Problems connected with the questions of: being-nonbeing, existence, modes of existence and alike, belong to the basic and most important in metaphysics. The article discusses some answers to the aforementioned issues, as proposed by the ancient philosophers, St Thomas Aquinas, R. Ingarden and A.N. Whitehead. In the Appendix some remarks are made on Aristotle’s and S. Thomas’ theory of act and potency.

The first to focus exclusively on implicit memory research, this book documents the proceedings of a meeting held in Perth, Australia where leading researchers ...

The 11 articles in this issue explore how people respond to climate change and other global challenges. The articles pursue three broad strands of enquiry that relate to the effects and causes of “skepticism” about climate change, the purely cognitive challenges that are posed by a complex scientific issue, and the ways in which climate change can be communicated to a wider audience. Cognitive science can contribute to understanding people's responses to global challenges in many ways, and it may also (...) contribute to implementing solutions to those problems. (shrink)

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called ‘‘iterated learning,’’ in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people's predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box office gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method to discriminate (...) between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difficult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reflect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals. (shrink)

The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and resolved in the course of its pursuit. The earlier History of Aesthetics (3 volumes, 1960-68, English-language edition 1970-74) by the author of the present book was a history of men, of writers and artists who in centuries past have spoken (...) up concerning beauty and art, form and crea tivity. The present book returns to the same subject, but treats it in a different way: as the history of aesthetic questions, concepts, theories. The matter of the two books, the previous and the present, is in part the same; but only in part: for the earlier book ended with the 17th century, while the present one brings the subject up to our own times. And from the 18th century to the 20th much happened in aesthetics; it was only in that period that aesthetics achieved recognition as a separate science, received a name of its own, and produced theories that early scholars and artists had never dreamed of. (shrink)

Science strives for coherence. For example, the findings from climate science form a highly coherent body of knowledge that is supported by many independent lines of evidence: greenhouse gas emissions from human economic activities are causing the global climate to warm and unless GHG emissions are drastically reduced in the near future, the risks from climate change will continue to grow and major adverse consequences will become unavoidable. People who oppose this scientific body of knowledge because the implications of cutting (...) GHG emissions—such as regulation or increased taxation—threaten their worldview or livelihood cannot provide an alternative view that is coherent by the standards of conventional scientific thinking. Instead, we suggest that people who reject the fact that the Earth’s climate is changing due to greenhouse gas emissions oppose whatever inconvenient finding they are confronting in piece-meal fashion, rather than systematically, and without considering the implications of this rejection to the rest of the relevant scientific theory and findings. Hence, claims that the globe “is cooling” can coexist with claims that the “observed warming is natural” and that “the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us.” Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that “something must be wrong” with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation. This high-level coherence accompanied by contradictory subordinate propositions is a known attribute of conspiracist ideation, and conspiracism may be implicated when people reject well-established scientific propositions. (shrink)

A fully quantum-mechanical description of the spontaneous emission from an excited two-level atom placed in front of a two-slit interferometer is given. Global modes of the electromagnetic field in a two slit system are derived within the Kirchhoff-Huygens diffraction approximation, serving as a base for the field quantization. The standard Fermi's golden rule, supplemented by a factor coming from the nontrivial mode structure caused by the presence of the two-slit interferometer, is used to show that interference results from the position-dependent (...) coupling between the atom and different field modes of the system. (shrink)

Sixty years that have passed since the Warsaw Uprising are meaningful on the life scale of human generations. The Uprising, planned for 2 or 3 days, lasted in fact for 63 days. That fact astounded the military experts and was even noticed by the German high command, which has to be mainly ascribed to the exceptional tension of patriotism of the soldiers and the population.The Germans suffered especially great losses on the average around 1,900 weekly, almost twice as many as (...) during the highest intensity of fighting in 1944/45. On our side the losses were estimated at 18,000 dead and about 6,500–7,000 wounded insurgents. However, the Warsaw Uprising and the whole nation counted around 150,000 dead among the civilians.During the two months of the uprising 25% of the pre-war buildings in Warsaw were destroyed, mainly due to the barbarian practice of burning the whole streets. Against the conditions of the capitulation agreement just signed, the majority of historical monuments were burned down.In Warsaw, the tradition of sacrifices and solidarity in action, bravery and the deep attachment to liberty, manifested in September 1939, was alive and brought results all the time of war through the acts of the patriotic resistance organizations. The leaders of the Warsaw Uprising belonged to the resistance fighters before World War I and during it. The battle for independence was their curriculum vitae, and the majority of the uprising participants, the youth, was educated in the independent Polish Republic, in respect for patriotic traditions of independence fights and insurrections.Jerzy Kirchmajer believes that the Warsaw Uprising was an error, as it did not suit the Soviets; Jan Ciechanowski from London—that it was against the plans of the British ally. It is said sometimes that the Uprising started without calculating the possibility of a helping hand.Faith played a major role during the Uprising. The clergy helped the community every way they could. (shrink)

The paper attempts to show that Christian hope is not a product of religious fantasy. It finds today an ally in the dialogue with the natural sciences which started in recent years on the topic of the ultimate destiny of the world. The natural sciences have confirmed that the universe is doomed to physical annihilation. Humanity with its cultural riches, scientists say, is only an episode in universal history and doomed to perish. Hence, if the Earth is nothing more than (...) an island of rationality in a cosmic void, then the only thing we can do is to keep up a heroic attitude worthy of human beings towards our own fragile existence. Contemporary science’s visions of the future are pessimistic: abundant, though short-lived, evolution culminating in a sense of final futility and the ultimate destruction of all life in the universe. Such forecasts question religion’s claims for the eschatological transformation of all creation. Christian eschatology does not accept, however, reductionist presuppositions about the very nature of reality. The universe contains levels of meaning far richer than what we have been able to discover sofar. Theology’s task is not to provide easy consolation, or generate false hopes. It has a good reason to avoid catastrophism, and maintain calm in its strivings to keep up our faith in God’s concern for the destiny of all His creatures. Theologians have to take a serious stand on the very concept of finitude, furthered by natural and social sciences. This, in turn, will require critical review of such concepts as the world’s future in God, hope and new creation. This effort must be undertaken in dialogue with the scientific views of the world’s finitude. Both sides are prone to stereotype judgements and shallow answers which must be corrected in consideration of the complexity of the issue at hand. Christian theology has to justify its claim to truth, but certainly not by launching battles with science. Christian hope shows the new creation not as annihilation and destruction of the old but as its ultimate transfiguration and salvific transformation. It speaks about the paradox of continuity/discontinuity in this new universe’s emergence. Special attention is paid in the paper to the “logical” structure of matter. If the world ofultimate events is, in fact, to be a new world of the resurrection, created by transition into new reality, then certain scientific suggestions and data on the present world’s processes could prove helpful in grasping the truly cosmic dimensions of Christian hope. Crucial here will not so much be particular data but rather a sort of meta-science allowing the deduction of general concepts from the detailed achievements of scientific research. Such generalized insights include today the following elements: 1) the dynamic concept of physical reality, 2) the relationality of its processes and, 3) a deeper understanding of the complexity of matter/energy as carriers of a specific information-bearing pattern. It appears that there are some similarities in science’s and theology’s strivings for a deeper understanding of the truth of reality, which continues to evade our theories and teaches us modesty. Neither method nor concept has yet managed to explaineverything. There exists no universal key to a comprehensive interpretation. The postulate to avoid reductionism in approaching the manifold richness of reality is addressed to scientists and theologians alike. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Universite catholique de Louvain, 1990.

This article examines the interpretive dimensions of human action. Although it takes the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as its starting point, the article attempts to develop a more robust hermeneutical account of the reflexivity of social actors and those who study them than Bourdieu himself has considered. It is argued that interpretation is best understood not as the homologous expression of inculcated structures but rather as context-sensitive and reflexively context-transforming action—or what the author wishes to characterize, respectively, as first- (...) and second-order thematizations of embeddedness. The article concludes by contrasting the author's position with the thick description of Clifford Geertz. (shrink)

Artykuł dotyczy doświadczenia moralnego podmiotu pozostającego poza siecią bliskich relacji. Analizuję dwie reguły niezależności moralnej, które mogłyby świadczyć o uprzywilejowaniu podmiotu w tego rodzaju sytuacjach. Zgodnie z pierwszą podmiot pozostający poza siecią relacji unika zagrożeń związanych z utożsamieniem z rolą społeczną. Zgodnie z drugą działania podejmowane przez podmiot charakteryzują się wyższym stopniem bezinteresowności, a co za tym idzie – większą wartością moralną. Argumentuję, że reguły te mogą mieć jedynie charakter prima facie i są ograniczone wieloma czynnikami. Wskazuję również, że uprzywilejowanie (...) podmiotu moralnego w sytuacji cudzoziemca jest równoważone przez trudności w działaniu moralnym w obszarze obietnic, praktyki obwiniania oraz współodpowiedzialności i troski. (shrink)

Resource loss, coping, alcohol expectancies and drinking in students The aim of the study was to find relationships between resource loss treated as a stress indicator, coping, alcohol expectancies and drinking in college students. Results of a group of 125 first and second year students showed that there was a strong relationship between alcohol consumption and expectancies connected with alcohol. Some coping forms were also related to drinking but no relationship was found for resource loss.