Leszek Kołakowski, who was brought up in the climate of Marxist philosophy, has moved away very considerably from the Marxist position of extreme atheism, but he may not be called a convert. Of the two contrasting attitudes which may be assumed in respect of the existential problems, the attitude of the priest and the attitude of the jester, Kołakowski is closer to the latter. The priest, if he is to perform his role well, should take his duties seriously; he (...) should be convinced of the truth of the deity that he serves. In carrying out his office he is expected to be ceremonious, formal and serious. The jester's position is more comfortable. His task is not to conduct a systematic and serious search for the truth: it is more the role of the critic. He is to observe the faults, the nonsenses, and the blunders, unconcerned for the persons at the butt-end of his critique and how they are to extricate themselves from it. The jester need not be a merry clown at all. Perhaps that is why alongside God, the sub-title of Kołakowski's book mentions things that are sad. Kołakowski is fascinated by the figure of Satan, who wants to be taken seriously but in culture, especially in the folk culture is attributed grotesque forms. Only the devil of the jasełka traditional Polish Christmas play makes audiences laugh hilariously, the real devil is deadly serious, since he is eternally thirsting for the truth and for love. Kołakowski is not pleased with his role of jester. But neither would he be any use as a priest. He has no gospel of his own which he could pass on to other people. He is trapped between two absurdities, which he briefly formulates after Pascal as: „The basic tenets of faith... are absurd, and yet the world image which excludes those tenets is even more absurd". (shrink)

For many believers, encounters with evil trigger a deep desire to understand the divine reasons for permitting evil, that is, a desire for theodicy. Very often, however, attempts to find a theodicy fail—a phenomenon called the inscrutability of evil. Skeptical theists attribute this failure to our cognitive limitations as creatures. In this paper, I argue that the clash between the common desire for theodicy and the inscrutability of evil should be analyzed using the concept of absurdity, famously explored by Albert (...) Camus and some contemporary philosophers studying the meaning of life. I then propose that a loving God would not subject human beings to the experience of absurdity, so He would not create a world in which our cognitive limitations prevent us from finding a theodicy. This conclusion has important implications for the plausibility of the skeptical theist’s position. (shrink)

`On Usury`, the treaty by Martin Smiglecki SJ, was the first strictly scientific attempt to show the economic and social background of the bourgeois and peasant social stratum in Poland and Lithuania at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. The author, being an excellent logician, expressed his views in a very precise way, limiting his technical language to a minimum, so that his treatise would be understandable to readers from a range of social positions and circumstances. Its careful (...) analysis of the socio-economic situation and clear formulation of its postulates enabled it to function, over the course of two centuries, as a practical manual imparting guidance to the ruling class as they sought to maintain a just and fair stance in their dealings with the burghers and peasants. Smiglecki’s ideas have become a reference point for many generations of professors of moral philosophy and folk preachers seeking to raise social issues in their own works. (shrink)

Extending the ideas from (Hofer-Szabó and Rédei [2006]), we introduce the notion of causal up-to-n-closedness of probability spaces. A probability space is said to be causally up-to-n-closed with respect to a relation of independence R_ind iff for any pair of correlated events belonging to R_ind the space provides a common cause or a common cause system of size at most n. We prove that a finite classical probability space is causally up-to-3-closed w.r.t. the relation of logical independence iff its probability (...) measure is constant on the set of atoms of non-0 probability. (The latter condition is a weakening of the notion of measure uniformity.) Other independence relations are also considered. (shrink)

Here, we analyze how the set of nucleotides in the cell is equilibrated and how this generates simple rules that help the cell to organize itself via maintenance of a stable non‐equilibrium state. A major mechanism operating to achieve this state is thermodynamic buffering via high activities of equilibrating enzymes such as adenylate kinase. Under stable non‐equilibrium, the ratios of free and Mg‐bound adenylates, Mg2+ and membrane potentials are interdependent and can be computed. The adenylate status is balanced with the (...) levels of reduced and oxidized pyridine nucleotides through regulated uncoupling of the pyridine nucleotide pool from ATP production in mitochondria, and through oxidation of substrates non‐coupled to NAD+ reduction in peroxisomes. The set of adenylates and pyridine nucleotides constitutes a generalized cell energy status and determines rates of major metabolic fluxes. As the result, fluxes of energy and information become organized spatially and temporally, providing conditions for self‐maintenance of metabolism. (shrink)

The fifth volume of the Universal Encyclopaedia of Philosophy [Powszechna Encyklopedia Filozofii] has been edited in September 2004 by the St. Thomas Aquinas Society in Poland under the auspices of the Department of Metaphysics at the Catholic University in Lublin. The grand volume of 934 pages contains entries beginning with the letters Iq-J-Ko. The Universal Encyclopaedia of Philosophy [UEP] has been out since 2000 in Lublin. It is the first philosophical encyclopaedia in the whole history of Polish academic activity, and (...) the fifth such publication world-wide. (shrink)

The article reviews the book Universal Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Vol. 6, edited by Andrzej Maryniarczyk.

Three chapters contain the results independent of each other. In the first chapter I present a set of axioms for the propositional calculus which are shorter than the ones known so far, in the second one I give a method of defining all ternary connectives, in the third one, I prove that the probability of propositional functions is preserved under reversible substitutions.

The studies on the history of logic in the Polish schools of the Commission for National Education in the period of the Enlightenment that have been published up to date evaluate the educational practice with respect to its accordance to Condillac’s work. His textbook was indeed order by the Commission for its schools, and it was also evaluated highly, but it was not published in the Polish language. From the rules of the Commission and its didactic practice, which made use (...) of a series of the most eminent eclectic textbooks on logic then functioning in the European school, we can deduce that the Commission must have evaluated Condillac’s book as too one-sided. Aside to his approach, there functioned in then Polish school a number of other studies. The Commission exposed a textbook written by the French Jesuit, Claude Buffier, in the first place. Despite the fact that he was close to modern solutions, e.g. Descartes’ and Locke’s, nevertheless he showed respect for scholastic tradition. Accordingly, he presented a group of solutions well-known from the traditional approaches. He only emphasised, in the modern spirit, how important is the veracity of the premises of syllogism as the fundamental condition for the veracity of the conclusion. It follows that the role of the theory of reasoning was limited and at the same time the value of epistemological problems was stressed. (shrink)

Eduard Spranger ujął program swojego życia w następujących słowach: „zgłębiać siły duchowe i uwarunkowania człowieka, które drzemią w jego wnętrzu, pragnąc je chronić i próbować je kształtować". Sam przyznaje, że stoi on jakby pomiędzy trzema dyscyplinami naukowymi: filozofią, psychologią i pedagogiką. Biorąc jednak pod uwagę jego wkład w rozwój tych trzech dyscyplin, należałoby wymienić je w odwrotnej kolejności.

Jak czytamy na czwartej stronie okładki recenzowanej książki, „niezależna filozofia przyrody uznaje wyniki pozytywnej nauki oraz teorii nauki jako refleksji nad nią, zadaje jednak pytanie, czym jest owa przyroda, która jest przedmiotem techniczno-praktycznych i etyczno-praktycznych sytuacji". Książka składa się ze Wstępu i 6 nierównej objętości rozdziałów. Mimo, że nosi tytuł Naturphilosophie, sugerujący, że jest ona systematycznym wykładem filozofii przyrody, faktycznie stanowi wprowadzenie do tego rodzaju filozofii. Autor przedstawia w niej panorama współczesnych poglądów na filozofię, szczególnie na metafizyki, i przeprowadza gruntowną (...) ich krytykę. Ogólną tezą autora jest stwierdzenie, że nauki przyrodnicze programowo odcinają się od filozofii, odrzucając szczególnie pojęcie celowości. W praktyce jednak posługują się terminologią teleologiczną, w czym ujawnia się bądź ich niekonsekwencja, bądź ograniczenie. Autor jest zdania, że w poglądach wielu filozofujących fizyków kryje się niczym nie podbudowany platonizm, i jest skłonny przyznać w wielu przypadkach rację Arystotelesowi, którego w sposób nieuzasadniony współcześnie wielu kwestionuje. (shrink)

This book collects research papers on the philosophical foundations of probability, causality, spacetime and quantum theory. The papers are related to talks presented in six subsequent workshops organized by The Budapest-Kraków Research Group on Probability, Causality and Determinism. Coverage consists of three parts. Part I focuses on the notion of probability from a general philosophical and formal epistemological perspective. Part II applies probabilistic considerations to address causal questions in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Part III investigates the question of indeterminism (...) in spacetime theories. It also explores some related questions, such as decidability and observation. The contributing authors are all philosophers of science with a strong background in mathematics or physics. They believe that paying attention to the finer formal details often helps avoiding pitfalls that exacerbate the philosophical problems that are in the center of focus of contemporary research. The papers presented here help make explicit the mathematical-structural assumptions that underlie key philosophical argumentations. This formally rigorous and conceptually precise approach will appeal to researchers and philosophers as well as mathematicians and statisticians. (shrink)