Tomasz Ignacy Szpot Dunin SJ w swoim dziele poświęconym historii Chin nie ominął postaw znaczących chińskich dowódców w okresie przełomu historycznego jakim był upadek dynastii Ming i jej zastąpienie przez mandżurską dynastię Qing. Jednym z nich był Wu Sangui, który początkowo wspierał Mingów w walce z zewnętrznymi i wewnętrznymi wrogami, by w kluczowym momencie przyczynić się do powodzenia najazdu mandżurskiego, a po niemal trzech dekadach działania pod zwierzchnością nowej dynastii wypowiedzieć jej posłuszeństwo i stanąć na czele tzw. Rebelii Trzech Lenników. (...) Sprawa ta była znana w Europie i stała się nawet przedmiotem zainteresowania literackiego w XVIII w. Szpot Dunin nie poddaje się w swoim opisie skrajnym tendencjom, umiejętnie rozważa okoliczności decyzji i przedstawia zniuansowany, ale jednocześnie wyrazisty obraz postaci Wu Sangui, jego zamiarów i niepowodzeń. (shrink)

The article presents a collection of seventeen previously unpublished inscriptions on stone and small objects from Bithynia. The majority of them belong to the middle Byzantine period and comes from the area of Nikaia and Nikomedeia. First of all, the inscription from a boundary stone of a monastery of Theotokos near Niketiaton is discussed, in which the bridge of a certain Eustathios and the monastery of Johannes Kranbas are mentioned. The building inscription of a refectory attests to the existence of (...) a splendid monastic complex near Kanlıçay, to the east of the Sangarios River. The inscription from a column offered by Leon lists several saints. In addition to clerics and monks, the funerary inscriptions also mention one Basil who came from the Diocese of Ikonion. This is followed by an epigraphical attestation of the koinonikon σῶμα Χριστοῦ (an Easter hymn), a fragment of an inscription mentioning the city of Joannina, a reliquary cross of Saint Damian, and two processional or blessing crosses. A clay seal with the monogram probably of a certain Photios closes the collection. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty has serious consequences for human lives, social values, and economy. The main aim of the study was to explore a model of relations between personal and cultural variables and academic dishonesty. The participants in the study were N = 2,586 individuals from nine countries (Pakistan, Israel, Italy, India, the USA, Peru, Romania, Ghana, and Poland). The authors administered the Academic Dishonesty Scale to measure academic dishonesty, the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale to measure distress, the Almost Perfect Scale – (...) Revised to measure perfectionism, the Brief Self-Control Scale to measure self-control, and the Singelis Scale to measure independent self-construal. The results showed that the theoretical model was well fitted to the dataset in six countries: Pakistan, the United States, Romania, Ghana, Israel, and Poland. However, it was not well fitted in Italy, India, and Peru. Our results also showed that perfectionism significantly predicted academic dishonesty, but not in all countries. Self-control significantly predicted cheating, falsification, and plagiarism in the USA. Moreover, we found that distress was related to cheating o0nly in Ghana. Finally, independent self-construal predicted academic dishonesty. Our findings provide a cross-cultural contribution to the debate on academic dishonesty by highlighting its significant predictors and may inform interventions aimed at eliminating it. Our results can be used in preventing and curbing academic dishonesty. Knowledge on cross-cultural differences can be useful in international education for example, as an indicator accepting or relaxing attitude toward academic dishonesty in students from different countries. (shrink)

The contemporary secularism is found to be a philosophy of life “as if there were no God” or a kind of ideology, which demands an absolute autonomy of human being to shape his destination. In the philosophy of Descartes at least three sources of secularism could be found: his theory of cognition which resulted in developing other than the classical concept of truth and rationality; his metaphysics; his arguments for the existence of God and in his concept of the nature (...) of God. Karl Marx’s criticism of religion was a next powerful factor on the advance of secularism. Marx makes the charge against the religion that it acts to reinforce the break down the conscience of man living in the modern society, into a public and a private realm. The widest criticism of religion was made by Marx in: Acontribution to the Hegel’s criticism on the philosophy of law”. Especially its first seven paragraph, are particularly important in view of the advance of secularism. F. Nietzsche undermines metaphysics by showing that knowledge of a non-empirical world is cognitively superfluous. He makes clear that he has moved beyond the assumption that there might be a metaphysical world to a positing of the empirical world as the only one. Nietzsche considers that the notion of God is inimical to human nature and human life. Is this really so in reality? Is Nietzsche’s consideration about God and religion in any way applicable to our own age? (shrink)

Die ewige Wiederkehr gehört zu den meist unklaren Fragen in der Philosophie von Friedrich Nietzsche. Die Idee der ewigen Wiederkunft wird von mir als ein integraler Teil seiner Philosophie angesehen, da meines Erachtens ist das die grundsätzliche Kategorie, die das Ganze jener Philosophie begreifen laßt. Am Beispiel konkreter Interpretationen werden dann genannt und kritisch betrachtet drei Interpretationsweisen der Idee der ewigen Wiederkehr, die sich in der Geschichte der Rezeption der Philosophie Nietzsches finden lassen: die ewige Wiederkehr im stoischen Sinne als (...) Wiederkehr der "identischen Fälle, die ewige Wiederkunft im ethischen Sinne als Postulat der Wirkung und die ewige Wiederkunft im dionysischen Sinne - als Prinzip und Charakteristik des Werdens. Ich spreche für die "dionysische" Interpretation aus, da sie mit den Voraussetzungen und mit der ursprünglichen Fassung der Philosophie von F. Nietzsche am meisten übereinstimmt. (shrink)

As formulated by Duncan Pritchard and John McDowell, epistemological disjunctivism is the claim that perceptual experience can provide the subject with epistemic justification that is reflectively accessible and externally grounded at the same time. Pritchard calls this thesis ‘the holy grail of epistemology’, since it reconciles two traditionally rival theories of justification, namely epistemic internalism and epistemic externalism. The main objection against epistemological disjunctivism thus understood is that it does not do justice to the well-known internalist intuitions expressed in The (...) New Evil Demon and Brain-in-a-Vat scenarios. I defend epistemological disjunctivism from this objection by indicating that those who apply to such scenarios commit themselves to implausible views in the philosophy of mind. I conclude that epistemological disjunctivism accurately expresses the epistemological attitude of a non-reductive materialist regarding the body-mind problem. (shrink)

L'article analyse l'interprétation deconstructive de la pensée de F. Nietzsche, qui a été presentée par Sarah Kofman sous l'influence de Jacques Derrida et à la base de sa critique de la tradition logocentrique. Kofman discerne deux périodes dans l'evolution de la philosophie de Nietzsche. Dans la premier Nietzsche part de la notion de la métaphore, qui detruit la possibilité du langage rationelle et objectif, mais qui se rapport symboliquement à l'essence dionysiaque du monde. Dans la seconde Nietzsche développe la notion (...) de l'interprétation: la volonté de puissance n'est que l'interprétation, "la hypothèse interprétative" qui fonde la possibilité de l'interprétation en général. À la fin de l'article j'analyse les difficultés concernant l'interprétation presentée par Kofman. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that inferentialist approach to meaning does not, by itself, show that meaning is normative in a prescriptive sense, and that the constitutive rules argument is especially troubling for this position. To show that, we present the proto-inferentialist theory developed by Ajdukiewicz and claim that despite the differences between his theory and contemporary inferentialism rules of language in both theories function more like classificatory devices than prescriptions. Inferentialists can respond by claiming that in their theory meaning (...) is essentially social and hence normative, but we claim that then semantic normativity becomes derivative of social normativity. (shrink)

Brain activity determines which relations between objects in the environment are perceived as differences and similarities in colour, smell, sound, etc. According to selectionism, brain activity does not create those relations; it only selects which of them are perceptually available to the subject on a given occasion. In effect, selectionism entails that perceptual experience is diaphanous, i.e. that sameness and difference in the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by sameness and difference in the perceived items. It has been argued (...) that diaphaneity is undermined by phenomenological considerations and empirical evidence. This paper considers five prominent arguments of this sort and shows that none of them succeeds. (shrink)

Dowód pierwszej tezy Gorgiasza jest dedukcyjnym wnioskowaniem nie wprost, skon-struowanym przez wielokrotne użycie schematu modus tollens. Te z jego przesłanek, które przyjęte są bez dowodów, są łudząco podobne do niektórych prawd logicznych lub analitycznych. Gdyby rzeczywiście nimi były, w dowodzie musiałyby pojawić się sprzeczności. W czasach Gorgiasza dowód mógł uchodzić za poprawny; możliwość jasnego wskazania i opisania jego defektów poja-wiła się dopiero z wynalezieniem logiki formalnej. Gorgiasz mógł ogłosić swą tezę serio –jako tezę skrajnego nihilizmu metafizycznego –nie obawiając się kompromitacji. (...) Jeżeli dowód jest sofizma-tem, to wśród sofizmatów jest arcydziełem, najwybitniejszym osiągnięciem sofistów w tej dziedzi-nie. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend a novel, multidimensional account of representational unification, which we distinguish from integration. The dimensions of unity are simplicity, generality and scope, non-monstrosity, and systematization. In our account, unification is a graded property. The account is used to investigate the issue of how research traditions contribute to representational unification, focusing on embodied cognition in cognitive science. Embodied cognition contributes to unification even if it fails to offer a grand unification of cognitive science. The study of this (...) failure shows that unification, contrary to what defenders of mechanistic explanation claim, is an important mechanistic virtue of research traditions. (shrink)

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition , brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in (...) the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system. (shrink)

This paper centers around the notion that internal, mental representations are grounded in structural similarity, i.e., that they are so-called S-representations. We show how S-representations may be causally relevant and argue that they are distinct from mere detectors. First, using the neomechanist theory of explanation and the interventionist account of causal relevance, we provide a precise interpretation of the claim that in S-representations, structural similarity serves as a “fuel of success”, i.e., a relation that is exploitable for the representation using (...) system. Then, we discuss crucial differences between S-representations and indicators or detectors, showing that—contrary to claims made in the literature—there is an important theoretical distinction to be drawn between the two. (shrink)

In the past centuries Maṇḍana Miśra was regarded as the most prominent figure of the advaita school of philosophy, to the extent that the whole system of advaita was frequently described by his name as ‘maṇḍana-matam’ (‘the view of Maṇḍana’). Nowadays advaita is almost exclusively associated, if not identified, with the name of Maṇḍana’s contemporary Śaṅkara. Both thinkers philosophizing along advaita lines, their views on the ultimate being, the highest bliss, ignorance etc. were substantially different. The present paper is intended (...) as a bird’s eye view on the whole of Maṇḍana’s legacy, including his Sphoṭasiddhi, being his contribution to the grammatical tradi­tion of Bhartṛhari. It is also aimed at finding the reason why in the hierarchy of eminent advaita thinkers Maṇḍana was eventually supplanted by Śaṅkara and his œuvre unacknowledged. (shrink)

Modernity and What Has Been Lost comes out of a conference held at the Jagiellonian University in Krakw̤, Poland, on June 4-5, 2009 that sought to identify Leo Strauss's intellectual background in re: the repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation). The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, or (...) abhorrent to those who love the search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen "the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns," and refers to the esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries. Strauss binds the concept of natural right with the question of maintenance of conditions for philosophizing, and it probably seems to him that such defense of philosophy is the highest task in our times. However, one must be well aware that philosophizing always means a perilous way of life. Indeed, it may be destructive of the city (polis) itself as far as the city exists due to some crucial beliefs the philosopher might put in doubt. Reflecting on those issues, Strauss engaged in several highly important debates with his contemporaries, in an open way with, e.g., Carl Schmitt, Karl Lw̲ith and Alexandre Kojv̈e, and more tacitly with Martin Heidegger"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The title of this article refers to one of the best-known essays written by David Hume, That Politics may be reduced to a Science. Hume assumed that politics was a science because it admitted of some general truths, which could not be varied by human beings. He adopted a similar stance, albeit indirectly, in the case of economics, discovering several general truths concerning the origins of wealth, money and international trade. At times, however, he was far from being consistent and (...) this undermined these truths. Consequently, it can be argued that, from his perspective, economics was a science on a theoretical level, but it lost this character at a more practical level. Similar doubts can be raised when it comes to Hume’s role in the history of economic thought. In some respects he was an original thinker, but several of his key concepts resembled to some extent ideas that had been put forward by ‘mercantilists’, especially those ‘mercantilists’ who were active in his native Scotland in the first decade of the 18 th century. (shrink)

The focus of this special issue of Theory & Psychology is on explanatory mechanisms in psychology, especially on problems of particular prominence for psychological science such as theoretical integration and unification. Proponents of the framework of mechanistic explanation claim, in short, that satisfactory explanations in psychology and related fields are causal. They stress the importance of explaining phenomena by describing mechanisms that are responsible for them, in particular by elucidating how the organization of component parts and operations in mechanisms gives (...) rise to phenomena in certain conditions. We hope for cross-pollination between philosophical approaches to explanation and experimental psychology, which could offer methodological guidance, in particular where mechanism discovery and theoretical integration are at issue. Contributions in this issue pertain to theoretical integration and unification of psychology as well as the growing importance of causal mechanistic explanations in psychological science. (shrink)

We investigate a simple game paradigm for intuitionistic logic, inspired by Wajsberg’s implicit inhabitation algorithm and Beth tableaux. The principal idea is that one player, ∃ros, is trying to construct a proof in normal form while his opponent, ∀phrodite, attempts to build a counter-model. The determinacy of the game implies therefore both completeness and semantic cut-elimination.

I borrow part of the title of my paper from Susan Sontag. In 2003, a year before her death, Susan Sontag published an essay entitled Regarding the Pain of Others. There she takes up the subject of the moral significance of presenting the views of war, violent human death exposed to the lenses of cameras. Her approach to the contemporary issue of mediatisation through the image of the sight of human suffering provokes a question: Do we need teleethics today, the (...) ethics of remote moral relations? Using the method of comparative analysis in the area of cultural determinants of ethics, I draw attention to the contemporary challenges that the culture of late modernity imposes on the morality of everyday life. My thesis is this: The images of human suffering provided by the media reveal the imperfection of our morality. As moral subjects, we are not prepared to respond to the suffering of human beings absent from face-to-face relationships. So, we need teleethics. The paper is devoted to this issue. (shrink)

The idea that concepts play a significant role in some perceptions is widespread but everybody seems to differ as to where to draw the line. Some researchers say that the difference between direct and indirect, concept driven acts of perception manifests itself whenever we perceive abstract or general properties. Others point at second order properties or causal properties. I call this inability to precisely differentiate between acts of direct and indirect perception “The Division Problem”. Furthermore there is always a question (...) as to how widespread indirect perceptions are. Can we attribute them to prelingual cognitive systems? I call this second problem “The Distribution Problem”. -/- The main aim of the paper is providing a solution to both problems by proposing a naturalistic explication of the notion of “concept”. -/- I propose to identify the role concepts were supposed to play in perception with a mechanism of “soft detection”. Unlike hard detectors which react to a specific target in virtue of their constitution and placement in the system, soft detectors are understood as dynamic categorization devices enabling the cognitive system to selectively react to an undetectable property via flexible exploitation of data from hard detectors. -/- I conclude by showing how the notion of soft detection retains some of the aspects traditionally attributed to concepts and how does it differ from similar accounts known from contemporary literature. (shrink)

We study the intersection type assignment system as defined by Barendregt, Coppo and Dezani. For the four essential variants of the system (with and without a universal type and with and without subtyping) we show that the emptiness (inhabitation) problem is recursively unsolvable. That is, there is no effective algorithm to decide if there is a closed term of a given type. It follows that provability in the logic of "strong conjunction" of Mints and Lopez-Escobar is also undecidable.

This book presents a new approach to semantics based on Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s Directival Theory of Meaning, which in effect reduces semantics of the analysed language to the combination of its syntax and pragmatics. The author argues that the DTM was forgotten because for many years philosophers didn’t have conceptual tools to appreciate its innovative nature, and that the theory was far ahead of its time. The book shows how a redesigned and modernised version of the DTM can deliver a new (...) solution to the problem of defining linguistic meaning and that the theory can be understood as a new type of functional role semantics. The defining feature of the DTM is that it presents meaning as a product of constraints on the usage of words. According to the DTM meaning is not use, but the avoidance of misuse. Readers will see how the DTM was shelved for reasons that we don’t find so dramatic anymore, and how it contains enough original ideas and solutions to warrant developing it into a full-blown contemporary account. It is shown how many of the underlying ideas of the theory have been embraced later by philosophers and treated simply as brute facts about natural languages or even as new philosophical discoveries. Philosophers of language and researchers with an interest in how languages and the mind work will find this book a fascinating read. (shrink)

Perceptual experience usually comes with “phenomenal force”, a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non‐inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic role of phenomenal force. Drawing on Bayesian modeling in cognitive science, I argue that the sense of reality that accompanies conscious vision can be viewed as epistemically appraisable in light (...) of its rational etiology. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has - at least according to some - a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind, not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive phenomenon meet to count as a representational explanation in the first place. The aim of this article is to propose a solution to this latter problem. (...) I will assume that representational explanations should be construed as a form of mechanistic explanations and proceed by proposing a general sketch of a functional architecture of a representational cognitive mechanism. According to the view on offer here, representational mechanisms are mechanisms that meet four conditions: the structural resemblance condition, the action-guidance condition, the decouplability condition, and the error-detection condition. (shrink)

The evolutionary origin of synapses and neurons is an enigmatic subject that inspires much debate. Non-bilaterian metazoans, both with and without neurons and their closest relatives already contain many components of the molecular toolkits for synapse functions. The origin of these components and their assembly into ancient synaptic signaling machineries are particularly important in light of recent findings on the phylogeny of non-bilaterian metazoans. The evolution of synapses and neurons are often discussed only from a metazoan perspective leaving a considerable (...) gap in our understanding. By taking an integrative approach we highlight the need to consider different, but extremely relevant phyla and to include the closest unicellular relatives of metazoans, the ichthyosporeans, filastereans and choanoflagellates, to fully understand the evolutionary origin of synapses and neurons. This approach allows for a detailed understanding of when and how the first pre- and postsynaptic signaling machineries evolved. The evolutionary origin of synapses and neurons is an enigmatic subject that inspires much debate. Most of our knowledge and recent discussions are biased towards a metazoan perspective, leaving a considerable gap in our understanding. Recent work has now revealed important insights into the emergence and co-regulation of complex synaptic signaling machineries from studies in the closest unicellular relatives of metazoans. (shrink)

Śankara did not comment on the first s ū tra in his Brahmas ū trabh āṣ ya, which was a common practice in such cases; rather, he started by defining two terms: ‘superimposition’ and ‘ignorance’, in a special introductory chapter known to a wider audience as Adhy ā sabh āṣ ya. The question arises as to why he deemed it necessary to precede his commentary to the initial s ū tra with these additional elucidations. Bh ā mat ī, Vācaspati Miśra’s (...) commentary on Mah ā s ū trabh āṣ ya, seems to shed some light on the problem. According to the doctrine of advaita, the phrase ‘desire to know Brahman’ in the first s ū tra seems prima facie to have no meaning. Thus, the introductory commentary is an explanation of an idea of Brahman which is foreign to advaita. (shrink)

The issue of liberation is a recurrent theme in all schools of Indian classical thought. In case of advaita-vedānta it is deeply rooted in ontology. The problem of ontological status of the world was the bone of contention for two competing non‑dualist schools of vedānta — vivaraṇa and bhāmatī. Maṇḍana’s Brahmasiddhi can be regarded as an important source of inspiration for the latter. The present paper is an analysis of Maṇḍana’s statements pertaining to the issue of mukti in contrast with (...) those of Śankara, the exponent of advaita commonly considered the creator and the most prominent representative of the school. (shrink)