Let equation image be the semigroup of all mappings on the natural numbers equation image, and let U and V be subsets of equation image. We write U≼V if there exists a countable subset C of equation image such that U is contained in the subsemigroup generated by V and C. We give several results about the structure of the preorder ≼. In particular, we show that a certain statement about this preorder is equivalent to the Continuum Hypothesis.The preorder ≼ (...) is analogous to one introduced by Bergman and Shelah on subgroups of the symmetric group on equation image. The results in this paper suggest that the preorder on subsemigroups of equation image is much more complicated than that on subgroups of the symmetric group. (shrink)

A comprehensive understanding of participants’ motives to complete web-based surveys has the potential to improve data quality. In this study we tested the construct validity of a scale developed to measure motivation to participate in webbased surveys. We expected that 7 different motivations observed in our previous study will form a 3-factor structure, as predicted by Self-Determination Theory. This web-based questionnaire study comprised 257 participants completing the Voluntary Participation in Online Studies Scale. Their responses to 21 items underwent a principal (...) component analysis and confi rmatory factor analysis. As we expected, three factors were identifi ed: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and amotivation. In line with Self-Determination Theory there are three distinct groups of motives among web-surveys participants with amotivation as an understudied motivational state. We discuss the results suggesting which types of motivation might lead to higher quality of data with an emphasis on possible negative effects of amotivation. (shrink)

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

Let ΩΩ be the semigroup of all mappings of a countably infinite set Ω. If U and V are subsemigroups of ΩΩ, then we write U≈V if there exists a finite subset F of ΩΩ such that the subsemigroup generated by U and F equals that generated by V and F. The relative rank of U in ΩΩ is the least cardinality of a subset A of ΩΩ such that the union of U and A generates ΩΩ. In this paper (...) we study the notions of relative rank and the equivalence ≈ for semigroups of endomorphisms of binary relations on Ω.The semigroups of endomorphisms of preorders, bipartite graphs, and tolerances on Ω are shown to lie in two equivalence classes under ≈. Moreover such semigroups have relative rank 0, 1, 2, or in ΩΩ where is the minimum cardinality of a dominating family for . We give examples of preorders, bipartite graphs, and tolerances on Ω where the relative ranks of their endomorphism semigroups in ΩΩ are 0, 1, 2, and .We show that the endomorphism semigroups of graphs, in general, fall into at least four classes under ≈ and that there exist graphs where the relative rank of the endomorphism semigroup is 20. (shrink)

Edward Dinker Cope (1840-1897) był jednym z najbardziej wpływowych przyrodników XIX wieku, który doprowadził do rozwoju amerykańskiej paleontologii oraz popularyzacji teorii ewolucji Lamarcka. Teorię tę rozwinął pod postacią autorskiej koncepcji psycholamarkizmu. Jednym z pomijanych wątków jego biografii są jego poglądy filozoficzne. Zdaniem Cope’a teologia naturalna powinna zostać zreformowana przez wprowadzenie do niej nowych założeń filozoficznych, zgodnych z formującą się nauką ewolucjonizmu. Cope proponował stworzenie nowej „teologii”, która miała się opierać na jego koncepcji ewolucji kierowanej świadomością, jak również doborem naturalnym. W (...) artykule przeanalizowano filozoficzne propozycje Cope’a oraz ukazano, w jaki sposób zreinterpretował mechanizm selekcji, wpisując go w swoją teleologiczną wizję procesu ewolucyjnego. Zdaniem Cope’a człowiek, posiadając wolną wolę, jest w stanie kierować swoją ewolucją, lecz nie ma gwarancji tego, że będzie w stanie przetrwać. Teza ta miała charakter teologiczny w dziełach Cope’a, który w nieprzystosowaniu widział odpowiednik grzechu, a ten z kolei eliminowany był przez dobór naturalny. W ten sposób akceptacja Boga stawała się jedyną drogą gwarantującą przetrwanie. Jednak ta konkluzja doprowadziła Cope’a do racjonalizacji rasizmu, gdyż widział on w wyzysku innych ras skutki ich ewolucyjnej degeneracji. Poglądy Cope’a odzwierciedlają współczesne problemy, jakie można zauważyć w naukach społecznych, jeśli odwołują się do mechanizmu doboru naturalnego. --------------- Zgłoszono: 29/08/2021. Zrecenzowano: 11/10/2021. Zaakceptowano do publikacji: 25/10/2021. (shrink)

Levinas Faces Biblical Figures captures the drama of the encounter between a great philosopher and a text of primary importance. The book considers the ways in which Levinas's thoughts can open up the biblical text to requestioning, and how the biblical text can inform our reading of Levinas.

De Dreu and Gross (D&G) seem to have disregarded some relevant experimental literature on games of conflict, most notably variations on “matching pennies” games. While in such games, “attacker” and “defender” are typically not explicitly labelled, players’ differentiated roles yield naturally to such notions. These studies partly validate some of D&G's findings and interpretations.

The paper deals with the reception and modifications of aristotelism in the epistemology, metaphysics and theology of John Duns Scotus. As a consequence of these modifications Scotus became the founder of a new philosophical-theological vocabulary. In the first part of the contribution the history of aristotelism in the Hellenic period is outlined; the second part examines two lines of aristotelism: that developed in the Latin European West on one hand and that of the Greek-Arabic East on the other hand. The (...) reception and modification of aristotelism in the considerations of J. D. Scotus is examined in more detail on the historical-philosophical background in the third part: rational intuition, ontological conception of metaphysics as scientia transcendens, theology as a practical science. In conclusion the author shows how Scotus’s modification of aristotelism influenced the rise of modern science. (shrink)

Rationality of faith. Relationship between faith and reason in Thomas Aquinas: The rationality of the Christian faith has been an issue debated for centuries. The relationship between faith and reason is an intrinsic reality of Christian thought. But on the other hand from the beginning the Christianity it was a form of religion based on the assent of faith and not on a human justification. Here comes the heart of the problem in the relationship between Christian faith and reason, because (...) the object of faith is not obvious. Instead, in general terms the rational knowledge is based on evidence and the principles of logic. But the act of faith, as evidenced by St. Thomas, is something more than the simple rationality: “act of the intellect gives assent to the divine truth under the influence of the will moved by God’s grace”. It is intended to demonstrate, on the basis of the thought of St. Thomas, that his position clearly can be considered as an attempt to achieve a balance covering the relationship between faith and reason. On the one hand, faith does not fall into irrationality of fideism. On the other hand, the faith in the thomistic conception has not been reduced to a form of rationalism. An attempt to read again the thomistic thought can be very fruitful to promote a dialogue between faith and reason. (shrink)

Recenzja książki: John D. Barrow, Książka o niczym, tł. Łukasz Lamża, Copernicus Center Press, Kraków 2015, ss. 460.

Esej jest próbą rozważenia problemu zła w polityce. Punktem wyjścia są refleksje polityczne B. Pascala i M. Montaigne. Historia filozofii służy tutaj do konceptualizacji problemów aktualnych i w gruncie rzeczy nieprzemijających. Namysł nad źródłami władzy i legitymizacją państwa okazuje się uniwersalną medytacją dotyczącą ludzkiego losu i wolności w obliczu egzystencjalnych zagrożeń. Raison d’État and Rationale of Appearances. An Essay on the Roots of Evil in Politics This essay attempts to weigh in on the problem of evil in politics. The starting (...) point follows the political reflections of B. Pascal and M. Montaigne. Here, the history of philosophy is used to conceptualize the problems of the present and, in fact, those that are enduring. Thinking about the sources of power and a state’s legitimacy proves to be a universal meditation on human destiny and freedom when challenged by existential threats. (shrink)

After the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a number of states have immediately banned abortion. Pro-choice activists are responding by promoting medication abortions – a do-it-yourself form of abortion. Women can take pills at home to induce an abortion in the first few weeks of pregnancy. -/- The Biden Administration [1] has backed the abortion pill, too. Attorney-General Merrick B. Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra both issued statements endorsing it. -/- “We stand ready (...) to work with other arms of the federal government that seek to use their lawful authorities to protect and preserve access to reproductive care,” said the Attorney-General. “In particular, the F.D.A. has approved the use of the medication mifepristone. States may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the F.D.A.’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.” -/- As the New York Times [1] has noted, this sets the scene for legal battles. The obvious one is: will anti-abortion states prosecute medication abortions? -/- But – based on experience in the United Kingdom - the use of the abortion pill could give pro-life doctors headaches as well. -/- In the past year, UK has witnessed the saga of two Catholic doctors who have been brought in front of the professional regulator, the General Medical Council, after accusations of professional misconduct. Their crime? They had supplied abortion pill reversal (APR) treatment to women. Accusations of this misconduct have been brought forward by pro-choice organisations [2]. -/- The problem is that some women might panic when they discover that they are pregnant or are pressured to make a rash decision. They obtain abortion pills, often without seeing a doctor faceto- face, and soon after taking the first pill, they regret their decision. -/- Is it too late for them to save their pregnancy? Not necessarily. -/- A treatment developed in the US works about half the time. It involves the woman taking progesterone after the first abortion pill to counteract the abortifacient action of the drug. -/- Seventy-three women in the UK are reported to have taken a full APR course, of whom, 38 – more than half — successfully remained pregnant. Admittedly, the procedure is controversial [3], with pro-choice writers denouncing it as unproven, unscientific, and unethical. This has triggered some healthcare practitioners and scholars to analyse the commitments of the pro-choice movement to APR. In a recently published paper in The New Bioethics [4], two colleagues, Dominic Whitehouse and Steven Bow, and I argue that those espousing a pro-choice worldview should actually support abortion pill reversal and that the current evidence indicates that they should actually be doing it. -/- While some pro-choice activists might be happy simply to expand women’s reproductive choices, some might also want to ensure that these choices are safe and effective at achieving the desired outcome, which in principle includes maintaining a pregnancy. -/- We then review the scientific evidence with respect to the ability of APR to halt an abortion, look at the potential impact of APR on mental health, as well as its procedural safety. While highlighting that gold-standard evidence is lacking, we note that APR is associated with about two times higher rate of embryo survival compared to not completing the full early medical abortion course, that there is large agreement in the literature that women who are ambiguous about abortion are at risk of poorer mental health outcomes after abortion (and argue that women who request APR fall into this category), and highlight that there is no evidence that APR is more dangerous than abandoning an initiated early medical abortion. -/- The latter fact is important, as the results of the only randomised-controlled trial of APR have been at times misrepresented in the media [5.6], creating the impression that APR is not safe while most of the adverse effects occurred in the study group that did not receive APR. As our paper argues, with respect to APR the two UK doctors were “champions of women’s choice and should be congratulated, not condemned, by pro-choice advocates”. -/- While the cases against the two doctors have now been dropped (and there have even been accusations against a member of one of these pro-choice organisations that they pressurised a patient into complaining about one of the doctors and twisted the patient’s experience of the treatment [7]), we argue that it is important to set-up systems to facilitate the future provision of APR to protect both patients and healthcare staff. -/- Our conclusion is that, while being open to any change in evidence, those espousing a pro-choice outlook should “support calls for an APR framework that will protect women and the healthcare professionals caring for them” “and certainly not oppose” APR. -/- The debate over abortion pill reversal will be heading to the United States soon. It is quite possible that it will be denounced as dangerous misinformation. It’s not. But pro-life defenders should be prepared to defend their ground. -/- This article was first published by Mercatornet. (shrink)

Book review: K. Chamcham, J. Silk, J.D. Barrow, S. Saunders, The Philosophy of Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2017, pp. XII + 514.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse a particularly influential case of memory continuity in Portugal, that of _Padrão dos Descobrimentos_. Spaces of collective memory (such as public monuments) raise questions about what we celebrate, remember or rescue from oblivion, providing an opportunity to rethink the trauma. As such, care for public spaces is associated with ethical and cultural values. One of the difficulties with certain monuments has to do with the fact that they recall actions that today we (...) see as traumatic acts. Thus, it is important to reflect on a critical use of memory. On August 8, 2021, _Padrão dos Descobrimentos_ was the subject of a graffiti. One of the sides of the monument could read: “Blindly sailing for money, humanity is drowning in a scarlet sea”. A great controversy immediately arose around the meaning of this gesture, as well as the role played by a monument that, after being temporarily built in 1940 for the Portuguese World Exhibition, was, in its current version, inaugurated in 1960, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the death of Infante D. Henrique. This episode reignited a deeper cleavage around the uses of history and memory, the Portuguese colonial past, and the role of the _Padrão dos Descobrimentos_ as an instrument for the reproduction of nationalism. In this sense, and with the authors proposing a new theoretical frame of reference based on the thought of Arendt and Ricoeur, its critical reading becomes relevant. (shrink)

Disorders of sexual differentiation lead to what is often referred to as an intersex state. This state has medical, as well as some legal, recognition. Nevertheless, the question remains whether intersex persons occupy a state in between maleness and femaleness or whether they are truly men or women. To answer this question, another important conundrum needs to be first solved: what defines sex? The answer seems rather simple to most people, yet when morphology does not coincide with haplotypes, and genetics (...) might not correlate with physiology the issue becomes more complex. This paper tackles both issues by establishing where the essence of sex is located and by superimposing that framework onto the issue of the intersex. This is achieved through giving due consideration to the biology of sexual development, as well as through the use of a teleological framework of the meaning of sex. Using a range of examples, the paper establishes that sex cannot be pinpointed to one biological variable but is rather d... (shrink)

Hybrid logics are extensions of standard modal logics, which significantly increase the expressive power of the latter. Since most of hybrid logics are known to be decidable, decision procedures for them is a widely investigated field of research. So far, several tableau calculi for hybrid logics have been presented in the literature. In this paper we introduce a sound, complete and terminating tableau calculus T H(@,E,D, ♦ −) for hybrid logics with the satisfaction operators, the universal modality, the difference modality (...) and the inverse modality as well as the corresponding sequent calculus S H(@,E,D, ♦ −) . They not only uniformly cover relatively wide range of various hybrid logics but they are also conceptually simple and enable effective search for a minimal model for a satisfiable formula. The main novelty is the exploitation of the unrestricted blocking mechanism introduced as an explicit, sound tableau rule. (shrink)

A. Klimczuk, D. Borowski, M. Skarzyński, Wnioski i rekomendacje, [in:] M. Juchnicka, Formalnoprawne aspekty modernizacji szkolnictwa zawodowego, Izba Rzemieślnicza i Przedsiȩbiorczości, Białystok 2014, pp. 161-170.

In this article, we develop an approach for the moral assessment of research and development networks on the basis of the reflective equilibrium approach proposed by Rawls and Daniels. The reflective equilibrium approach aims at coherence between moral judgments, principles, and background theories. We use this approach because it takes seriously the moral judgments of the actors involved in R & D, whereas it also leaves room for critical reflection about these judgments. It is shown that two norms, namely reflective (...) learning and openness and inclusiveness, which are used in the literature on policy and technological networks, contribute to achieving a justified overlapping consensus. We apply the approach to a case study about the development of an innovative sewage treatment technology and show how in this case the two norms are or could be instrumental in achieving a justified overlapping consensus on relevant moral issues. (shrink)

The philosophy of Scottish Enlightenment became popular in Poland at the turn of 18th and 19th centuries due to its conciliatory nature characteristic for the mentality of our philosophers of that epoch. Th e central for that philosophy category of common sense was not identical with the French bon sens opposed both to fi deism of theologians and to metaphysical subtleties of the 17th century philosophical systems. In the period of breakthrough between the Polish Enlightenment and Romanticism the category of (...) common sense, popular sense based upon common experience and intuition acquired an unusual popularity, since it reconciled two intellectual formations – the disappearing one and the succeeding one.The initiators in spreading Scottish philosophy in Poland were the brothers Czartoryski and the following, associated with them thinkers: Karol Sienkiewicz who propagated pre-romantic Ossianism; Krystyn Lach-Szyrma who propagated the ideas of D. Stewart; Michał Wiszniewski, who was a pupil of Th. Reid, this one considered to be a founder of the Scottish school of common sense philosophy; Jan Śniadecki, who declaring himself for the “Scottish School” criticized both Kant and the French materialists. (shrink)

This article is the text of an interview with D. H. Mellor conducted by Andrew Pyle and first published in the Spring 1993 issue of the philosophical journal Cogito.