Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzscheforschung Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 314-318.

The question about reality of the difference between existence and essence in creatures was one of the main problems of medieval metaphysics. The above text is an attempt to reconstruct two answers to this question: by Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome. Thomas Aquinas is a person most often associated with the problem of real difference. It seems, however, that the doctrine of Giles of Rome was also very important for the development of the problem. For example, Giles was the (...) first to call the difference between existence and essence the "real difference". The doctrines of the two authors concerning real difference were often believed to be identical. However, beside some similarities, we can also find important differences between them. Aquinas appears to teach about real composition of existence and essence, while Giles writes about the real difference between the two, and he is so radical as to say that existence and essence are two different "things". In Giles' doctrine, we can also find clear Neo-Platonic influences. Giles puts special stress on accidental character of existence. This way he returns to Avicennian essentialism, discarded by St. Thomas. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is a critical reconstruction of the Platonic conception of laughter, which is presented primarily in Republic and Philebus. A comic quality calls, in his opinion, to lower emotions, it throws human mind out of balance and undermines the prevailing order of values. The philosopher associates a laughter with the feeling of envy, which comes down to the joy of humiliating of someone weaker. The comic envy - as opposed to passive jealousy - almost automatically leads (...) to the activity, to the enhancement of humiliation. Laughter is caused according to Plato by a defect resulting from the ignorance about himself. The key feature of the comic situation is the asymmetry between the victim's weakness and the strength of a laughing person. Plato's concept of laughter turns out to be one-sided, when we compare it with "laughter of Democritus" which serves as a therapeutic and catharctic means. Laughter is here a clear signal that initiates the critical reflection on himself and gives impetus to a change of attitude towards the world. In his writings Plato did not include such educational and cognitive aspects of laughter because in his philosophy it becomes a specific antagonist of true knowledge. The negative attitude towards laughter does not go hand in hand with Plato’s recognition of Socrates, who used irony as a key element in his method of inquiry leading to truth. (shrink)

In this paper, we indicate how Jan Woleński’s non-linguistic concept of the norm allows us to clarify the deontic relationship between sentences and the given normative system. A relationship of this kind constitutes a component of the metalogic of relating deontic logic, which subjects the logical value of the deontic sentence to the logical value of the constituent sentence and its relationship with a given normative system in the accessible possible worlds.

According to contrastivism in epistemology - advocated chiefly by Jonathan Schaffer - the knowledge relation is not binary (s knows that p) but ternary (s knows that p rather than q). Thus knowledge ascriptions are contrast-sensitive. The aim of this paper is to portray, investigate and assess the details of this view. In the first three sections I focus mainly on arguments for contrastivism. Section fourth is devoted to the contrastivist solution to the skeptical puzzle. In the last three sections (...) I present several problems for contrastivism as well as three main binary explanations for contrast-sensitivity. (shrink)

Two fundamental features of a liberal political community are usually identified in contemporary deliberations: there is an inevitable pluralism of visions of good and worthy life, blended into a wide range of religious, philosophical and ethical positions; those who are in power are under an obligation to set public matters in such a way as to avoid discrimination of any class of the ruled. In respect of and, it is presumed that the process of enacting, implementing and executing public law (...) shall be separated from any perfectionist moral position, because being impartial when making political decisions is a prerequisite for non-discriminatory politics. This kind of politics looks for proper, convincing and comprehensible reasons to establish a new legal standard of behaviour in the ‘public reason’ – a set of moral statements and political values commonly shared in an open, pluralistic and tolerant society, which does not provide decisive answers to any questions about the meaning of life and does not bring us closer to discover its ideal. This article tries to reproduce the main notions and ideas of leading, contemporary liberal philosophers – John Rawls and Charles Larmore – that deal with the very nature of impartiality of a liberal state and the ability of policymakers to be impartial. It also presents the critical views of Stephen Macedo and Nicholas Wolterstorff, who question the possibility of building a neutral state. (shrink)

Legal institutions are created at a certain point in time, intended to be applied to ‘life’ as it is perceived at the specific moment when they are elaborated and cast into legal form. As a result, legal institutions always already refer, in their original design, to a certain normality, but between the moment of creation of a legal institution and its application to future situations there is always a certain time lag. Some legal institutions—referred to in the paper as “legal (...) survivals” –outlive the epoch in which they were created and continue their legal life long after the conditions which lead to their creation had, in the meantime, disappeared. The aim of this paper is to put forward an archaeologico–genealogical perspective on legal survivals not only as a method of studying continuity of law and the resilience of juridical form, but also as a line of enquiry capable of enriching our understanding of the juridical in its relation to the changing circumstances of life. The study of legal survivals allows to combine three aspects of legal continuity: firstly, the continued use of the same legal forms in different circumstances and for different purposes, whereby the same juridical form is filled with different socio-economic substance; secondly, the gradual adaptation of legal forms to new circumstances; thirdly, the emergence of new legal forms in close reference to old ones. The study of legal survivals allows to address the foundations of law’s claims to authority, based on stability and predictability of juridical forms. It also reveals the complex and multilayered nature of legal form which effectively has the structure of a palimpsest. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to compare the notion of a Grzegorczyk point introduced in [19] (and thoroughly investigated in [3, 14, 16, 18]) to the standard notions of a filter in Boolean algebras and round filter in Boolean contact algebras. In particular, we compare Grzegorczyk points to filters and ultrafilters of atomic and atomless algebras. We also prove how a certain extra axiom influences topological spaces for Grzegorczyk contact algebras. Last but not least, we do not refrain from (...) a philosophical interpretation of the results from the paper. (shrink)

The goal is to sketch a nominalist approach to mathematics which just like neologicism employs abstraction principles, but unlike neologicism is not committed to the idea that mathematical objects exist and does not insist that abstraction principles establish the reference of abstract terms. It is well-known that neologicism runs into certain philosophical problems and faces the technical difficulty of finding appropriate acceptability criteria for abstraction principles. I will argue that a modal and iterative nominalist approach to abstraction principles circumvents those (...) difficulties while still being able to put abstraction principles to a foundational use. (shrink)

With material on his early philosophical views, his contributions to set theory and his work on nominalism and higher-order quantification, this book offers a uniquely expansive critical commentary on one of analytical philosophy’s great ...

A family $$\mathcal {I}$$ I of subsets of a set X is an ideal on X if it is closed under taking subsets and finite unions of its elements. An ideal $$\mathcal {I}$$ I on X is below an ideal $$\mathcal {J}$$ J on Y in the Katětov order if there is a function $$f{: }Y\rightarrow X$$ f : Y → X such that $$f^{-1}[A]\in \mathcal {J}$$ f - 1 [ A ] ∈ J for every $$A\in \mathcal {I}$$ A (...) ∈ I. We show that the Hindman ideal, the Ramsey ideal and the summable ideal are pairwise incomparable in the Katětov order, where The Ramsey ideal consists of those sets of pairs of natural numbers which do not contain a set of all pairs of any infinite set (equivalently do not contain, in a sense, any infinite complete subgraph), The Hindman ideal consists of those sets of natural numbers which do not contain any infinite set together with all finite sums of its members (equivalently do not contain IP-sets that are considered in Ergodic Ramsey theory), The summable ideal consists of those sets of natural numbers such that the series of the reciprocals of its members is convergent. (shrink)

This is the first, out of two papers, devoted to Andrzej Grzegorczyk’s point-free system of topology from Grzegorczyk :228–235, 1960. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485101). His system was one of the very first fully fledged axiomatizations of topology based on the notions of region, parthood and separation. Its peculiar and interesting feature is the definition of point, whose intention is to grasp our geometrical intuitions of points as systems of shrinking regions of space. In this part we analyze separation structures and Grzegorczyk structures, and (...) establish their properties which will be useful in the sequel. We prove that in the class of Urysohn spaces with countable chain condition, to every topologically interpreted representative of a point in the sense of Grzegorczyk’s corresponds exactly one point of a space. We also demonstrate that Tychonoff first-countable spaces give rise to complete Grzegorczyk structures. The results established below will be used in the second part devoted to points and topological spaces. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical reconstruction of the motivations that led to the development of mereology as we know it today, along with a brief description of some problems that define current research in the field.

Legal probabilism is the view that juridical fact-finding should be modeled using Bayesian methods. One of the alternatives to it is the narration view, according to which instead we should conceptualize the process in terms of competing narrations of what happened. The goal of this paper is to develop a reconciliatory account, on which the narration view is construed from the Bayesian perspective within the framework of formal Bayesian epistemology.

This article is devoted to the problem of ontological foundations of three-dimensional Euclidean geometry. Starting from Bertrand Russell’s intuitions concerning the sensual world we try to show that it is possible to build a foundation for pure geometry by means of the so called regions of space. It is not our intention to present mathematically developed theory, but rather demonstrate basic assumptions, tools and techniques that are used in construction of systems of point-free geometry and topology by means of mereology (...) and Whitehead-like connection structures. We list and briefly analyze axioms for mereological structures, as well as those for connection structures. We argue that mereology is a good tool to model so called spatial relations. We also try to justify our choice of axioms for connection relation. Finally, we briefly discuss two theories: Grzegorczyk’s point-free topology and Tarski’s geometry of solids. (shrink)

As it is indicated in the title, this paper is devoted to the problem of defining mereological (collective) sets. Starting from basic properties of sets in mathematics and differences between them and so called conglomerates in Section 1, we go on to explicate informally in Section 2 what it means to join many objects into a single entity from point of view of mereology, the theory of part of (parthood) relation. In Section 3 we present and motivate basic axioms for (...) part of relation and we point to their most fundamental consequences. Next three sections are devoted to formal explication of the notion of mereological set (collective set) in terms of sums, fusions and aggregates. We do not give proofs of all theorems. Some of them are complicated and their presentation would divert the reader’s attention from the main topic of the paper. In such cases we indicate where the proofs can be found and analyzed by those who are interested. (shrink)

Author: Michalski Rafał Title: ANCIENT SOURCES OF MEANING OF THE TERM “MIMESIS” (Antyczne źródła pojęcia mimezis) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2005, vol:.5, number: 2005/1, pages: 45-64 Keywords: ‘MIMESIS’, PLATO, PYTHAGORAS Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:In this article I show the evolution of meaning of the term ‘mimesis’ in ancient Greece. I distinguish its two basic meanings: copying (imitation) and expression. The older meaning (mimesis as expression) comes from the Pythagorean (...) tradition, whereas the newer one (mimesis as copying) can be traced back to the philosophy of Plato. Analysis of Plato’s dialogues step by step reveals ambivalence of the notion, and, what is most important, points out how useful it can be in epistemology, philosophy of language, psychology and aesthetics. (shrink)

This article departs from a mereological conceptualization of the Daoist metaphysi- cal system in the Daodejing 道德經. I discuss what parthood status applies to dao 道. Whereas it is quite intuitive that you 有—the region of concrete objects—has parthood relationships and compositions (entities made from parts), the other, undif- ferentiated region, dao, poses a considerable problem. This problem can be charac- terized in the following way: (a) dao cannot be characterized as a particular com- position, which entails that it does (...) not include parts. However, (b) dao underpins compositions in you, which entails that it contains compositions or at least parts that make compositions in you. This generates a problem of how compositions are possi- ble with an undifferentiated ontological foundation. I focus on one possible approach to this problem––mereological nihilism, according to which no composition is pos- sible. Assuming nihilism entails dao composed of mereological simples––funda- mental entities, which are not parts. (shrink)

This is a spin-off paper to [3, 4] in which we carried out an extensive analysis of Andrzej Grzegorczyk’s point-free topology from [5]. In [1] Loredana Biacino and Giangiacomo Gerla presented an axiomatization which was inspired by the Grzegorczyk’s system, and which is its variation. Our aim is to compare the two approaches and show that they are slightly different. Except for pointing to dissimilarities, we also demonstrate that the theories coincide in presence of axiom stipulating non-existence of atoms.

Los ultimos tiempos se caracterizan, sobre todo, por una mayor conciencia y un mayor interes acerca de los derechos humanos. Sin duda alguna es consecuencia de lo que experimento la humanidad en nuestro siglo. Las dos guerras mundiales, los campos de concentracion y de trabajo, los deportaciones masivas y ejecuciones, los crimenes de guerra y el exterminio de naciones enteras, muestran la violacion mas cruel de la dignidad de la persona humana y de sus derechos fundamentales. Hey dla, los Ilamados (...) derechos humanos, derechos de la persona o derechos naturales gozan de un gran reconocimiento. Sin embargo, 50 anos despues de proclamar la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas la Declaracion Universal de Derechos Humanos, el problema mas importante en la doctrina de los derechos humanos lo constituye todavia la busqueda del fundamento de los mismos. La abundante discusion que rodea esta cuestiön muestra diferentes posturas, a voces opuestas. Esta „gran dispersion de enfoques" -como dice Massini- lleva consigo consecuencias necesariamente negativas, porque „no puede sino conducir a su debilitamiento y, en definitiva, a su difuminacion. En ultima instancia, unos derechos quo se intentan justificar de modo tan desemejante y hasta contradictorio, tienden a aparecer como postulados gratuitos, como afirmaciones meramente dogmaticas". A pesar de esta dispersion, los enfoques para justificar los derechos humanos se pueden sintetizar en tres. (shrink)

Polish medical law does not explicitly regulate the possibility of off-label use of medicines. Such procedures therefore raise doubts in medical practice, where medicines are often prescribed beyond the Characteristic of Medicinal Product. This phenomenon particularly affects the treatment of children, as there is a lack of registered medicines in this age group, but they are registered for use in adults. Since such treatment goes beyond the scope of registration, a dilemma arises as to whether it is permissible and, if (...) so, under what conditions and whether sanctions are imposed on the medical professional using the off-label medicine. These issues are addressed in an article by Dr Maria Gutowska-Ibbs, entitled 'Off label - practical consequences of unclear legislation". The present study complements these considerations and is in part an ad vocem statement. The article attempts to differentiate between the use of off-label medicines and medical experiments, following the criterion of the purpose for which a given medical action is performed. The limits of admissibility of such actions under criminal law are also discussed in more detail. Off-label treatment is considered through the prism of the required precautionary rules, compliance with which is the antithesis of inadvertence. It is assumed that if the drug was administered in accordance with current medical knowledge and the treatment is adequate to the patient's condition, there is no violation of these rules, which excludes the imputation of inadvertence. An extensive section of the study is devoted to the issue of the patient's consent to treatment outside the indications. Above all, it emphasises the need to explain in detail to the patient the circumstances of prescribing such a drug and, on this basis, to obtain informed consent. It also stresses the importance of the written form of consent, which can have a significant evidentiary impact in potential litigation. (shrink)

The first traces the production of numerous stone tools from the period of the Plio-Pleistocene represent a deep antiquity technical processes in the context of human evolution. Determining cognitive ability needed to convey the first hominids manufacture of stone tools is a challenge for the cognitive archaeology. Currently, thanks to archaeological discoveries and the development of cognitive science we can try to restore all the necessary treatments aimed at the production and use of stone tools along with a broad understanding (...) of their underlying cognitive processes. Analyses based on empirical data derived from Lokalalei – one of the oldest archaeological sites – indicate that the hominids comprehensive understanding of the principles of producing stone tools already at their very beginning. (shrink)

The article reconstructs main assumptions and the theoretical context of Arnold Gehlen’s conception of institution. I argue that this conception is mainly a theory of action. At its centre Gehlen sets not so much specific institutions but rather specific forms of human activity that bring to life the over-individual normative structures. He describes them by means of a series of categories which, in his opinion, have a universal character. We do not find any genealogical analyzes here, but only a constellation (...) of concepts deduced a priori, referring to empirical facts. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł jest próbą wyjaśnienia pojęcia politycznego entuzjazmu, za pomocą którego Immanuel Kant wyraził stosunek do rewolucji francuskiej. Entuzjazm jako czysto rozumowy afekt, a nie jako kolektywnie przeżywana, irracjonalna euforia, pełni w rozważaniach królewieckiego filozofa ważną heurystyczną funkcję. Pozwala mu bowiem uzasadnić pozytywne znaczenie rewolucji, która na poziomie empirycznych faktów okazała się godną moralnego potępienia eskalacją przemocy. W pierwszej części przedstawiono definicję polityki, przydatne w dalszej analizy kategorii entuzjazmu. Głównym punktem odniesienia jest tu teoria polityczna Hannah Arendt. W drugiej części (...) postaram się wyjaśnić dwuznaczną postawę Kanta wobec rewolucji francuskiej, która z punktu widzenia moralnego została przez niego jednoznacznie potępiona, natomiast z punktu widzenia estetycznego i politycznego – oceniana została bardzo pozytywnie. Kluczem do zrozumienia tej ambiwalencji jest kategoria jawnej publiczności. W trzecim rozdziale przechodzę do głównego tematu tego artykułu, czyli kwestii entuzjazm w kontekście politycznym. (shrink)

W artykule podjęto problem związków zachodzących między retoryką a współczesną antropologią filozoficzną. Głównym punktem odniesienia jest dzieło Hansa Blumenberga. Rekonstrukcja założeń antropologicznych odwołujących się wprost do tradycji retorycznej zostanie uzupełniona analizą jego programu metaforologii – dyscypliny badającej logikę poznania przedpojęciowego. Koncept człowieka jako istoty nacechowanej brakiem – zarówno biologicznymi deficytami, jak i przypadkowością egzystencji, prowadzi do interesującej zmiany paradygmatu rozumienia samej antropologii. Skoro homo defectus zdany jest na prowizoryczność wiedzy o świecie i o sobie samym, antropologia powinna zrezygnować z perfekcjonistycznych (...) roszczeń poznawczych i zwrócić się ku badaniu metaforycznych zasobów języka, które determinują zarówno dyskurs filozoficzny, jak i potoczny język. (shrink)

I focus on the monastery life in Europe and its predomination of vita contemplativa upon vita activa. It is not hard to distinguish within Christianity its Manichaean component whose characteristic feature is a grudge against matter, body and sexuality. This complexity of ideas brought about the contempt of vital elements of human existence, so that its animal past, still present in Zivilisationsprozess. An alternative anthropology inspired by an evolutionism should based on the presumption that only through the appreciation of an (...) animal dimension of us—instead of monastic desire of becoming an angel—will it be possible to create new perspectives for renegotiation of the human–animal boundaries. (shrink)

One of the standard axioms for Boolean contact algebras says that if a region __x__ is in contact with the join of __y__ and __z__, then __x__ is in contact with at least one of the two regions. Our intention is to examine a stronger version of this axiom according to which if __x__ is in contact with the supremum of some family __S__ of regions, then there is a __y__ in __S__ that is in contact with __x__. We study (...) a modal possibility operator which is definable in complete algebras in the presence of the aforementioned axiom, and we prove that the class of complete algebras satisfying the axiom is closely related to the class of modal KTB-algebras. We also demonstrate that in the class of complete extensional contact algebras the axiom is equivalent to the statement: _every region is isolated_. Finally, we present an interpretation of the modal operator in the class of the so-called _resolution contact algebras_. (shrink)

It is a commonplace remark that the identity relation, even though not expressible in a first-order language without identity with classical set-theoretic semantics, can be defined in a language without identity, as soon as we admit second-order, set-theoretically interpreted quantifiers binding predicate variables that range over all subsets of the domain. However, there are fairly simple and intuitive higher-order languages with set-theoretic semantics in which the identity relation is not definable. The point is that the definability of identity in higher-order (...) languages not only depends on what variables range over, but also is sensitive to how predication is construed. This paper is a follow-up to , where it has been proven that no actual axiomatization of Leśniewski’s Ontology determines the standard semantics for the epsilon connective. (shrink)

In the second installment to Gruszczyński and Pietruszczak we carry out an analysis of spaces of points of Grzegorczyk structures. At the outset we introduce notions of a concentric and \-concentric topological space and we recollect some facts proven in the first part which are important for the sequel. Theorem 2.9 is a strengthening of Theorem 5.13, as we obtain stronger conclusion weakening Tychonoff separation axiom to mere regularity. This leads to a stronger version of Theorem 6.10. Further, we show (...) that Grzegorczyk points are maximal contracting filters in the sense of De Vries, but the converse inclusion is not necessarily true. We also compare the notions of a Grzegorczyk point and an ultrafilter, and establish several properties of topological spaces based on Grzegorczyk structures. The main results of the paper are representation and completion theorems for G-structures. We prove both set-theoretical and topological representation theorems for various classes of G-structures. We also present topological object duality theorem for the class of complete G-structures and the class of concentric spaces, both restricted to structures which satisfy countable chain condition. We conclude the paper with proving equivalence of the original Grzegorczyk axiom with the one accepted by us as axiom. (shrink)

The systems of patent rights in force in Europe today, both at the level of national law and on the regional level, contain general clauses prohibiting the patenting of inventions whose publication and exploitation would be contrary to “ordre public” or morality. Recent years have brought frequent discussion about limiting the possibility of patent protection for biotechnological inventions for ethical reasons. This is undoubtedly a result of the dynamic development in this field in the last several years. Human genome sequencing, (...) the first successful cloning of mammals, and the progress in human stem cell research present humanity with many new questions of an ethical nature. Directive 98/44 of the European Parliament and of the Council of July 6, 1998, on the Legal Protection of Biotechnological Inventions created a new basis for patent protection in this field of technology. Based on the European experience to now, however, it must be said that patent law is not the right place to legislate the consequences of the morality of an invention. (shrink)

We generalize the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem on ideal convergence. We show examples of ideals with and without the Bolzano-Weierstrass property, and give characterizations of BW property in terms of submeasures and extendability to a maximal P-ideal. We show applications to Rudin-Keisler and Rudin-Blass orderings of ideals and quotient Boolean algebras. In particular we show that an ideal does not have BW property if and only if its quotient Boolean algebra has a countably splitting family.

This article proposes a mereological approach to the dao-you relation in the Daodejing. It is claimed here that dao and you can be conceived of as two integrated subregions, defined in terms of rules of composition and their persistence through time. It is shown that dao is an atemporal object (a fourdimensional unrestricted composition), whereas you is a temporal object (a three-dimensional restricted composition). This particular approach can provide a new understanding of essential issues in Daoist metaphysics.