Motherland under attack! Nationalism, terrorist threat, and support for the restriction of civil liberties The paper addresses the role which national attitudes play in terrorist threat perception and in the choice of specific counterterrorism strategies. Study 1 shows that participants higher on nationalism tend to perceive the threat of terrorism as more serious than participants lower on nationalism. Moreover, we found that nationalism mediated the relationship between the perceived terrorist threat and the support for tough domestic policies, even at the (...) expense of considerable limitation of civil liberties. Study 2 confirms the link between the perceived terrorism threat and the support for suspension of civil liberties. Nevertheless, when terrorism was seen in terms of crime rather than in terms of war, the mediating role of nationalism disappeared. The results contribute to a better understanding of the process whereby the perception of one's own national group and the perception of one's own nation-state translate into specific reactions triggered by external threats. (shrink)

The aim of this research was to examine the impact of two specific negative emotions of anger and fear on intergroup attitudes. In Study 1 we measured emotions of anger and fear and in Study 2 we evoked these emotions incidentally, that is independently of any intergroup context. In both studies we measured attitudes towards the ingroup and the outgroup.We expected that fear would lead to more positive ingroup attitudes and anger to more negative outgroup attitudes. The results of the (...) correlational study confirmed the predictions regarding anger and decreased outgroup evaluations, and the experimental study revealed that fear enhanced positivity towards the ingroup, but anger increased negativity towards the outgroup. The impact of fear and anger on social attitudes in the specific context of a negatively self-stereotyped ingroup is discussed. (shrink)

The impact of background category information on the creation of social cliques: The role of need for cognitive closure and decisiveness This article focuses on the role of need for cognitive closure in the process of mental model creation about social relations. We assumed that high need for closure participants tend to rely on background category information when forming social cliques. We predicted that this tendency to employ categorical information as a mental aid, used in order to form social cliques, (...) would be efficient in simple task structures but would lead to increased error rates in complex task structures. The results confirmed our predictions, showing especially strong effects for the decisiveness component of need for closure. The importance of individual differences in need for closure and decisiveness in social reasoning is discussed. (shrink)

As volunteer engagement in non-governmental organizations vary between individuals, it is vital to get to know its predictors. It can be of profit to volunteers and the ones who profit from their activities. The aim of present study was to examine a model explaining volunteer engagement examining volunteer self-efficacy as a mediator and personality traits, job resources as its predictors. Respondents were asked to fill in questionnaires accessible online. Those consisted of demographic questions as well as Ten-item Personality Inventory, and (...) three measures adjusted to volunteer environment: Work Design Questionnaire, General Self-Efficacy Scale, and Work Engagement Scale. Results. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that conscientiousness, skill variety and self-efficacy are statistically significant predictors of volunteer engagement. It was shown that the effects of conscientiousness and skill variety on volunteer engagement are mediated by volunteer self-efficacy. (shrink)

In the present study the impact of need for cognitive closure manipulations via time pressure and explicit closure goal activation on executive control was investigated. Although there is some evidence that NFC, measured as an individual variable, is related to better performing in attentional tasks involving executive control, these results have never been validated across different manipulations of NFC. Thus, in the present study we induced NFC via internal and external time pressure and tested the impact of these manipulations on (...) the performance in tasks that measure executive control, i.e., the Stroop and switching tasks. The results revealed that induced high NFC, indeed boosted performance in executive control tasks. Moreover, there was no difference in the effect of both NFC manipulations on task performance. The implications regarding the role of executive control and specific NFC manipulations in social cognition are discussed. (shrink)

The paper offers a new model of politics adequate for the Anthropocene epoch. It uses the concept of ‘heterotopia’ to argue for the environmental potential of Arendtian political philosophy. The adopted meaning of heterotopia combines its Foucauldian (as interpreted by L. De Cauter and M. Dehaene) and medical sources. It is argued that, thus understood, the concept can be applied to the Arendtian idea of judgment. In this capacity, the concept of heterotopia is both politically foundational and environmentally relevant. It (...) helps us maintain the idea of politics as humanely construed activity, while recognising that political actors are also natural beings, whose actions draw on and affect the non-human world. (shrink)

The text is a review of the book Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy by Nadia Urbinati. The review discusses themes of criticism towards the establishment, the morality of populist leaders, and the understanding of what constitutes the people. These themes converge in the idea of populism as a process of transforming democracy, which is the central philosophical concept in the book. The review critically examines the comparison of the trust relationship between voters and a populist leader versus that (...) between voters and a non-populist leader. It also addresses the ambiguity surrounding Urbinati's usage of the concept of democracy. (shrink)

The main objective of this collection of papers is to explore ideas of generation and transformation in the context of postdependency discourse as it may be traced in women’s writing published in Bengali, Polish, Czech, Russian and English. As we believe, literature does not have merely a descriptive function or a purely visionary quality but serves also as a discursive medium, which is rhetorically sophisticated, imaginatively influential and stimulates cultural dynamics. It is an essential carrier of collective memory and a (...) significant indicator of group identity. Along with philosophy, literature explores the intellectual and emotional, aesthetic and ethical components of our lives, and, while focusing on a single feeling or unique event or phenomenon, aspires to capture the universal attributes of human experience. Hence, we intend to juxtapose interpretations of literature originating in very different cultural milieus, such as the Central East European and South Asian,with the literary treatment of the philosophical dilemmas that challenge authors of various nationalities in times of great political, economic and social upheaval and transformation following long periods of dependency and suppression, caused either by colonial and imperialist domination or by communist ideology. (shrink)

The paper brings together Steven Vogel’s concept of the environment and the category of the world in Hannah Arendt’s and Malcom Ferdinand’s interpretations. First, the similarities between the concepts are shown: they both refer to the networks of things and relationships and, as such, emphasize the political dimension of ecological concerns. Second, it is argued Vogel’s discursive model of politics can be enriched with the aid of the model of non-appropriative relating implied by the concept of the world. Two amendments (...) to Vogel’s project are analyzed. It is shown that non-appropriative relating provides additional support for the central value of Vogel’s approach, i.e., non-domination. In the next step, it is argued the model offers insights into the problem that Vogel considers important but impossible to solve, namely—the question of politically relating to non-human beings. (shrink)

English title: Ricoeur and Derrida — the Heritage of Death. In this article the author juxtaposes two different attempts of defending life against Heidegger’s horizon of death (Sein zum Tode) (the survie (survival) of Jacques Derrida and the “Living up to Death” of Paul Ricoeur). Their false proximity introduces a new insight into the discussion about the paradoxical positiveness of deconstruction. Ricoeur’s concept of life makes impossible the understanding of deconstruction as faithfulness to the other not in his identity, but (...) precisely in his otherness. (shrink)

The paper presents the agency of human beings as embodied, i.e. it shows what it means to think about agency as founded on being a body (rather than merely exercised through a body). It is also argued that the free—i.e. reflective and spontaneous—exercise of agency should likewise be understood as embodied. The paper argues that both the appreciation and experience of the free exercise of embodied agency require wonder. The latter is defined as the attitude that facilitates the relationship of (...) familiarization without appropriation. The paper shows how wonder contributes to the experience of freedom related to expressing one’s own unchosen (bodily) difference while relating to the differences of others. (shrink)

Decisions are taken by humans very often during professional as well as leisure activities. It is particularly evident during surfing the Internet: selecting web sites to explore, choosing needed information in search engine results or deciding which product to buy in an on-line store. Recommender systems are electronic applications, the aim of which is to support humans in this decision making process. They are widely used in many applications: adaptive WWW servers, e-learning, music and video preferences, internet stores etc. In (...) on-line solutions, such as e-shops or libraries, the aim of recommendations is to show customers the products which they are probably interested in. As input data the following are taken: shopping basket archives, ratings of the products or servers log files.The article presents a solution of recommender system which helps users to select an interesting product. The system analyses data from other customers' ratings of the products. It uses clustering methods to find similarities among the users and proposed techniques to identify users' profiles. The system was implemented in Apache Mahout environment and tested on a movie database. Selected similarity measures are based on: Euclidean distance, cosine as well as correlation coefficient and loglikehood function. (shrink)

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) has often been regarded as a direct text in its dealings with a multi-dimensional conception of dualism, insecurity, anxiety and weakness. In the constrained moral atmosphere of Victorian England, where such issues were consciously or even intentionally avoided, the novel seemed to be articulating difficult themes about which society preferred to remain silent. A specific literary tradition, the history of Great Britain, scientific discoveries and lively, scientific debates (...) of the 19th-century are ones of the most significant factors which make The Strange Case so original and memorable.The study poses a number of questions: Why does the history of the double return? What is a meaning of a double in a given context? What is so significant about this concept that it has inspired many others successors (e.g. Stephen King’s The Dark Half, 1989)? Why this motif is so popular? The project of delivering the answers to these questions in a one paper is not straightforward. Therefore, the main purpose of this article is limited to presentation and analysis of a conditionof men in the face of emerging Modernism with a close reference to philosophical ideas of the turn of the century. On such basis, it investigates the foundations of Stevensonian philosophy of dualism. (shrink)

I investigate the relationship between traditional philosophical epistemology and cognitive science. I start my considerations with the following questions: does the development of cognitive science require any revision of epistemology, akin to the revision required in some areas analytic philosophy after the emergence of quantum physics? Does cognitive science continue philosophical epistemology or is the complete break with traditional philosophical approaches?

The paper sought to point at the epistemological aspect of understanding. It departs from the semiotic analysis of understanding, submitted with regard to words, statements, and texts. Some problems connected with the semiotic analysis are pinpointed here. They cannot be solved on the semiotic level. The considerations are crowned with some remarks on understanding as a property of the cognitive equipment of the knowing system. This property is examined not only in philosophical epistemology but in the epistemology developed in the (...) contemporary context of cognitive sciences. (shrink)

The paper is focused on the problem of identification in perception. I attempt to inquire on what ground the cognitive system is able to identify an object of perception (I restrict my analysis to visual perception). Although this is an empirical question for cognitive science, I consider it using a philosophical method of analysis. But my considerations in great part are heuristic, I ask questions and rather search for the answers than give a ready solution. The questions I ask arise (...) from a theoretical philosophical inquiry made in the context of cognitive science. The key question of my paper is whether perceptual identification has any cognitive basis, i.e. does it require any concepts or any prior knowledge. I especially pay attention to the problem of representation, asking if perceptual identification is representational or not. These questions are topical today and show that the traditional philosophical approaches to perception require revision and a new critical look at old problems and controversies. (shrink)

The main thesis of the paper is very simple, namely that the cognitive system is a representational system. The cognitive system will be defined as a system which is able to realize cognitive functions such as perception, symbolic thinking, understanding and reflection. Such a system is further characterized as: cognitively open and at the same time relatively isolated, representational, structurally complex and many-dimensional, dynamic and having functional plasticity (cognitively adaptive) and also having the capacity for self-determination. The analysis will be (...) focused on the characterization of representation (which will be defined as a certain kind of content) and on the types of representations in the cognitive system (i.e. perceptual and conceptual representations, the representation of the body and the representation of "self"). (shrink)

In this paper I defend the multi-dimensional conception of the mind according to which an account of one-dimension, for example biological or computational or cultural, is insufficient for an adequate theory of the mind. The systematic account of this conception was presented in my book Philosophy of mind. The debate with naturalistic conceptions of mind (in Polish, Marszałek 2003). Here I only focus on some problems which have been raised by Robert Poczobut in his review of my book (presented in (...) this volume). They are the following problems: the problem of unification of research in the paradigm of cognitive science (i.e., unification via information); the problem of reduction and emergence discussed on Searle's approach to the mind; the problem of causality and determinations of the mind (Does the mind have only causal, i.e. physical determination or not?, Does the determination of the mind have any influence on the causal complementation of the physical universe?, Is possible a system without any causal determination?); the problem of consciousness (Is consciousness possible in artificial intelligence? What is the conclusion from the known Searle's principle of connection saying about the connection between the intentional and conscious states?); and the problem of compatibility of descriptions given in the philosophy of mind at the psychological level, and in neuroscience at the neuronal level (I'd presented this compatibility on the analysis of the experience of pain). In the conclusion, entitled "Conclusion without dialectics," I reply to the objection of my reviewer that I admit the dialectics of naturalism with non-naturalism. I agree for such "dialectics" as a starting point from where I speak for certain continuity in research of the mind conducted by science and philosophy, but I also admit such dimensions of the mind which can be studied autonomically (in non-naturalistic philosophical approach). (shrink)

Grammar teaching has never belonged to mainstream ESP teaching/ learning practices. However, this apparent lack of concern with grammar in ESP materials runs counter to both subjective and objective needs of ESP learners. The first part of the paper presents students′ views on deficiencies of coursebooks for teaching English for Medical Purposes as well as author’s reflective thinking on the needs of medical undergraduates of vocational schools in Poland. It is suggested that some of the deficiencies of the materials might (...) be remedied and the students′ needs better taken care of if explicit teaching of formulaic language is introduced into ESP classroom environment. It is hypothesized that explicit teaching of formulaic language may stimulate grammar development in the long term and foster communicative competence of ESP learners in the short term. Therefore, the second part of the paper proposes pedagogically relavant classification of medical formulaic sequences motivated by the lexicogrammatical features of Medical English. The third part of the paper shows in what way the proposed classification of formulaic sequences might help teachers of medical English design tasks that are conducive to the development of formulaic competence of students of English for Medical Purposes. (shrink)

Richard III’s courtship of Lady Anne in William Shakespeare’s King Richard III is a blend of courtly speech and sexual extravaganza. His sexual energy and power of seduction were invented by Shakespeare to enhance the theatrical effect of this figure and, at the same time, to present Richard as a tragic character. Richard’s eroticism in Act 1 Scene 2 makes him a complicated individual. Playing a seducer is one of the guises he uses to achieve his political aims on the (...) one hand, and, on the other, the pose of a sexually attractive lover enables him to put his masculinity to the test. Throughout the scene Richard is haunted by his deformity that, together with his villainy, makes him a stranger to the world and an enemy to his family and the court. In order to overcome his self-image of a disproportional cripple he manifests his sexuality towards Anne to boost his self-esteem and to confirm that the lady will accept him despite his obvious physical shortcomings. This article uses Georges Bataille’s theory of eroticism and erotic desire to characterize Richard as a tragic individual and to explain the reasons behind his unexpected sexual behaviour in the seduction scene. (shrink)

The paper intends to initiate a discussion on the politico-liberal concept of judgment. It is argued that whilst political liberalism (PL) – presented as an account of political objectivity – already appeals to judgment, this conception is an unsatisfactory one. This critical assessment is supported by the juxtaposition of PL with an Arendtian understanding of political objectivity which offers a more robust account of judgment. In the conclusion, the possibility of applying the Arendtian solution to PL is outlined.

The paper revises the idea of speech as a fundamental political faculty in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene. First, it is argued that, rather than as a subsystem of language, speech should be conceptualised as the expression of the embodied capacity of voice (in this respect, the paper follows Adriana Cavarero’s [2005] argument). Secondly, vocality is linked to the faculty of taste (understood as in Arendt’s reading of Kant) to locate politics in the broader order of materiality (physis).

The paper offers a contribution to the political account of wonder. The rationale for addressing this problem is provided by Hannah Arendt’s observations on the paradoxical relationship between wonder and politics—wonder appears here as both essential and indispensable to politics as the realm of opinions. This quandary corresponds to two common-sense uses of the term “wonder”—as an emotion and as an act of judging. It is argued that the political interpretation of wonder should link these two poles. Drawing on Martha (...) Nussbaum’s account of wonder and its reformulation developed by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, the paper offers such a synthesis by emphasising the environmental and aesthetic dimensions of the concept. (shrink)