The development of studies on the first- and third-person human experience which took place in the 20th century revealed the need to re-empirize Thomistic anthropology. Among the thinkers who undertook this task were Karol Wojtyła and Mieczysław Krąpiec. This re-empirization was linked with adapting the cognitive tools developed within the modern philosophy of the subject to descriptions of the first-person experience. Wojtyła assumed that the starting point of the cognition of the personal subject was the experience of performing an act, (...) in opposition to what happens within a man. Krąpiec criticized this concept and proposed basing Thomistic anthropology on the subjective experience of existence, in which the ‘I’ manifests itself through ‘my’-acts. The experience of the act, on the one hand, and the immanence and transcendence of the self in relation to ‘my’-acts, on the other hand, allowed these philosophers to build an anthropological bridge to the Thomistic system. (shrink)

The German philosopher Robert Spaemann proposed a complex but incomplete concept of philosophy. It has features of a classical approach, but it is difficult to define what is classical in it. Its comparison to the contemporary version of classical philosophy developed by the Lublin School of Philosophy shows that Spaemann may be considered as a representative of a classical, though not metaphysical, manner of philosophizing. Both in philosophy, systematically perceived as a type of cognition, and history, perceived as a type (...) of discourse, classical influences can be observed in terms of the concept of philosophy, its object, purpose, and method. Despite the tension between philosophy as the cognition and philosophy as the discourse, in his concept these two aspects cannot be reduced one to another and cannot be separate from each other. The awareness that philosophy is an endless and controversial discourse on ultimate problems does not relieve philosophers from their efforts to pursue the truth about reality. And this is how Spaemann looks at his own philosophising. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas understands providence as the reason of directing things to ends, and as the execution of that directing, i.e. governance. Thus, providence is one of the fundamental attributes of the person that reveals the person's perfection and dignity. Providence consists in a free and reasonable directing of oneself and the reality subject to oneself in order to actualize potentialities of oneself and of other beings in the context of the ultimate goal of existence. Human providence joins the providence of (...) the Absolute with regard to the world. In spite of its deficiencies human providence reveals the essential dignity of the human person. (shrink)

Artykuł pokazuje źródła filozoficznych inspiracji Andrzeja Maryniarczyka, jednego z najwybitniejszych przedstawicieli trzeciego pokolenia Lubelskiej Szkoły filozoficznej. Szkoła ta nawiązuje do tradycji arystotelesowsko-tomistycznej, w której centralną rolę odgrywa metafizyka. To właśnie myśl Stagiryty i Akwinaty stała się dla Maryniarczyka przedmiotem badań oraz źródłem inspiracji. Autor Metody metafizyki realistycznej sięgał także do myśli Mieczysława Alberta Krąpca i Karola Wojtyły, współczesnych reprezentantów nurtu tomistycznego, a zarazem przedstawicieli Lubelskiej Szkoły Filozoficznej. Maryniarczyk uczył się od swoich poprzedników rozumienia, czym filozofia jest, co jest jej przedmiotem (...) i jak należy ja uprawiać. Myślicieli tych traktował jako swoich przewodników w realistycznym filozofowaniu, czerpiąc od nich inspirację do bycia filozofem w XXI wieku poprzez zajmowanie określonej postawy wobec rzeczywistości i toczącego się dyskursu. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to outline the concept of transcendentalising reduction and to demonstrate what role it plays in Thomistic metaphysics. An adaptive interpretation has been used in the analyses by applying phenomenological thinking based on epoche reduction to Thomistic metaphysics. It was used to present the structure of transcendentalising reduction, which consists of several different epoché. Consistently applied, this reduction should lead to a neutralised concept of being as a subject of metaphysics expressed in the formula “being (...) as being”. In conclusion, we note that the proposed interpretation opens the door to further research in which phenomenology could be used in metaphysical studies to a greater extent than has been the case to date. (shrink)

W swojej ostatniej monografii Piotr Stanisław Mazur podejmuje problematykę metafizyki klasycznej, starając się ją zaktualizować, rozszerzyć, uwiarygodnić, zwłaszcza w odniesieniu do antropologii filozoficznej, która miałaby być budowana na jej podstawach. To zainteresowanie metafizyką, jako wiedzą o całości rzeczywistości, badanej w aspekcie istniejącego bytu, ma kilka swoich przyczyn. Do najważniejszych z nich należy współczesna krytyka metafizyki klasycznej oraz coraz częściej podnoszone kwestie dotyczące tego, jak rozumieć realność istnienia. W swojej najnowszej monografii Mazur podejmuje próbę obrony tomistycznej metafizyki (...) przez wskazanie na jej nowe, poznawcze możliwości związane z podstawami antropologii. Formułuje szereg pytań dotyczących istnienia człowieka, a konkretnie, na czym polega specyfika istnienia człowieka i co je charakteryzuje. (shrink)

As the concept of recognition shifts from philosophical theory to other fields of the humanities and social sciences, this volume explores the nature of this border category that exists in the space between sociological and philosophical considerations, related as it is to concepts such as status, prestige, the looking-glass self, respect, and dignity - at times being used interchangeably with these terms. Bringing together work from across academic disciplines, it presents theoretical conceptualizations of recognition, demonstrates its operationalization in historical and (...) literary research, considers recognition as a fundamental problem of sociological theory and examines the concept as a marker of social distances and redistribution. An examination and demonstration of the full potential of recognition as a category, Understanding Recognition: Conceptual and Empirical Studies explores the contemporary meanings and manifestations of recognition and sheds light on its capacity to complement the notions of status, class or prestige. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory, philosophy, history and literary studies. (shrink)

This study was designed to determine the quality of service through the evaluation of hospitalized patients. An analysis of hospitalized patients’ subjective feelings towards service quality was carried out, in the context of the application of the SERVQUAL method. The pilot study was conducted in a Silesian hospital in a group of 29 young patients diagnosed with kidney disease. The study used a standard sheet of 22 SERVQUAL statements and an analysis of the significance of the 5 areas of quality (...) material important for the patient. According to the respondents, the most important of the 5 features that influence the quality of life is the ability of the ward staff to provide adequate medical services The least important were the aesthetics and ergonomics of rooms. Service quality gaps were seen in all the five dimensions as well as in the overall service quality. Hence, the following conclusions could be made: 1. The SERVQUAL method helps to identify discrepancies between perceptions of patients’ expectations in all the dimensions of quality of medical services. 2. For patients, the least important is the material dimension, whereas the one most affecting them is the dimension associated with the reliability of medical services. 3. An improvement of the level of satisfaction with the quality of medical services requires proper planning and effectiveness of implementation of health care services. 4. Research should be conducted on a larger population of patients. (shrink)

Editorial note about the project entitled "Polish Christian Philosophy of the Twentieth Century," which inspired philosophers from Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow to organise the international conference "Christian Philosophy: Its Past, Present and Future." This issue of Forum Philosophicum collects edited and blind-reviewed papers from this conference.

Last year marked the appearance of an English-language book entitled Philosophical Anthropology: Outline of Fundamental Problems. It is, in actuality, an English translation of the most frequently reprinted work of the distinguished philosopher and expert on the history of Jesuit philosophy in Poland, Father Professor Roman Darowski. Although Philosophical Anthropology: Outline of Fundamental Problems is, excluding some of its parts, a translation rather than a new book, the fact of its appearance in English deserves to be noted and discussed, as (...) the new English-language version will allow it to reach a significantly wider range of readers than before. (shrink)

Last year marked the appearance of an English-language book entitled Philosophical Anthropology: Outline of Fundamental Problems. It is, in actuality, an English translation of the most frequently reprinted work of the distinguished philosopher and expert on the history of Jesuit philosophy in Poland, Father Professor Roman Darowski. Although Philosophical Anthropology: Outline of Fundamental Problems is, excluding some of its parts, a translation rather than a new book, the fact of its appearance in English deserves to be noted and discussed, as (...) the new English-language version will allow it to reach a significantly wider range of readers than before. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present the application of the lean management method as appropriate for the management of the organizational system of psychiatric care in the Zealand region of Denmark. The organizational solutions of the Danish psychiatric care system presented in this paper are individualized and adapted to the regional needs of the residents. In Denmark, there are five administrative regions, in which each independently organizes its own system of medical (psychiatric) care. This means that the regions (...) have considerable independence in choosing the acceptable and necessary methods of management, including – as is clear from the conducted research – the use of methods put-upon other areas of economy. Although the national laws in Denmark define certain conditions and guidelines for the functioning of psychiatric care (e.g. regarding the use of direct coercion/restrains for patients treated in the centres), there is a distinct separation of structures and methods of functioning throughout the whole country, which constitutes unique observation material – from the cognitive point of view. The authors of this paper conduct extensive research and analyse the systems of psychiatric care organizations in various countries (including Spain, Italy and Japan) and, as a result, the obtained results may lead to the selection of the best models from other systems (good organizational practices and management, the management methods in use), which can be applied in the currently reorganised system of the Polish psychiatric care. The choice of Denmark for the observational study is not accidental and is related not only to the fact that there is a large degree of systemic identity within the country and between the regions, but also because the country applies solutions addressed to patients with very different cultural conditions and needs, resulting from their descent, religion, and (world)-views. Denmark is one of those European countries that express a significant acceptance of diversity and tolerance, which is why communities with very different imponderables, denominations, and worldviews co-exist. In the area related to the organization of the psychiatric system, these conditions are of key importance. In the period from January 2015 to December 2017 the authors participated in study visits in Denmark, conducting research aimed at identifying the key success factors of the psychiatric care organization system in the country. The conducted analysis is also based on the analysis of literature and own and participant observations. The conclusions concerning this subject are also the result of interviews conducted with employees of the visited hospitals and system users, both professionals and patients. As the search for an optimal organizational model of psychiatric care is currently an ongoing concern in Poland, it seems justified to review the existing solutions in Europe and perform their critical analysis. A comparison of the adopted solutions was performed, in the context of, above all, the improvement of the quality of these services, their availability, and the satisfaction of patients and their families from the proposed organizational changes. The economic benefits of these solutions are also significant. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas understands providence as the reason of directing things to ends, and as the execution of that directing, i.e. governance. Thus, providence is one of the fundamental attributes of the person that reveals the person's perfection and dignity. Providence consists in a free and reasonable directing of oneself and the reality subject to oneself in order to actualize potentialities of oneself and of other beings in the context of the ultimate goal of existence. Human providence joins the providence of (...) the Absolute with regard to the world. In spite of its deficiencies human providence reveals the essential dignity of the human person. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest rekonstrukcja hipotezy odnowionego traducjanizmu. Hipotezę tę sformułował o. Stanisław Ziemiański, polski jezuita, przedstawiciel filozofii chrześcijańskiej. Przedmiotem badań naukowych przedstawionych w artykule były artykuły i książki, w których autor sformułował hipotezę odnowionego traducjanizmu. Sformułowana hipoteza była także przedmiotem debaty, która jednak nie doprowadziła do żadnego rozstrzygnięcia merytorycznego. Artykuł jest podzielony na dwie części. W pierwszej przedstawiono argumenty, które wspierają hipotezę traducjanizmu. W sposób szczególny skoncentrowano się na omówieniu sposobu wykorzystania nauk przyrodniczych w argumentacji filozoficznej. W drugiej części (...) dokonano krytycznej oceny przedstawionych argumentów. Wykazano za pomocą argumentacji filozoficznej, że koncepcja o. Ziemiańskiego ma charakter naturalistyczny i prowadzi do eliminacji pojęcia duszy. W artykule zastosowano metodę rekonstrukcji treści tekstu z uwzględnieniem analizy logicznej i metodologicznej. Dzięki zastosowanej metodzie uporządkowano materiał badawczy i poddano go ocenie logiczno-metodologicznej. W zakończeniu wskazano, że warto jest rozwijać nawet tak kontrowersyjne koncepcje jak o. Ziemiańskiego, gdyż inspirują one do twórczego myślenia i prowadzą do rozwoju filozofii chrześcijańskiej. Tego typu hipotezy mają wartość, gdyż prowokują do twórczej debaty, której owocem może być modyfikacja niektórych rozstrzygnięć w zakresie antropologii i etyki, podtrzymywanych mocą samej tradycji. Przykład z hipotezą odnowionego traducjanizmu wyraźnie pokazuje, że można swobodnie wrócić do przeszłości i wydobyć z niej coś wartościowego, a następnie przedstawić to w taki sposób, aby przyciągnąć uwagę współczesnego czytelnika, którego cechuje niechęć do zbyt wyrafinowanych spekulacji filozoficznych. (shrink)

This is a review of the book "A Companion to Polish Christian Philosophy of the 20th and 21st Centuries", edited by Piotr S. Mazur, Piotr Duchlinski, Pawel Skrzydlewski. Krakow: Ignatianum University Press, 2020, written by Curtis Hancock.

Part of a series of books devoted to Polish Christian Philosophy in the twentieth century, this latest study introduces the life and work of Piotr Lenartowicz. Lenartowicz, a member of the Jesuit order, held several professional positions, but spent most of his career at the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow. Approaching philosophy from an Aristotelian- Thomistic perspective, his interests ranged over the philosophy of animate nature, the theory of evolution, topics in the philosophy of science, and epistemological issues, especially (...) concerning the nature of human cognition. (shrink)

In _The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus’s Mysticism_, Zeke Mazur offers a radical reconceptualization of Plotinus with reference to Gnostic thought and praxis, chiefly as evidenced by Coptic works among the Nag Hammadi Codices whose Greek Vorlagen were read in Plotinus’s school.

Democracy - hope or illusion? Blooming, failing or declining? Our doubts and hesitation make part of unbending efforts to endorse and explain democracy. Who is right - the custodians of promise or the prophets of decline? The book concentrates on doubts. The author tries to explore «the other side of the moon», emphasizing the role of critical thinking, opposing a main-current optimism. Defending democracy we want to generate hope, but hoping may be a dangerous craft. Protecting our hope we are (...) prone to believe that democracy - even if it is not a full success story - is justified in its nature and out of question. How much do we have to forget to sanction this view? This is, in fact, the main question the book raises. It gives voice to those who never, in their writing on democracy, used a flattering tone. Starting with Greek giants - Plato and Aristotle - up to modern and most recent times, going through a broad field of revealing criticism, leaving us with an unsettling feeling that democracy is rather something to be explained than something to be celebrated. Living in democracy, lamenting its underperformances, we must not overlook a fundamental question - in what part do our disappointments reflect the «art of forgetting», allowing us to cast into oblivion all serious doubts originating in a critical discourse on modernity and democracy? (shrink)

Topic modeling—a text‐mining technique often used to uncover thematic structures in large collections of texts—has been increasingly frequently used in the context of the analysis of scholarly output. In this study, we construct a corpus of 19,488 texts published since 1971 in seven leading journals in the field of bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and we use a machine learning algorithm to identify almost 100 topics representing distinct themes of interest in the field. On the basis of intertopic correlations, we (...) group the content‐based topics into eight clusters, thus providing a novel, fine‐grained intellectual map of bioethics and philosophy of medicine. Moreover, we conduct a number of diachronic analyses, examining how the “prominence” of different topics has changed across time. In this way, we are able to observe the distinct patterns in which bioethics and philosophy of medicine have evolved and changed their focus over the past half a century. (shrink)

Leading authors in their fields present an interdisciplinary panorama of vital themes of the philosophy of language and track their historical origins. This book gives new life to historical ideas and additional depth to current debates.

Contributed papers presented at seminar held at Warsaw University, Poland, 8-9 September, 2000.

All through the XXth century it has been repeated that "there is an exact correspondence, almost coincidence between Euclid's definition of equal ratios and the modern theory of irrational numbers due to Dedekind". Since the idea was presented as early as in 1908 in Thomas Heath's translation of Euclid's Elements as a comment to Book V, def. 5, we call it in the paper Heath's thesis. Heath's thesis finds different justifications so it is accepted yet in different versions. In the (...) paper its historical and mathematical version is reconstructed. We next reconstruct Eudoxos' theory of proportions in an axiomatic fashion. Finally, we show that Heath's thesis both in the historical and mathematical version is false. To this end a counterexample is given; it is based upon a specific interpretation of the uniform distribution theorem. (shrink)

In its attempt to come to grips with the nature of the human mind idealism employs such terms as "pure self," "transcendental apperception," "pure con sciousness" and so on.

Predictive processing (PP) has been repeatedly presented as a unificatory account of perception, action, and cognition. In this paper, we argue that this is premature: As a unifying theory, PP fails to deliver general, simple, homogeneous, and systematic explanations. By examining its current trajectory of development, we conclude that PP remains only loosely connected both to its computational framework and to its hypothetical biological underpinnings, which makes its fundamentals unclear. Instead of offering explanations that refer to the same set of (...) principles, we observe systematic equivocations in PP‐based models, or outright contradictions with its avowed principles. To make matters worse, PP‐based models are seldom empirically validated, and they are frequently offered as mere just‐so stories. The large number of PP‐based models is thus not evidence of theoretical progress in unifying perception, action, and cognition. On the contrary, we maintain that the gap between theory and its biological and computational bases contributes to the arrested development of PP as a unificatory theory. Thus, we urge the defenders of PP to focus on its critical problems instead of offering mere re‐descriptions of known phenomena, and to validate their models against possible alternative explanations that stem from different theoretical assumptions. Otherwise, PP will ultimately fail as a unified theory of cognition. (shrink)

The book by professor Stanisław Kowalczyk, renowned scholar in the field of social philosophy, is, without doubt, one of the most important studies on the idea of freedom. The concept of freedom is as old as mankind. It has many meanings and has been interpreted in many different ways. For instance, we also have the word „liberty," which means „freedom or right" and is synonymous with the word freedom, which means „the condition of being free." The author indicates that (...) in our times the notion of freedom is most frequently used; however, it is often misused or deceptive. Mass media and people of all walks of life talk of liberty; everyone talks of freedom and, for many, it is the highest value. Longing for freedom is rooted in the heart of every human being, for freedom is an existential correlate and the fulfilment of the rational human being. The semantic confusion about the notion of freedom leads to many misuses of the concept. Personalism, as a philosophical concept in which a person stands in the centre of all discussion, serves as a framework for the author's delineation on the concept of freedom. He further states that the appropriate understanding of this value is possible in the context of the personalistic interpretation of a human being. This is the focus of this informative and insightful book. (shrink)

In the first part I focus on the issue of progress, in particular progress in philosophy. Philosophical progress has a special property that it shares with the process of becoming a better person. It is constantly finding yourself “on the way”. This path is not only anchored in the Absolutely Perfect but it conditions and stimulates the reflection towards the truth about the relationship between Him and us. We can assume that the core of this reflection is philosophy. The second (...) part is devoted to the paradoxical nature of the most generally understood memory. I assume that the condition of awareness of a certain content is its outdatedness, that is, its transfer to the sphere of memory. Memory is a constantly updated and constantly re-ordered picture of everything that the subject has ever relegated from being, so that it can be replaced by something else. The foundation of this order is a certain axiology. In the third part I show how the sketched concept of memory is used to describe the mechanism of the evolution of philosophical thought. The “on the way” philosophy would consist of two constantly repeated activities: on reconstructing what is to be denied, and thus on the recognition of the previous philosophical achievements in its totality, and on its negation. This denial would concern the whole of this achievement as an axiologically reconstructed unity. The new system is only realized as a series of consequences of the negation of the current state. The vast majority of philosophical reflection focuses on the constitution of this current state, its supposed unity. In the short part of the fourth, I draw up prospects for further deliberations. (shrink)