controlling for age, gender and time off treatment were performed and confirmed a negative relationship of PTSS with all QOL dimensions except for social functioning. For PTG, regression analyses revealed a significant positive relationship with QOL dimensions of social functioning, outlook on life and intimate relations. While the relationship between PTSS and QOL is negative for almost all QOL dimensions in children and adolescents, the nature of the relationship between PTG and QOL appears to be more complex and changing over time. PTG in children may reflect different processes with different outcomes than PTG in adolescents. (shrink)

Author: Nowik Andrzej Marek Title: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ’S HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM THE METHODOLOGICAL POLEMICS POINT OF VIEW (Historiografia Władysława Tatarkiewicza w kontekście sporów metodologicznych) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 497-503 Keywords: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, MODERN PHILOSOPHY, METHODOLOGY Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The purpose of this article is to show the main trends in philosophy that influenced Władyslaw Tatarkiewicz’s science research, with special consideration of neo-Kantianism (the (...) Marburg and the Baden Schools). Władysław Tatarkiewicz, one of the most significant polish historians of philosophy, rarely made comments on his preferred methods and on his concept of history of philosophy. Nevertheless, many of the methodological issues raised by Tatarkiewicz are focused on the problem of historical synthesis, at which the historian is obliged to make specific assessment concerning the subject matter of the research. Tatarkiewicz’s position on historiography indicates its relationship with remaining humanistic disciplines. (shrink)

Since the publication of ChatGPT and Dall-E, there has been heavy discussions on the possible dangers of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for society. These discussions question the extent to which the development of AI can be regulated by politics, law, and civic actors. An important arena for discourse on AI is the news media. The news media discursively construct AI as a technology that is more or less possible to regulate. There are various reasons for an assumed regulatability. Some voices (...) highlight the predominant capitalism of modern society as an ideology that enforces an uncontrolled development of AI. Others call on the rationality of civic society, which will push AI toward a development that serves humankind. Summarized, the discourse on AI floats between positions of technological and social determinism. The article conducts a discourse analysis on 113 articles from the German newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The analysis shows how these center-left and center-right media frame the AI development in terms of social and technological determinism. As these newspapers reach out to a large audience, the article shows the kinds of perspectives on AI that confront civic society in Germany every day. News media can motivate or impede social action, as they frame the potential necessity of society and its members to intervene against certain developments. The article shows how the newspapers promote an understanding of AI, by which citizens will feel motivated to insist on a regulation of AI by politics and law. (shrink)

The article reviews the book Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, by Erik J. Wielenberg.

In this work, a system for the classification of liver dynamic contest- enhanced CT images is presented. The system simultaneously analyzes the images with the same slice location, corresponding to three typical acquisition moments. At first, the texture features are extracted separately for each acquisition mo- ment. Afterwards, they are united in one “multiphase” vector, characterizing a triplet of textures. The work focuses on finding the most appropriate features that characterize a multi-image texture. At the beginning, the features which are (...) unstable and dependent on ROI size are eliminated. Then, a small subset of remaining features is selected in order to guarantee the best possible classification accuracy. In total, 9 extraction methods were used, and 61 features were calculated for each of three acquisition moments. 1511 texture triplets, corresponding to 4 hepatic tissue classes were recognized. As a classifier, an adaptive boosting algorithm with a C4.5 tree was used. Experiments show that a small set of 12 features is able to ensure classification accuracy exceeding 90%, while all of the 183 features provide an accuracy rate of 88.94%. (shrink)

Audiozáznam přednášky proslovené ve Filozofické jednotě na Katedře filozofie dne 26. března 2012.V přednášce se pokouším o velmi základní rozlišení tří funkcí, jež mohou myšlenkové experimenty plnit. Nejprve nabízím liberální definici myšlenkového experimentu, podle níž nejde nutně o výjimečné, nereálné, teoreticky zajímavé, bizarní, imaginární scénáře, nýbrž o celkem běžné představování si situace s kognitivním cílem. Snažím se ukázat, že navzdory své šíři je tato definice přiměřeným zachycením všech podstatných vlastností útvarů, jež intuitivně mezi myšlenkové experimenty počítáme. Stručně se poté věnuji (...) prvnímu významu myšlenkových experimentů: imaginární příklady jsou názornou pomůckou při posilování již získaných přesvědčení. Jejich první význam je didaktický. Druhý možný význam myšlenkových experimentů je předmětem vyhraněných diskusí zejména v posledním dvacetiletí: imaginární příklady jsou zdrojem zdůvodnění. Jejich druhý význam je tedy epistemický. Zatímco je však první, didaktický význam zcela nekontroverzní, epistemický význam myšlenkových experimentů je předmětem mnoha odmítnutí. Myšlenkové experimenty jsou tak často odkázány pouze do role názorných pomůcek bez další hodnoty. Snažím se ukázat, že existuje ještě třetí význam myšlenkových experimentů, význam dialektický. Vhodně použitý myšlenkový experiment může v kritické diskusi sloužit jako „přenašeč důkazního břemene”, tj. dokáže vyvolat argumentační tlak na protistranu. Imaginární scénář může za jistých okolností fungovat jako legitimní argument, aniž bychom však nutně museli předpokládat silný epistemický význam myšlenkových experimentů. Myšlenkové experimenty tak mohou být víc než jen líbivé ornamenty, zároveň ale nejsme zavázáni k obhajobě problematické epistemické teze.klíčová slova: myšlenkový experiment, epistemologie, důkazní břemeno. (shrink)

Author: Pepliński Marek Title: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ’S ANALYSIS OF MEANING OF “HAPPINESS” (Władysława Tatarkiewicza analiza terminu „szczęście”) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 633-674 Keywords: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF HAPPINESS, EMOTION, PLEASURE, EUDAIMONIA Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: marek[DOT]peplinski[AT]univ[DOT]gda[DOT]pl www:Władysław Tatarkiewicz work on philosophical and moral psychology, particularly on theory of happiness is still example of the best kind of analytical and close to phenomenological analysis of (...) our speaking and thinking about the topics in question. He distinguishes four main different meanings of Polish word ‘szczęście’ and present a new classification of them based on two principles: the opposition of subjective and objective and between ordinary and philosophical language. Accordingly we can speak about luck, positive psychological states like different kinds of good emotions or feelings and pleasure, Greek eudaimonia and specifically philosophical, a very correct concept of happiness as a rationally justified deep and comprehensive satisfaction of one’s life taken in its wholeness. In this paper I present critically his classification and argue that subjective meanings are always related to objective concepts. (shrink)

Philosophizing and the True Knowledge of Human Being -/- The article presents the principles and method of classical philosophy. This kind of philosophy, developed mainly in ancient and medieval times, is still viable and interesting today. What is more important, it can be used as grounds for academic philosophy. Doing so provides a philosopher with resources for autonomy in her philosophical inquiry as well as the usefulness and application of its results for various cultural, social, and political tasks. The last (...) part of the article explains the manner in which the principles of philosophy may be connected with different ways of classical philosopher’s concern the with knowledge of the human being understood as a special, unique being, with her transcendence behind her biological nature and human society. In the conclusion, several tasks for philosophical reflection are given. In all its parts, the article emphasizes the importance of the concept of philosophizing person for the understanding of philosophy. (shrink)

The article juxtaposes Jan Srzednicki’s conception of cognition with Jean Piaget’s psychology of cognition. Human’s (child’s) cognition is syncretic. Various cognitive data are confused, systematized, dogmatized or become chaotic, and mistakes appear. These mistakes can be overcome thanks to analytical, intuitive or logical perspectives. Cognition moves from the sphere of “children’s dogmatism” to the world of “mature skepticism”. The syncretic cognition can be overcome thanks to various cognitive procedures, e.g., analytical, logical or intuitive. The intuitive cognition is primary and synthetic—it (...) is present in the acts of analytical cognition. Syncretism may lead to dogmatism if it is uncritical or to skepticism if it is connected with logical procedures. It is explained to a different extent both by Piaget’s epistemology of development and also by epistemology of Srzednicki’s logical gap. (shrink)

W projekcie badawczym, który w zamyśle będzie składał się z dwóch merytorycznie i logicznie powiązanych artykułów, formułujemy taki schemat pojęciowy, w którym adekwatna staje się charakterystyka struktur fraktalnych w kategoriach filozoficznej koncepcji emergencji. W pracy pierwszej przedstawiamy główne idee filozofii emergencji oraz dokonujemy prób uchwycenia w procesie generowania fraktali jednostek emergentnych. Pozostajemy jednak w obrębie klasycznego rozumienia badanej relacji. W pracy drugiej, na podstawie zademonstrowanych słabości ujęć klasycznych, jako niewystarczających w specyficznym kontekście badanych struktur matematycznych, pokazujemy, że dyskurs nad emergencją (...) w matematyce staje się sensowny i uprawniony w ugruntowanym w filozofii nauk formalnych quasi-empirycznym podejściu do niektórych zagadnień w matematyce. (shrink)

The author proves that rejecting the existence of permissive norms and limitation of norms to prohibitions and commands alone is possible only with reducing the idea of a function. The essence of the function is then the ability of the expression to generate independently the universal norm formation. Such manipulation is easy on the level of logical analysis, but proves risky from other points of view. If we want the deontic logic, which we construct, to consider the fact that permission (...) is pragmatically necessary for the law-maker to convey his normative preferences, we must solve the consequences of the adopted structure of the function of norms, which originate on the socio-linguistic level. It appears, however, that due to a lack of a pragmatic theory useful for lawyers, there is no proof that the pragmatically strong permission can be expressed by means of a lot of prohibitions and commands (dos and don’ts). Besides, reducing permissions only to the language of legal rules is an obligation to accept the structure of an act of communication, which can find its full motivation in the Husserl’s structure of the direct cognition. (shrink)

The title of the book promises to provide the reader with “A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics.” However, what can be contemporary about a philosophy which was developed as a complement and a tool for thirteenth-century theology? The last century’s revival of Thomism was mainly an affair of text exegesis in the eyes of most interpreters of Aquinas, even if sometimes they added an epistemological basis to the metaphysical system developed by Aquinas himself. Clarke proposes, instead, a “creative appropriation of Thomistic metaphysics,” (...) that is, a break with the traditional Thomistic attitude where philosophers of a significant stature presented themselves as mere historians of medieval thought. Hence, Clarke takes philosophical responsibility for the arguments he presents. He does not expect any leeway to be given to his arguments for this would amount to talking about philosophical attitudes and beliefs that are long gone from any serious philosophical mind. The result is what he labels “Thomistically inspired metaphysics,” which should be treated as a contemporary philosophical theory attempting to explain the origin and the structure of all individual beings. (shrink)

Kuala Lumpur is a diverse city representing many different religions and nationalities. Recent government policy has actively promoted unity and cohesion throughout the city; and the country of Malaysia, with the implementation of a programme called 1Malaysia. In this book, the authors investigate the aims of this programme – predominantly to unify the Malaysian society – and how these objectives resonate in the daily spatial practices of the city’s residents. -/- This book argues that elements of urban infrastructure could work (...) as an essential mediator ‘beyond community’, allowing inclusive social structures to be built, despite cultural and religious tensions existing within the city. It builds on the premise of an empirical study which explores the ways in which different communities use the same spaces, supported through the implementation of a theoretical framework which looks at both Western and Islamic conceptualisations of the notion of community. Through the analysis of Kuala Lumpur, this book contributes towards the creation of more inclusive places in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious communities across the world. (shrink)

Artykuł podejmuje polemikę z obiegowym rozumieniem tolerancji. Autor podkreśla znaczenie podziału na tolerancję jako postawę i na dyskursy o tolerancji. Następnie, w nawiązaniu i częściowo w dyskusji z koncepcją tolerancji zaproponowaną przez Iję Lazari Pawłowską, przedstawione jest rozróżnienie trzech odmian tolerancji, a także rozróżnienie odpowiednich trzech odmian nietolerancji. Rozważane są również niektóre paradoksy związane z tolerancją oraz ze zwalczaniem nietolerancji.

According to UNESCO guidelines, one of the four forms of bioethics committees in medicine are the Hospital Ethics Committees. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how the above guidelines are implemented in real practice. There were 111 hospitals selected out of 176 Polish clinical hospitals and hospitals accredited by Center of Monitoring Quality in Health System. The study was conducted by the survey method. There were 56 hospitals that responded to the survey. The number of HECs members fluctuated (...) between 3 and 16 members, where usually 5 members were part of the board committee. The composition of the HECs for professions other than physicians was diverse and non-standardized. Only 55 % of HECs had a professional set of standards. 98 % of HECs had specific tasks. 62 % of HECs were asked for their expertise, and 55 % prepared <6.88 % of the opinions were related to interpersonal relations between hospital personnel, patients and their families with emphasis on the interactions between superiors and their inferiors or hospital staff and patients and their families. Only 12 % of the opinions were reported by the respondents as related to ethical dilemmas. In conclusion, few Polish hospitals have HECs, and the structure, services and workload are not always adequate. To ensure a reliable operation of HECs requires the development of relevant legislation, standard operating procedures and well trained members. (shrink)

The paper is a contribution to the object ontology. The general approach assumed in the investigation is that of Roman Ingarden's The Controversy Over the Existence of the World where an object is the subject-of-properties. The analysis of the form and the mode of existence of properties leads to the rejection of both negative and general properties. Each property is an individual qualitative moment of a particular object. Its form reveals existential heteronomy: the quality of the property is not immanent (...) but refers to the object. The subject of properties has not its own qualitative content: its form is just the internal causality establishing the unity of an object. An object is not causally isolated from other objects, but external causation differs from internal either by being ramified in case of the composition and destruction of an object or reciprocal in case of interaction between coexisting objects. (shrink)

Can we see the expressiveness of other people's gestures, hear the intentions in their voice, see the emotions in their posture? Traditional theories of social cognition still say we cannot because intentions and emotions for them are hidden away inside and we do not have direct access to them. Enactive theories still have no idea because they have so far mainly focused on perception of our physical world. We surmise, however, that the latter hold promise since, in trying to understand (...) cognition, enactive theory focuses on the embodied engagements of a cognizer with his world. In this paper, we attempt an answer for the question What is social perception in an enactive account? In enaction, perception is conceived as a skill, crucially involving action, an ability to work successfully within the set of regularities, or contingencies that characterize a given domain. If this is the case, then social perception should be a social skill. Having thus transformed the question of what social perception is into that of what social skill is, we examine the concept of social contingencies and the manner in which social skills structure—both constrain and empower— social interaction. Some of the implications of our account for how social and physical perception differ, the role of embodiment in social interaction and the distinction between our approach and other social contingency theories are also addressed. (shrink)

We investigate under what conditions contrary-to-duty (CTD) structures lacking temporal and action elements can be given a coherent reading. We argue, contrary to some recent proposals, that CTD is not an instance of defeasible reasoning, and that methods of nonmonotonic logics are inadequate since they are unable to distinguish between defeasibility and violation of primary obligations. We propose a semantic framework based on the idea that primary and CTD obligations are obligations of different kinds: a CTD obligation pertains to, or (...) pre-supposes, a certain context in which a primary obligation is already violated. This framework is presented initially as an extension of Standard Deontic Logic (SDL), a normal modal logic of type KD, and is illustrated by application to a series of examples. The concluding section is concerned with some resemblances between CTD and defeasible reasoning. We show first that the SDL-based framework contains a flaw and must be adjusted. A discussion of possible adjustments, including an alternative treatment in terms of a preference-based semantics, reveals difficulties that are reminiscent of problems in defeasible reasoning and intensional accounts of defeasible conditionals. (shrink)

In this paper I first present in a few sentences the main theses of Ajdukiewicz’s theory of questions, then I briefly express the main theses of Professor Jonkisz’s book and the indisputable advantages of this work. Then I put forward my objections to some theoretical solutions adopted by the Author, namely the assumption that datum questionis is sequence of components without any syntactic requirements, the assumption about the special character of the so called generalized negation and the assumption that no (...) ontological assumptions are adopted in the work. The adoption of the language of set theory is already a privileging of a set theory ontology. (shrink)

In the article I discuss the conceptual problem of other minds and different approaches to mental concepts. Firstly, I introduce the conceptual problem and argue that solutions proposed by theory-theory and direct perception approach are inadequate. I claim that mental concepts are neither theoretical terms nor observational terms. Then, I consider third option which states that mental concepts are dispositional terms, i.e. they concern particular patterns (stereotypes) of behavior. Finally, I argue that dispositional approach is to some extent coherent with (...) phenomenological account and that phenomenological concept of embodiment can improve this position. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 9, August 2020, Page 923-927.

ABSTRACT:Microfinance is often assumed to be an ethically progressive industry, but in recent years it has been the target of much ethical criticism. Microfinance institutions have been accused of using exploitative lending techniques and charging usurious interest rates; and critics even question the ability of microfinance to alleviate poverty. This article reviews recent research on the microfinance sector that addresses these ethical issues. We show how this research is relevant to a number of theoretical issues, such as how to define (...) poverty, how to understand exploitation, and how to balance financial and social goals in commercial organizations. We conclude by identifying a critical agenda for future research. (shrink)

This book develops a new approach to naturalizing phenomenology. The author proposes to integrate phenomenology with the mechanistic framework that offers new methodological perspectives for studying complex mental phenomena such as consciousness. While mechanistic explanatory models are widely applied in cognitive science, their approach to describing subjective phenomena is limited. The author argues that phenomenology can fill this gap. He proposes two novel ways of integrating phenomenology and mechanism. First, he presents a new reading of phenomenological analyses as functional analyses. (...) Such functional phenomenology delivers a functional sketch of a target system and provides constraints on the space of possible mechanisms. Second, he develops the neurophenomenological approach in the direction of dynamic modeling of experience. He shows that neurophenomenology can deliver dynamical constraints on mechanistic models and thus inform the search for an underlying mechanism. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł stanowi podsumowanie osiągnięć Stanisława Judyckiego w dziedzinie antropologii filozoficznej. Zajmuje on stanowisko dualizmu absolutnego, głoszącego istnienie duszy jako bytu samodzielnego (prostej, niematerialnej i atemporalnej substancji), typu augustyńsko-kartezjańskiego (stwierdzającego możliwość uchwycenia „ja” w strumieniu własnej świadomości, choć za zasłoną ogółu semantycznego). W tekście przedstawiam argumenty Judyckiego na wsparcie tego stanowiska: (a) wyjaśnienie takich cech doświadczenia wewnętrznego, jak jedność strumienia świadomości, jest możliwe tylko w dualizmie, (b) argument modalny, (c) argumenty przeciw naturalizmowi (według Judyckiego jedyną alternatywą wobec materializmu jest dualizm.

One of the best known approaches to the logic of agency are the ‘stit’ logics. Often, it is not the actions of an individual agent that bring about a certain outcome but the joint actions of a set of agents, collectively. Collective agency has received comparatively little attention in ‘stit’. The paper maps out several different forms, several different senses in which a particular set of agents, collectively, can be said to bring about a certain outcome, and examines how these (...) forms can be expressed in ‘stit’ and stit-like logics. The outcome that is brought about may be unintentional, and perhaps even accidental; the account deliberately ignores aspects such as joint intention, communication between agents, awareness of other agents’ intentions and capabilities, even the awareness of another agent’s existence. The aim is to investigate what can be said about collective agency when all such considerations are ignored, besides mere consequences of joint actions. The account will be related to the ‘strictly stit’ of Belnap and Perloff, 25–48 1993) and their suggestions concerning ‘inessential members’ and ‘mere bystanders’. We will adjust some of those conjectures and distinguish further between ‘potentially contributing bystanders’ and ‘impotent bystanders’. (shrink)

In this paper I present the Ingardenian distinction between inseparability and dependence. My considerations are both historical and systematic. The historical part of the paper accomplishes two goals. First, I show that in the Brentanian tradition the problem of existential conditioning was entangled into parts—whole theories. The best examples of such an approach are Kazimierz Twardowski’s theory of the object and Edmund Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes. Second, I exhibit the context within which Ingarden distinguished inseparability and dependence. Moreover, (...) Ingarden’s motivations are presented: the problem of understanding the Husserlian concept of “immanent transcendence,” the issue of the existence of purely intentional objects, and finally the problem of the relationship between individual objects and ideas. The systematic part deals with the ambiguity of Ingarden’s definition of inseparability. I seek to improve this definition by reference to the distinction between absolute and summative wholes. I also present some divisions of inseparability and dependence and investigate whether these types of existential conditioning are reflexive, symmetric, or transitive. (shrink)

Author: Siwiec Marek Kazimierz Title: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ’S VIEWS ON CREATIVITY WITH REGARDS to a Creative Source (Koncepcja twórczości Władysława Tatarkiewicza a twórcze źródło) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 573-590 Keywords: CREATIVITY, CREATIVE SOURCE, PLURALISTIC AESTHETICS, WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, KARL JASPERS, BARBARA SKARGA, GEORG SIMMEL Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:In the essay – which consists of the three parts – the author tries to show Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s views (...) on problems of the creativity as a basis to considerations on the creative source. In the first part the author outlines a point of view of a creator such as an artist, a poet, a composer. In the second part we can see the author sketching the problems of creativity and the creator itself. At the beginning he focuses on the Tatarkiewicz’s programme of pluralistic aesthetics with important discerning notions of aesthetics explicite and aesthetics implicite. The latter relates to works of art and the aesthetics views of the artists which can be found within. Afterwards he discusses main notions of the creator and the creativity i.e. poetic creativity, divine creativity, artistic creativity, human creativity. More carefully he examines contemporary approach of the creativity by Tatarkiewicz and analyses two criteria of it: high level of a novelty and a large outlay of an intellectual energy. The author notices a certain difficulty of the approach, namely a repetition of the intellectual energy in both criteria, yet he proposes a solution to the issue: first criterion relates to potential energy as a certain possibility, whereas the second relates to energy effectively implemented by the creator. He also discusses relation between the creativity and culture. In the third part the author approaches the problems of the creative source. He discusses views of Karl Jaspers, Barbara Skarga and Georg Simmel. In the conclusion the author defines the creative source as a task and a way of the creator. He points out that Tatarkiewicz’s view can be good groundwork to developing further considerations on the issue of the creative source. (shrink)

The origin and early evolution of animals marks an important event in life's history. This event is historically associated with an important variable in Earth history – oxygen. One view has it that an increase in oceanic oxygen levels at the end of the Neoproterozoic Era (roughly 600 million years ago) allowed animals to become large and leave fossils. How important was oxygen for the process of early animal evolution? New data show that some modern sponges can survive for several (...) weeks at low oxygen levels. Many groups of animals have mechanisms to cope with low oxygen or anoxia, and very often, mitochondria – organelles usually associated with oxygen – are involved in anaerobic energy metabolism in animals. It is a good time to refresh our memory about the anaerobic capacities of mitochondria in modern animals and how that might relate to the ecology of early metazoans. (shrink)