In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Green Utopia Now! A Transdisciplinary Symposium on How to Deal with the Climate Crisis: November 30, 2022, University of Ferrara, ItalyManuel Sousa Oliveira, Ilenia Vittoria Casmiri, Fabiola Onofrio, Tânia Cerqueira, Francisca Teixeira, and Florian WagnerHow could we come together in transdisciplinary collaboration to deal with the climate crisis? Could utopianism be what brings us together? Last summer (2022) we started asking ourselves these questions, and months later Green (...) Utopia Now! A Transdisciplinary Symposium on How to Deal with the Climate Crisis was our initial attempt at finding an answer. The symposium was an ambitious and challenging venture from the start. Our aspirations for it were perhaps still formulated best in the event program:Green Utopia Now! brings together an outstanding group of early career researchers (ECRs) working on climate and the environment in various fields of study. The symposium will provide a creative space where ECRs can share their transdisciplinary perspectives on how to challenge the limits of monodisciplinary views on sustainability, and how the sciences and the humanities can join forces to tackle the current climate crisis. Each of these scientific and cultural points of view will be brought together by a utopian impulse that insists on the role of collaboration, and the urgency of positive [End Page 368] climate action. In fact, this symposium is guided by our conviction about the importance of (1) transdisciplinary collaboration, (2) innovative research conducted by ECRs, and (3) utopian thinking and practice for engaging with global scale problems.Fortunately, eleven guest speakers accepted the challenge, and their answers were unsurprisingly diverse.1If we are to approach the vicissitudes of the climate crisis, we must, as Hannah Nelson-Teutsch and Lena Pfeifer recently called for, seek “new, entangled form(at)s of scholarship in the humanities.”1 These entanglements have become even more obvious in the ways in which research on the climate and environmental crises challenges the very limits of humanities and monodisciplinary scholarship. Not circumscribed to the humanities, then, Green Utopia Now! similarly aspired to “new, entangled form(at)s” of transdisciplinary research at the intersection of environmental and utopian studies. Thus, it follows that this briefing too should diverge from the conventional form(at) in an attempt to convey the professional, personal and collective entanglements of our projects.Green utopianism, as described in a recent issue of this journal, shares with political ecological movements a radical and urgent “need to live and embody better alternatives within the Now.”2 This idea of “nowness” inspired our symposium down to its title. It would be only fitting, then, that the author, Heather Alberro, would deliver the opening keynote of the Green Utopia Now! symposium. Alberro (Nottingham Trent) joined us online to, on the one hand, (re)introduce the idea of green utopianism and, on the other, propose a new iteration termed “terrestrial ecotopianism.” Drawn for a wide range of both fictional and nonfictional, imaginative and empirical sources, Alberro’s terrestrial ecotopianism redirects our focus toward the here and the now. Providing a further layer to this utopian project is the work being conducted in empirical ecocriticism, as made obvious by W. P. Małecki (Wrocław), who delivered the closing keynote, which was based on “hot off the press” research on environmental communication, environmental psychology, as well as affective (and, of course, empirical) ecocriticism. It inquired into the possibilities of utopian cli-fi in general, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) in particular, to change attitudes toward the climate crisis. [End Page 369]Most of our speakers, were far from being utopian scholars. Still, by the end of the symposium it was becoming clear that many (if not all) were in fact unwitting utopians. Regardless of the fields—from literature to genetics, biology to sociology, or economics to architecture—collectively the proposals that were put forth constitute a fresh and wide-ranging utopian project exploring both more and less exact ways of dealing with the climate crisis now. Not wishing to have the project become monolithic, much of the utopian aspirations for the symposium were placed in the process, the relationships, and the conversations. Even if to admittedly mixed results, the panels too... (shrink)

There were few Marxist sympathizers among Polish classicists decimated during World War II. How they fared during the tense and uncertain first postwar decade depended on their Communist connections and personality. Kazimierz Majewski (1903–1981), a classicist from Lviv, commanded quasi-universal respect in the academic community – despite his Communist views – because of his scholarly, organizational, and didactic achievements. Tasked with organizing and inaugurating a new Polish University in Wrocław in 1945, he contributed to creating three thriving classical (...) departments – philology, ancient history, and archaeology – a scholarly society, academic journals, and a vibrant academic community. When he moved to Warsaw four years later, he founded an institute for material culture, developed a multidisciplinary research team, and launched within the Soviet bloc two major archaeological excavation projects, in Olbia and in Novae, where generations of archaeologists learned how to perform fieldwork and communicate its results internationally through regular publications and cooperation. Through his Party connections, he protected and ensured support for colleagues less fortunate in this respect. (shrink)

Dieter Birnbacher is professor of philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf and a member of the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations’ scientific board. In 1988 he published the book Verantwortung für zukünftige Generationen ; which was translated into French and Polish. Hanna Schudy is an ethicist and environmentalist interested in questions of intergenerational responsibility concerning the natural environment. She is a doctoral student at the University of Wroclaw and a DAAD scholarship holder. The interview was conducted (...) in December 2011 at the Heinrich Heine Universität; Duesseldorf. It is part of Ms. Schudy’s current research into “The principle of responsibility in Hans Jonas’ and Dieter Birnbacher’s environmental ethics”. (shrink)

Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland This article is a review of the book _Making AI Intelligible. Philosophical Foundations_, written by Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever, and published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. The authors of the reviewed book address the difficult issue of interpreting the results provided by AI systems and the links between human-specific content handling and the internal mechanisms of these systems. Considering the potential usefulness of various frameworks developed in philosophy to (...) solve the problem, they conduct a thorough analysis of a wide spectrum of them, from the use of Saul Kripke’s work to a critical analysis of the explainable AI current. (shrink)

Wroclaw’s Neo-Kantian Manifesto of Jacob FreudenthalThe initial part of the article focuses on the presentation of Jacob Freudenthal, his scientific activity and scientific achievements. The central point of the article is the analysis of the solemn speech that Jacob Freudenthal gave in front of the academic community of Wrocław on the hundredth anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s death. This speech — but also his didactic activity popularizing Kantian thought — was important because it gave rise to the relatively late Neo-Kantianism (...) of Wrocław which was developed more extensively — after Freudenthal’s death — thanks to Richard Honigswald. Neo-Kantianism opposed the prevailing Kantian idealism and experimental psychology at the University of Wrocław. (shrink)

Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa was one of the most outstanding female representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School. After achieving her PhD in philosophy under Kazimierz Twardowski’s supervision, she was Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s assistant. She was also influenced by Alfred Tarski whose results in semantics she analyzed and popularized. After World War II, she got the chair of logic in University of Wrocław and she organized studies in logic in this academic center. In the 1930s, Kokoszyńska kept in contact with members of the (...) Vienna Circle and became a kind of connecting factor between Polish logicians and the Viennese group. In Poland, she presented the views of members of the Vienna Circle. In Vienna, she emphasized the results of her Polish colleagues. In the present paper, some of Kokoszyńska’s results connected with the matters discussed in the Vienna Circle are presented, namely with the problem of metaphysics, the status of logic and the idea of unity of science. (shrink)

: Research done in recent years shows that Virtual Reality can be an effective tool for distracting attention from pain. The purpose of this study was to test how the complexity of Virtual Environment influences the experienced intensity of thermal pain stimuli. A within-subjects design experiment was conducted, using cold pressor test for pain stimulation. Research was done on 31 students of Wroclaw Universities. Participants played games created for the purpose of the study, using head mounted displays and movement sensors. (...) Two Virtual Environments differing in the level of complexity and non-VR control condition were used. The order of all conditions was counterbalanced. Participants reported significantly lower pain intensity after playing the high complexity game, compared to the low complexity game. There were also significant differences between non-VR control condition and high complexity game, but not between non-VR and low complexity game. The pain tolerance was significantly higher in both VR conditions comparing to non-VR conditions. However, no significant differences between VE’s were found in pain tolerance ratings. Results of this study provide preliminary evidence that game complexity can be related to pain experience during VR interventions. (shrink)

Wilhelm Dilthey in WrocławThe article above discusses 11 years of Wilhelm Dilthey’s creative presence in Wrocław, a philosopher whose contribution to the European culture has been never questioned. Dilthey was appointed to the University of Wrocław in March 1871. Same year in October, he moved to Wrocław, took over the department of philosophy from Christlieb Julius Braniβ and started academic lectures in autumn. Acclimatizing in the Silesian capital was dif ficult for the philosopher, in his letters (...) he complained about the climate and provinciality of the city. It has changed over time, so that Dilthey finally adjusted to the environment. It happened because of numerous connections with the people from the university, among others with Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, but not only. In Dilthey’s biography, years in Wrocław were extremely prolific. In Wrocław Dilthey matured to the work of his life: Introduction to the Human Sciences, called in the subject literature the “crowning of the period in Wrocław”. He presented the concept of his work in a letter, among others, to Theodor Althof f, an of ficial from the Prussian Ministry of Culture. The preserved sketch of the letter is interesting because of its concept, but also because it shows a certain dependence of onetime philosophers on the state system. The article above contains an annex—a translation of this letter into Polish. Dilthey was a lecturer at the University of Wrocław until the end of the summer semester in 1882, after that he was appointed to Berlin in July 1882. (shrink)

From the initiative of the Institute of Philosophy of the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow there was a debate last May that centred on a book by young author Filip Borek from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who is also a member of the board of the Polish Phenomenological Association. His book consists of a phenomenological interpretation of Vom Wesen der Wahrheit [On the Essence of Truth], an important work in which Heidegger (...) explores the essential connection between truth as correctness and freedom. In attendance were the following guests: Maria Gołębiewska (Polish Academy of Sciences), Paweł Korobczak (University of Wrocław), Daniel R. Sobota (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Jacek Surzyn (Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow), as well as the author himself. The debate was led by Magdalena Kozak (Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow). (shrink)

This thesis defends the diagnostic accuracy and political usefulness of the claim that women are complicit in their sexual objectification. Feminists have long struggled to demarcate the appropriate limits of feminist critiques of sexual objectification, particularly when it comes to objectifying practices which women both consent to and experience as empowering. These struggles, I argue, are the result of a fundamental misdiagnosis of what happens when women are sexually objectified, whereby the abstract notion of 'treating as an object' is called (...) upon to explicate the kind of phenomena which can only be properly understood in light of a more general set of social norms of masculinity and femininity. A more accurate diagnosis of sexual objectification, I argue, is provided by Catharine MacKinnon's radical feminist theory, according to which sexually objectifying acts are manifestations of the social process through which women are made into objects of male sexual gratification. One important implication of this account is that women themselves play a role in perpetuating the norms through which sexually objectifying treatment of women is enabled: insofar as they participate in the re-constitution of the social context which facilitates their sexual objectification, they are complicit in it. Although this idea lacks intuitive appeal from a feminist perspective, I argue that understanding the nature of the contribution women make to perpetuating their objectification enables a better understanding of what practices of resistance are necessary for effectively combatting the sexual objectification of women. I defend the explanatory power of the complicity account of objectification in light of two pressing debates in contemporary feminist philosophy: the question of how women can disidentify from femininity given the strong attachments they develop to it, and the question of how feminism can continue to appeal to the motif of solidarity considering the anti-essentialist commitments of recent feminist theory. (shrink)

Neo-Kantian in the Psychological Laboratory — Richard Hӧnigswald’s Research on the Principles of Mental BeingThe specificity of Richard Hӧnigswald’s attitude to the issues raised in the Neo-Kantian philosophy was clearly visible in his approach to psychology. First of all, this covered the question of the objectivity of cognizance. Like other Neo-Kantian philosophers, Hӧnigswald undertook in his work both the problem of the relationship between philosophy and psychology and the problem of psychologism. Unlike the representants of both Neo-Kantians schools, he took (...) up psychology practically. In the years 1916–1930 he led the psychological laboratory of the Philosophical Seminar at the University of Wrocław, where he conducted a study of the process of thinking. Hӧnigswald took up psychology as he intended to expand the question of objectivity by the subjectivity conditions of cognizance, among which the most important was a synthesis in the way that Kant used this term — primary apperception, i.e. the unity of Self-Knowledge. According to Hӧnigswald, there is no knowledge beyond the knowing subject — an experience centre in which cognitive acts take place. In this way, Hӧnigswald extended the epistemological questions by the notion of ontology of thinking — the theory of mental existence. (shrink)

A brief account of the first - unsuccessful - attemps to create research centers in the field of technical (applied) physics in Poland in the period before the outbreak of World War is given. Outstanding physicists such as Mieczysław Wolfke, Stanisław Kalinowski, Aleksander Jabłoński and Wacław Dziewulski took part in this trials. Activities in this direction continued after the war, especially after the establishment of the Polish Academy of Sciences, within whch several institutes dealing with the application of physics were (...) established. The most important of them incude the Institute of Physics and Institute of Fundamental Technological Research in Warsaw, as well as the Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery in Gdańsk and Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków. Outside the structure of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Industrial Institute of Electronics and the Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion were established, both in Warsaw. Technical Physics center establised at the Warsaw, Wrocław and Poznań Universities of Technology and at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń are also discussed. Spectacular examples of medical applications include photodynamic therapy based on the Jabłoński diagram, optical tomography and proton radioteraphy for eye cancer. (shrink)

This chapter explores the nature of moral rights by examining their formal structure, their status within morality, and rival theories concerning their content. Moral rights are construed as ones which legal systems ought to embody. As such, it is argued that consideration of the possibility of conflicts between rights and other moral values, and among rights themselves, serves to illuminate issues surrounding their content and moral status.

Musical Work Analysis is a holistic approach to the cognitive theory of the musical work. The book develops some of Roman Ingarden's concepts on the epistemology of an actually existing work of music. The author outlines an epistemological theory of the musical work by discussing the role of musical analysis in modern musicology, defining sources and objects of epistemological activity, formulating a systematization of analytical terms, issues and methods, both normative and descriptive, and addressing the relation between analysis and interpretation (...) of a musical work. The book was published in Polish language in edition of the Foundation for Polish Science (Wrocław University Press, Wrocław 2003) and awarded by the Polish Ministry of National Education (2004). (shrink)

This translation of selections from the De universo grew out of a graduate seminar on William of Auvergne held at Marquette University in 1995. It translates and annotates large parts of the De universo and of the De anima.

The European Summer Schools in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) have been organised every year since 1989 under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different cities around Europe. The 24th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2012) took place at the University of Opole, Poland, during August 6-17, 2012. The organisation committee was chaired by Janusz Czelakowski and Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Opole) and the (...) programme committee was chaired by Andreas Herzig (University of Toulouse and CNRS). During two weeks, over 340 participants from 36 countries were offered a rich academic program of their choice from 9 foundational, 16 introductory and 17 advanced courses and 6 workshops. Just as in the previous years, the 17th conference on Formal Grammar collocated with ESSLLI. Besides the regular courses, a traditional highlight of the summer school were the 4 evening lectures by distinguished academics: - Johan van Benthem (Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), Amsterdam and Department of Philosophy, Stanford University), "Computation as Agency''; - Melvin Fitting (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, City University of New York), "Reasoning About Games''; - Jonathan Ginzburg (UFR Études anglophones, Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7)), "False starts, jokes, and music:semantics in the 21st century''; - Adam Przepiórkowski (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), "Secret life of corpora''. Another traditional event was the student session, organised by a student programme committee chaired by Rasmus K. Rendsvig (University of Copenhagen): master and doctoral students presented 16 papers and 5 posters, and Michał Zawidzki obtained the best paper award and Raul Fervari obtained the best poster award. Moreover, the Beth Dissertation Prizes were announced at the FoLLI General Meeting and went to Andreas Kapsner (University of Barcelona) and Daniel R. Licata (Carnegie Mellon University). Apart from the busy academic programme, participants of the summer school were offered an exciting social program as well. In addition to the traditional ESSLLI Party and the famous Students vs. Lecturers Soccer Match (also called `Johan van Benthem Cup'), kayaking, and excursions to Kraków and Wrocław were offered. -/- . (shrink)

During the 15th century the Cracow University had become a major intellectual centre in central Europe. It was especially important in educating lawyers and administrators for the Polish-Lithuanian state as well as the higher clergy: as a result, special stress was put on legal and theological studies. The faculty of Liberal Arts (Philosophy), though less prized, also took part in the intellectual life of the Latin Europe, becoming home to representatives of most philosophical schools of the late Middle Ages. (...) Scotism was one of the last medieval schools to arrive in Cracow. It was introduces there by Michael Twaróg of Biestrzyków, who studied the doctrines of scotism in logic and metaphysics. His main source was not Duns Scotus, however, but his pupils and followers, notably Antonius Andreae, whose "Quaestiones super XII libros Metaphysicae" was a book widely read in Cracow since 1489. Antonius' solutions on the division of sciences, the subject-matter of metaphysics, the concept of being, etc. were accepted also by Nicholas of Michałowice, Martin Kulap of Tarnowiec, John of Głogów, and John of Stobnica. Some of them tried to combine some scotist ideas with philosophical views of other schools. In logic, the solutions associated with scotism started appearing in Cracow s little earlier – in 1470s – but their influence was weaker than in metaphysics. Again, they were mostly coming from the works of Scotus's followers of the 14th and early 15th century. The group of Cracow logicians influences by scotist opinions included John of Głogów, Michael of Wrocław, Nicholas of Giełczewo and Michael od Biestrzyków, who tried to combine the views of Scotus with those of Peter of Spain in his commentary on "Parva naturalia". Philosophy of nature was the discipline in which the influence of scotism was felt last and least. It is found mostly in the works of John of Stobnica – especially in his commentary on "Parvulus philosophiae naturalis" (1498) – and Simon of Leśniewo, John's pupil, who wrote glossa to the commentary. (shrink)

Against species essentialism Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9448-6 Authors Olivier Rieppel, Department of Geology, The Field Museum, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605-2496, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Daniel Sennert is one of the more neglected big figures of that seventeenth-century process that goes by the shorthand name of Scientific Revolution. Born in Breslau/wroclaw in 1572, he was professor of medicine at the University of Wittenberg from 1602 until his death in 1637. However, his fame and importance were not due to his classroom teaching but to his writings, which were reprinted throughout the century in Germany, France, England, Italy, and the Netherlands, and partially translated into English. (...) His reputation among both his contemporaries and today’s historians of science has to do with the highly innovative synthesis of natural philosophy, medicine, and chymistry, which he presented notably in the two editions of his De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu and in his late Hypomnemata physica, both of which relied on a novel type of atomistic matter theory. His influence, generally underestimated in today’s scholarship, was felt throughout the century and, as William R. Newman has demonstrated, is particularly important in the case of Robert Boyle, who was “plundering Sennert’s œuvre for proofs of the corpuscularian hypothesis,” albeit without acknowledging his source. (shrink)