Kuala Lumpur is a diverse city representing many different religions and nationalities. Recent government policy has actively promoted unity and cohesion throughout the city; and the country of Malaysia, with the implementation of a programme called 1Malaysia. In this book, the authors investigate the aims of this programme – predominantly to unify the Malaysian society – and how these objectives resonate in the daily spatial practices of the city’s residents. -/- This book argues that elements of urban infrastructure could work (...) as an essential mediator ‘beyond community’, allowing inclusive social structures to be built, despite cultural and religious tensions existing within the city. It builds on the premise of an empirical study which explores the ways in which different communities use the same spaces, supported through the implementation of a theoretical framework which looks at both Western and Islamic conceptualisations of the notion of community. Through the analysis of Kuala Lumpur, this book contributes towards the creation of more inclusive places in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious communities across the world. (shrink)

Advances in Pig Welfare analyses current topical issues in the key areas of pig welfare assessment and improvement. With coverage of both recent developments and reviews of historical welfare issues, the volume provides a comprehensive survey of the field. The book is divided into two sections. Part I opens with an overview of main welfare challenges in commercial pig production systems and then reviews pig welfare hot spots from birth to slaughter. Part II highlights emerging topics in pig welfare, such (...) as pain and health assessment, early socialisation and environmental enrichment, pig-human interactions, breeding for welfare, positive pig welfare and pigs as laboratory animals. This book is an essential part of the wider ranging series Advances in Farm Animal Welfare, with coverage of cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry. With its expert editor and international team of contributors, Advances in Pig Welfare is a key reference tool for welfare research scientists and students, veterinarians involved in welfare assessment, and indeed anyone with a professional interest in the welfare of pigs. (shrink)

The confusion/non-consequential thinking explanation proposed by Newstead, Girotto, and Legrenzi (1995) for poor performance on Wason's THOG problem (a hypothetico-deductive reasoning task) was examined in three experiments with 300 participants. In general, as the cognitive complexity of the problem and the possibility of non-consequential thinking were reduced, correct performance increased. Significant but weak facilitation (33-40% correct) was found in Experiment 1 for THOG classification instructions that did not include the indeterminate response option. Substantial facilitation (up to 75% correct) was obtained (...) in Experiment 2 with O'Brien et al.'s (1990) one-other-THOG classification instruction. In Experiment 3, a revised version of O'Brien et al.'s pre-test problem format also led to substantial facilitation, even with the use of the standard three-choice THOG classification instruction. These findings are discussed in terms of Newstead et al.'s theoretical proposal and possible attentional factors. (shrink)

The First International Workshop brings together researchers from the theoretical ends of the logic programming and artificial intelligence communities to discuss their mutual interests. Logic programming deals with the use of models of mathematical logic as a way of programming computers, where theoretical AI deals with abstract issues in modeling and representing human knowledge and beliefs. One common ground is nonmonotonic reasoning, a family of logics that includes room for the kinds of variations that can be found in human reasoning. (...) Topics covered: Stable Semantics. Default Logic. AutoEpistemic Logic. Truth Maintenance Systems. Implementation Issues. Diagnosis. Applications. Inheritance Reasoning. Logics of Belief. Inconsistency and Non-Monotonicity. (shrink)

La formule " plénitude ontologique du vide " signifie que le vide n'est pas un néant, un rien ou une absence définitive mais, au contraire, l'affirmation en son autosuffisance de la présence à l'état pur. Le vide est plein de la présence pure, mieux il s'identifie à elle. De l'atomisme antique à la révolution scientifique en passant par la Renaissance, de Démocrite à Newton, d'Aristote à Descartes en tant que ses plus éminents adversaires, le vide n'a cessé de hanter tant (...) le champ de la métaphysique que celui de la science, celui de l'expérience comme celui de l'imaginaire. Après avoir tenté de l'expulser de la physique au moyen de la notion d'éther, la cosmologie contemporaine redécouvre le rôle essentiel du vide dans le devenir et peut-être l'origine de l'univers. Aujourd'hui, c'est au tour de la métaphysique de soupeser à nouveaux frais le poids du vide dans le cadre de la problématique qui lui est propre. Après un siècle de dépassement, de déconstruction et autre célébration de la fin de la métaphysique, l'intention est de démontrer ici que, loin d'être oublieuse de la question de l'être, elle a pensé celle-ci avec une portée et une acuité sans égales. (shrink)

Referring to basic Weberian notions of rationalization and secularization, I try to find a more accurate sense of the term “secularization”, intending to describe adequately the position of religion in modernity. The result of this query is—or at least should be—a new, original conceptualization of religion as one of finite provinces of meaning within one paramount reality of the life-world, as defined by Alfred Schutz. I proceed by exposing a well known, major oversimplification of the Weberian concept of secularization, very (...) well outlined in Peter Berger’s The sacred canopy, in order to point to the genuine, much more differentiated position of Max Weber in this matter (especially from the period of Foundations of social economic and Economy and society), and, consequently, to return to the roots of Berger’s thought: phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz, an attempt to assure the philosophical foundations of Weber’s sociological theory. At a closer glimpse, transformation of religion in the modern process of rationalization does not consist—according to Weber—in eliminating religion and thus depriving society of the religious source of meaning, but in parallel emancipation of many different domains of rationality, including religion itself. Using Schutz’s analysis of the social world as a complex structure of many different final provinces of meaning, I describe religion as such a province and show what does the process of rationalization of this province consist and what it should consist in: a complex, ongoing exchange of cognitive relevances and contents, combined with growing autonomy of many different sub-worlds. Schutz’s theory of symbol, rooted in Edmund Husserl’s description of constitution of complex objects in mono- and polythetic acts of consciousness, moves the analysis to the epistemological level, pointing to a chance of intensifying our cognitive relation to reality through increasing interpenetration of various sub-universes of meaning. (shrink)

In the former socialist countries the relation of philosophy to social reality, as shaped by the political interests of the State, must be considered for each particular case with a view to the historical dynamics of its own development. The Polish case is not typical in this regard -- it was determined by the failure of forced sovietization at the institutional, cultural level and the maintenance of Poland's traditional contacts with Western European culture. In this regard Polish universities played an (...) important role since they preserved 'normal' structures of academic activity. Philosophy in Poland has been marked by three currents which managed to rebuff the advances of Marxism. Best known among them is the Lwów-Warsaw school of logic and analytic philosophy. Its contribution is especially important in the methodology of philosophical inquiry and the style of responsible philosophical discourse. Though not a bed of political opposition the school's members mounted a 'spiritual opposition' to Marxism, especially during the Solidarity period. Catholic philosophy, as represented by the Catholic University of Lublin, has been and remains a completely independent force in Eastern and Central Europe. Doctrinally, Catholic philosophy in Poland has been divided between a more traditional, dated Thomism and the more progressive circles in Cracow where Western European philosophy, especially phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics, has been influential. The third major current, centered in Cracow, is the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden, whose influence is manifest in a style of philosophizing that has attracted professional philosophers as well as committed intellectuals from different disciplines. Against this diversified background Marxism had to prove its mettle, a requirement that explains the unique internal differentiation and pluralism within Polish Marxist philosophy. The decisive factors in its development were its rejection of Soviet Marxism-Leninism and the opening to Western Marxism. The often remarked 'revisionist' character of Polish Marxism consists in the recognition by its most talented representatives of the fundamental incompatibility between Marxism as the ideological legitimation of the Communist state and as a philosophy subject to rational criteria. In effect, Polish Marxists thought the theory through to its end, and in this sense brought to light its inherently unstable nature: to be a philosophy it would have to cease to be Marxist, to be Marxist means having to pander to ideology. The confrontation of the diverse currents in Polish philosophy contributed to an unfortunate result: for political reasons non-Marxists steered clear of social philosophical questions, while official Marxism, which suppressed the 'revisionist' trend, obfuscated the relation between philosophy and social reality. Today philosophy in Poland has the urgent task to contribute to the reconstruction of a social rationality combining a critical consciousness with moral elements of commitment and responsibility. (shrink)

Michael A. Petersa and Fazal Rizvib aBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China; bMelbourne University, Melbourne, Australia Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘no...

Assuming the importance of Alfred Schutz’s “protosociology” in social theory as a given, the paper tries to explore its philosophical core, treating Schutz’s sociophenomenology as an answer to the most fundamental questions of phenomenology, such as evidence and phenomenological reduction. It analyses Schutz’s point of departure – the problematization of Max Weber’s concept of the meaning of social action and its deepening by means of Henri Bergson’s and Edmund Husserl’s notion of time – and tries to unravel the double structure (...) of consciousness, revealing increasingly its complex temporal character. Brentano’s and Husserl’s double intentionality, seeming to offer a kind of “decent realism” in modern philosophical context, in Schutz turns out to be marked by the profound pastness of reflexive consciousness, reaching the primary stream experience only by means of primary and secondary acts of remembrance, re-effectuated intersubjectively in acts of phantasying about future, thus constituting the very core of meaning, with its reference to external objects. It appears that only analysing this mode of phantasying in reference to its motives that we can solve the conundrum of realism in its modern shape. (shrink)

The cognitive purpose of the research presented in the article is to identify the propensity for pro-social and altruistic behavior among first-year military students in three simulated situations of need for help to other people. It raised the question contained in the main research problem: to what extent do military students at universities tend to behave in a pro-social and altruistic way in situations that pose a threat to the other people’s life and health, and what is the relationship between (...) these behaviors and socialization in the civil environment? At the outset, the hypothesis was adopted that the candidates for professional soldiers show a higher propensity for this type of behavior. For its verification, the population of the first-year military students during their basic training was assumed as a research area. The study covered 246 people selected randomly from among military students in the first year of studies of the command profile of all military specialties and the medical profile. The selection of the research sample based on first-year students during the basic training aimed to identify the impact of environmental factors on the tendency to altruistic and pro-social behavior in two different groups of candidates for professional soldiers. (shrink)

The paper focuses on metaphorical representation of military activities of the US-led international coalition and of ISIL which are construed on the basis of systematic metaphors drawn from the com...

According to The Consensus Gentium Argument from the premise: “Everyone believes that God exists” one can conclude that God does exist. In my paper I analyze two ways of defending the claim that somebody’s belief in God is a prima facie reason to believe. Kelly takes the fact of the commonness of the belief in God as a datum to explain and argues that the best explanation has to indicate the truthfulness of the theistic belief. Trinkaus Zagzebski grounds her defence (...) on rationality of epistemic trust in others. In the paper I argue that the second line of reasoning is more promising and I propose its improved version. (shrink)

Jaśkowski’s discussive logic D2 was formulated with the help of the modal logic S5 as follows (see [7, 8]): \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${A \in {D_{2}}}$$\end{document} iff \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\ulcorner\diamond{{A}^{\bullet}}\urcorner \in {\rm S}5}$$\end{document}, where (–)• is a translation of discussive formulae from Ford into the modal language. We say that a modal logic L defines D2 iff \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${{\rm D}_{2} = (...) \{A \in {\rm For^{\rm d}} : \ulcorner\diamond{{A}^{\bullet}}\urcorner \in {\it L}\}}$$\end{document}. In [14] and [10] were respectively presented the weakest normal and the weakest regular logic which (†): have the same theses beginning with ‘\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\diamond}$$\end{document}’ as S5. Of course, all logics fulfilling the above condition, define D2. In [10] it was prowed that in the cases of logics closed under congruence the following holds: defining D2 is equivalent to having the property (†). In this paper we show that this equivalence holds also for all modal logics which are closed under replacement of tautological equivalents (rte-logics).We give a general method which, for any class of modal logics determined by a set of joint axioms and rules, generates in the given class the weakest logic having the property (†). Thus, for the class of all modal logics we obtain the weakest modal logic which owns this property. On the other hand, applying the method to various classes of modal logics: rte-logics, congruential, monotonic, regular and normal, we obtain the weakest in a given class logic defining D2. (shrink)

Can we see the expressiveness of other people's gestures, hear the intentions in their voice, see the emotions in their posture? Traditional theories of social cognition still say we cannot because intentions and emotions for them are hidden away inside and we do not have direct access to them. Enactive theories still have no idea because they have so far mainly focused on perception of our physical world. We surmise, however, that the latter hold promise since, in trying to understand (...) cognition, enactive theory focuses on the embodied engagements of a cognizer with his world. In this paper, we attempt an answer for the question What is social perception in an enactive account? In enaction, perception is conceived as a skill, crucially involving action, an ability to work successfully within the set of regularities, or contingencies that characterize a given domain. If this is the case, then social perception should be a social skill. Having thus transformed the question of what social perception is into that of what social skill is, we examine the concept of social contingencies and the manner in which social skills structure—both constrain and empower— social interaction. Some of the implications of our account for how social and physical perception differ, the role of embodiment in social interaction and the distinction between our approach and other social contingency theories are also addressed. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the work of Leopold Blaustein — philosopher and psychologist, who studied under Kazimierz Twardowski in Lvov and under Husserl in Freiburg im Breisgau. In his short academic career Blaustein developed an original philosophy that drew upon both phenomenology and Twardowski’s analytical approach. One of his main publications concerns Husserl’s early theory of intentional act and object, introduced in Logische Untersuchungen. In the first part of the article I briefly present Blaustein’s biography and (...) some general features of his philosophy. The second part provides an overview of Blaustein’s dissertation concerning Husserl’s early phenomenology. In the third and final part I summarize Blaustein’s research, including the critical remarks of Roman Ingarden. (shrink)

Local hidden-variable model of singlet-state correlations discussed in Czachor (Acta Phys Polon A 139:70, 2021a) is shown to be a particular case of an infinite hierarchy of local hidden-variable models based on an infinite hierarchy of calculi. Violation of Bell-type inequalities can be interpreted as a ‘confusion of languages’ problem, a result of mixing different but neighboring levels of the hierarchy. Mixing of non-neighboring levels results in violations beyond the Tsirelson bounds.

Bell’s theorem cannot be proved if complementary measurements have to be represented by random variables which cannot be added or multiplied. One such case occurs if their domains are not identical. The case more directly related to the Einstein–Rosen–Podolsky argument occurs if there exists an ‘element of reality’ but nevertheless addition of complementary results is impossible because they are represented by elements from different arithmetics. A naive mixing of arithmetics leads to contradictions at a much more elementary level than the (...) Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality. (shrink)

The history of political transformation in Poland is an uninterrupted process of forming identifications along party lines, as well as of the political milieus’ searching, for a response to the question regarding the location of their own subjective space within the wider political sphere. It is worthwhile, when we discuss this, to ask whether the building up of a party’s identity is dictated by ideological and programmatic reasons or whether it is an incidental matter. The values and beliefs concealed in (...) the 80s, when the opposition belonged to the underground, have been permanently inscribed into the Polish political landscape. A group of doctrines which served as a component in the build-up of party identity may be perceived. The religious and national values, as well as the historical and cultural issues, which emerged into the daylight, may be treated as the embryo of certain ideas, which in time, as a result of public debates, have become fundamental determinants of many political parties. (shrink)

The article presents an epistemological and partially methodological analysis of cognitive science as a scientific discipline, created as a result of the transformations that took place in the philosophical and psychological concepts of the mind and cognition, which were carried out with the aid of tools and methods of modelling as well as through simulating human cognitive processes and consciousness. In order to describe this interdisciplinary science, and its positions, as well as the stages and directions of its development, it (...) makes use of the epistemological model formulated by Michel Foucault, in which he draws attention to social, ideological and technological conditions of scientific knowledge. The opinions of the leading creators and critics of cognitive science, such as George A. Miller, Howard Gardner, Margaret Boden and José Luis Bermúdez are referenced to and analyzed with the use of this model. The article shows the epistemologically and methodologically divergent status of cognitive science, as well as its cognitive and institutional conditions and challenges, which stand before it after half a century of intensive development. (shrink)

Expert knowledge - a concept associated with Ryle’s distinction of knowledgethat and knowledge-how - functions in distinct areas of knowledge and social expertise. Consisting of both propositional and procedural knowledge, expertise is performative in its essence. It depends not only on expert’s experience and cognitive competences, but also on his or her social and institutional position. The paper considers the role of heuristic and intuitional abilities, including particular experts’ cognitive biases, as the vital and indispensable part of expertise. On the (...) basis of selected managerial and juridical examples it analyzes the epistemological issues: the autonomy versus dependence of expert knowledge as well as the influence of social-cognitive circumstances on expertise. (shrink)

The article discusses a response to Schellenberg’s atheistic ‘hiddenness argument’ that neither objects to its premises nor formulates a new inductive argument in favour of the existence of God. According to the proposed response, it is sufficient for the task of defending theism to reverse Schellenberg’s reasoning and present a theistic meta-argument that takes as its assumption the fact that there are resistant believers in the world. The paper defends the claim that both arguments have similar persuasive power. However, because (...) of their contradictory conclusions both cannot be sound. It is argued that the way to decide the dilemma is to compare the demographics of theism and atheism and to compare accommodation strategies of both arguments. The first comparison favours theism, but it does not exclude the possibility that quantitative proportions between theists and atheists can change in the future. The second comparison refers to accommodation strategies of proponents of A-argument who have to give an account of how it is possible that in an atheistic world there exist resistant believers and of proponents of T-argument who have to give an account of how it is possible that in the world governed by an all-powerful and all-loving God there exist nonresistant nonbelievers. The conclusion of the considerations is the claim that the theistic accommodation strategy compares favourably to the atheistic one. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reconstruct Bocheński’s method of philosophical analysis as well as to clarify the purpose of that method and its basic elements. In the second part of the paper I will compare Bocheński’s method with the methods of modern applied ontology.

In this paper we present a comparison of certain inconsistencyadaptive logics and Jaśkowski’s logic.

In the article I discuss functionalist interpretations of Husserlian phenomenology. The first one was coined in the discussion between Hubert Dreyfus and Ronald McIntyre. They argue that Husserl’s phenomenology shares similarities with computational functionalism, and the key similarity is between the concept of noema and the concept of mental representation. I show the weaknesses of that reading and argue that there is another available functionalist reading of Husserlian phenomenology. I propose to shift perspective and approach the relation between phenomenology and (...) functionalism from a methodological perspective, specifically taking into account the functionalist explanatory strategy called functional analysis. I discuss the notion of function in Husserl’s works and Husserl’s idea of functional phenomenology. The key argument I develop is that in functional phenomenology we can find an explanatory strategy which is analogous to the strategy of functional decomposition used in functional analysis. I conclude that the proposed functionalist reading of phenomenology opens a new approach to the integration of phenomenology with cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Can we assume, then, that more than the doctrine of faith, it was this lived experience which placed the Christians ever anew before this difficult question: Of what use are history and politics to Christianity? Can we not make do without them? Tertullian’s famous question – “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” – began a centuries-old dispute about the relation between theology and philosophy, between faith and reason, which (...) became a principle axis of tension between Christianity and the Hellenistic legacy. But Tertullian’s question can also be understood as pertaining to the problem of Christianity’s relation to history and politics: What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Agora with the Temple, the polis with the Church? Thus the tension between Christianity and the classical world takes on yet another dimension. It is the conflict of faith and eternity with history and politics, of the faithful pilgrim member of the People of God with the loyal citizen of a political community. Christianity attempted to resolve this conflict by reformulating the fundamental concepts of classical politics and philosophy, but the main doubts still remained, and led to new tensions and currents within Christianity itself. (shrink)

In my paper I review the main strategies adopted by two leading schools in cognitive science, symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) and connectionism, in modeling time-dependent phenomena such as learning. In particular, I briefly mention shortcomings of non-monotonic logic approach that dominates symbolic AI. I also discuss the problems that beset the recurrent networks approach advocated by connectionists (e.g., S. Grossberg) and philosophers (e.g., P. Churchland), who focus their attention on oscillatory behavior of such networks. I point out that neither approach (...) adequately captures essential features of the dynamics of human temporal awareness. Finally, I develop certain ideas borrowed from neurophysiologists (e.g., W. Freeman) and system theorists and describe the brain-mind, the entity that is capable of producing temporal awareness, as a self-organizing system that exhibits chaotic dynamics and generates a dynamic structure that resembles the chaotic hierarchy o Rossler. (shrink)

One of the best known approaches to the logic of agency are the ‘stit’ logics. Often, it is not the actions of an individual agent that bring about a certain outcome but the joint actions of a set of agents, collectively. Collective agency has received comparatively little attention in ‘stit’. The paper maps out several different forms, several different senses in which a particular set of agents, collectively, can be said to bring about a certain outcome, and examines how these (...) forms can be expressed in ‘stit’ and stit-like logics. The outcome that is brought about may be unintentional, and perhaps even accidental; the account deliberately ignores aspects such as joint intention, communication between agents, awareness of other agents’ intentions and capabilities, even the awareness of another agent’s existence. The aim is to investigate what can be said about collective agency when all such considerations are ignored, besides mere consequences of joint actions. The account will be related to the ‘strictly stit’ of Belnap and Perloff, 25–48 1993) and their suggestions concerning ‘inessential members’ and ‘mere bystanders’. We will adjust some of those conjectures and distinguish further between ‘potentially contributing bystanders’ and ‘impotent bystanders’. (shrink)

Works by Henryk Sienkiewicz, a Polish writer and the winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize for Literature, were subjected to verification by the DDR’s censorship apparatus several times. Censors considered his novellas which discussed 19th-century social issues as desirable and worth promoting among East German readers. His novel Krzyżacy, which was set in the Middle Ages, was accepted eagerly both by publishing houses and the censorship office as it enabled national socialism in Germany to be viewed in critical terms, as (...) the DDR distanced itself from the system. Reviewers did, however, find a major ideological threat for young readers in East Germany in a young adult novel entitled W pustyni i w puszczy, and for that reason it was withdrawn from the publishing procedure. (shrink)

In this paper I present the Ingardenian distinction between inseparability and dependence. My considerations are both historical and systematic. The historical part of the paper accomplishes two goals. First, I show that in the Brentanian tradition the problem of existential conditioning was entangled into parts—whole theories. The best examples of such an approach are Kazimierz Twardowski’s theory of the object and Edmund Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes. Second, I exhibit the context within which Ingarden distinguished inseparability and dependence. Moreover, (...) Ingarden’s motivations are presented: the problem of understanding the Husserlian concept of “immanent transcendence,” the issue of the existence of purely intentional objects, and finally the problem of the relationship between individual objects and ideas. The systematic part deals with the ambiguity of Ingarden’s definition of inseparability. I seek to improve this definition by reference to the distinction between absolute and summative wholes. I also present some divisions of inseparability and dependence and investigate whether these types of existential conditioning are reflexive, symmetric, or transitive. (shrink)

This article discusses passive and active aspects of consciousness as two equally justified roots of life experiencing the world. The passive domain involves the synthesis of internal time, association, habituality, bodily aspects, etc. The active domain includes strictly cognitive competences of consciousness: thinking, judging, etc. What has been actively constituted becomes passive as the basic level for higher form of understanding. The two domains interweave, influence each other, complement each other, and also remain in a certain tension and discrepancy. In (...) the broader perspective of the system of consciousness and its various layers, the passive-active differentiation must be treated functionally, and not as hierarchically arranged or constituted by separable concepts. It reflects the dynamics of the consciousness system at all its levels, and its meaning oscillates between the opposite and the overlapping. --------------------- Received: 26/01/2022. Reviewed: 28/03/2022. Accepted: 12/05/2022. (shrink)

Jaśkowski’s discussive logic D2 was formulated with the help of the modal logic S5 as follows (see [7, 8]): \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${A \in {D_{2}}}$$\end{document} iff \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\ulcorner\diamond{{A}^{\bullet}}\urcorner \in {\rm S}5}$$\end{document}, where (–)• is a translation of discussive formulae from Ford into the modal language. We say that a modal logic L defines D2 iff \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${{\rm D}_{2} = (...) \{A \in {\rm For^{\rm d}} : \ulcorner\diamond{{A}^{\bullet}}\urcorner \in {\it L}\}}$$\end{document}. In [14] and [10] were respectively presented the weakest normal and the weakest regular logic which (†): have the same theses beginning with ‘\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\diamond}$$\end{document}’ as S5. Of course, all logics fulfilling the above condition, define D2. In [10] it was prowed that in the cases of logics closed under congruence the following holds: defining D2 is equivalent to having the property (†). In this paper we show that this equivalence holds also for all modal logics which are closed under replacement of tautological equivalents (rte-logics).We give a general method which, for any class of modal logics determined by a set of joint axioms and rules, generates in the given class the weakest logic having the property (†). Thus, for the class of all modal logics we obtain the weakest modal logic which owns this property. On the other hand, applying the method to various classes of modal logics: rte-logics, congruential, monotonic, regular and normal, we obtain the weakest in a given class logic defining D2. (shrink)

The study aims to explain the meaning and function of the concept of topicality (Aktualität) in Benjamin’s philosophy of history and to show that it can present a relevant alternative to contemporary historiography. In times when society is improving the accuracy of its grasp of history and accumulating ever more data about it, Benjamin’s philosophy is valuable by concerning itself primarily with the problem of presentation (Darstellung) of the topicality of particular historical phenomena. Thanks to a better understanding of the (...) concept of topicality, the reader will be able to see why Benjamin thought that to respond to what is “actual” in the sense of “topical” or “timely” in history is more important than specifying or accumulating data about it. However, in the presentation of a single topical historical object the whole of history is monadologically expressed: Benjamin’s focus on particular, unique phenomena didn’t imply a resignation vis-à-vis the task of expression of the whole. (shrink)

The author offers a new look at one of the most influential books in the history of philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". He presents the Tractatus as expressing the intellectual anxietes of its modernist epoch. The most intruiging but usually unanswered question concerning the Tractatus is why Wittgenstein had to think that only propositions of natural science have meaning. The author reviews the most popular interpretations of the Tractatus and comes to the conclusion that the early Wittgenstein was an ethical (...) subjectivist. With this insight, he solves the tension between Tractarian theses that influenced neopositivism and its mystical part. (shrink)