Most of Polish translations of David Hume’s essays have been collected in two well-known volumes edited by T. Tatarkiewiczowa and Ł. Pawłowski, but some of them were also published in various scientific journals. Moreover, some are also available in two, or even three Polish versions, whereas some were not available in Polish until they were translated and published in several issues of this journal. The dissipation of translations and functioning of various versions of their titles cause problems for Hume scholarship (...) in Poland. In answer to this problem the article collates all existing Polish translations of Hume’s essays. (shrink)

Niniejszy esej stanowi piąty rozdział tomu The Realm of Spirit kończącego cykl The Realms of Being. Podstawą przekładu jest pierwsze wydanie dzieła: George Santayana, The Realms of Being (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., Toronto: The Macmillan Company, 1940), 67–89. -/- This essay is the fifth chapter of The Realm of Spirit volume concluding The Realms of Being series. The translation is based on the first edition of the work: George Santayana, The Realms of Being (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., Toronto: (...) The Macmillan Company, 1940), 67-89. (shrink)

_Three Stoic Exercises _is the first Polish translation, done by Adam Grzeliński, of three excerpts from Shaftesbury’s notebooks: _Character and Conduct_, _Attention and Relaxation_, and _Improvement _being part included in the collection entitled _Askêmata_. These texts prove that these notebooks not only complement the contents of _Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times_, the three-volume set which made Shaftesbury a famous and influential philosopher, but they are to be seen mainly as a kind of moral exercises and soliloquies in (...) which Shaftesbury comments the works of the stoics: Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. (shrink)

The Self is the first Polish translation of an excerpt from Shaftesbury’s notebooks entitled Askêmata. The text proves that these notebooks not only complement the contents of his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, the three-volume set which made Shaftesbury a famous and influential philosopher but is to be seen mainly as a kind of moral exercises and soliloquies in which Shaftesbury comments the works of the stoics: Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. In one of the previous issues of „Folia Philosophica” (...) three other excerpts from the same set were published: Character and Conduct, Attention and Relaxation, and Improvement; the present one is a continuation of the series. (shrink)

John Locke’s medical interests resulted in several short texts in which he criticizes two theoretical conceptions of his days, paracelsianism and galenism. Two of the texts – ‘ Morbus’ and ‘ Anatomia’ – show the influence of Thomas Sydenham on Locke’s understanding of medicine which can be summarized as a turn towards clinical medicine and empirical investigations. The article reconstructs this early stage of the development of Locke’s standpoint leading to ‘ An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’.

Artykuł rekonstruuje najważniejsze elementy filozofii polityki Dawida Hume’a dotyczące możliwość ukonstytuowania się państwa. Zdaniem szkockiego filozofa warunkiem wyjścia ze stanu natury jest określenie praw własności, które w dalszej konsekwencji prowadzi do stworzenia prawa pozytywnego oraz wskazania reguł sprawowania władzy. Hume wskazuje na psychologiczne przesłanki powstania państwa, odnajdując je w naturalnej dla wszystkich ludzi motywacji egoistycznej i ograniczonej życzliwości. Wizja powstania państwa, wynikająca ze sposobu, w jaki Hume rozumiał udział rozumu i namiętności w ludzkim doświadczeniu, stanowi jednocześnie kontynuację krytycznego namysłu nad (...) filozofią praktyczną wywodzącą się w brytyjskiej filozofii od Locke’a i Hobbesa. (shrink)

Kartezjanizm i antykartezjanizm locke’owskiej koncepcji tożsamości osobowej Niniejszy artykuł koncentruje się na zależnościach pomiędzy Locke’owskim i kartezjańskim pojmowaniem tożsamości osobowej. Wbrew częstym odczytaniom, różnica pomiędzy nimi nie daje się sprowadzić do prostego przeciwstawienia substancjalizmu i empiryzmu. Locke nie rezygnuje ze stanowiska substancjalistycznego, jednakże rozgranicza dwie sfery — naturalnego, bazującego na doświadczeniu poznania oraz filozoficznych spekulacji, w których stara się przedstawić racjonalną i zgodną ze swym programem epistemologicznym interpretację dogmatów religijnych. Krytyka Locke’a dotyczy możliwości istnienia rzeczy myślącej jako substancji istniejącej niezależnie (...) od ciała, natomiast rozbudowaniu w stosunku do filozofii kartezjańskiej ulega opis różnicowania się doświadczenia i ludzkiej subiektywności, zaś pojęcie tożsamości osobowej zyskuje eksplikację na czterech uzupełniających się poziomach: psychologicznym, biologicznym, społeczno-prawnym i religijnym. (shrink)

Brytyjska estetyka została w XVIII wieku zapoczątkowana pracami A.A.C. Shaftesbury’ego i Josepha Addisona. Shaftesbury jako pierwszy wskazał na specyfikę doświadczenia estetycznego, odmiennego od bezpośredniego doznania zmysłowego, odwołując się do pojęć zmysłu wewnętrznego ( inward sense ) oraz bezinteresowności jako warunku tego doświadczenia. Do wyobraźni czytelników przemawiał pochodzący z Moralistów przykład pasterza podziwiającego piękno oceanu: „Doża, jako pan młody, który w majestatycznym bucentaurze płynie na łonie swej Tetydy – mówi jeden z rozmówców tego dialogu – posiada mniej niż biedny pasterz, który, (...) swobodnie wyciągnięty na zwisającej skale lub szczycie wysokiego cypla, zapomina o swych stadach i podziwia piękno oceanu” [Shaftesbury 1790, 328]. Ocena piękna wiąże się z przyjemnością płynącą z kontemplacji zjawisk, nie odnosi się do realnego istnienia przedmiotów. Pojęcie bezinteresowności w filozofii Shaftesbury’ego rozumiane jest jednak znacznie szerzej. Oznacza ono pewien sposób percypowania zjawisk poddanych kontemplacji i osądowi estetycznemu. Skoro zaś smak estetyczny opiera się na odrębnej władzy zmysłu wewnętrznego, podmiotowego warunku doświadczenia piękna, bezinteresowność odwołuje się także do określonej postawy, gdy obserwator porzuca własne, indywidualne upodobanie (związane z doznawaniem przyjemności, nie zaś piękna), a wydaje sąd, który ma mieć charakter obiektywny. Podając powody zepsucia smaku, Shaftesbury pisze m.in. (shrink)

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

The Significance Argument (SA) for the irreducibility of consciousness is based on a series of new puzzle-cases that I call multiple candidate cases. In these cases, there is a multiplicity of physical-functional properties or relations that are candidates to be identified with the sensible qualities and our consciousness of them, where those candidates are not significantly different. I will argue that these cases show that reductive materialists cannot accommodate the various ways in which consciousness is significant and must allow massive (...) vagueness in conscious experience. I also will argue that a nonreductive theory of the conscious-of relation can easily provide a very satisfying, unified explanation of the ways in which this relation is significant. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

Though the vegetarian movement sparked by Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation has achieved some success, there is more animal suffering caused today due to factory farming than there was when the book was originally written. In this paper, I argue that there may be a technological solution to the problem of animal suffering in intensive factory farming operations. In particular, I suggest that recent research indicates that we may be very close to, if not already at, the point where we (...) can genetically engineer factory-farmed livestock with a reduced or completely eliminated capacity to suffer. In as much as animal suffering is the principal concern that motivates the animal welfare movement, this development should be of central interest to its adherents. Moreover, I will argue that all people concerned with animal welfare should agree that we ought to replace the animals currently used in factory farming with animals whose ability to suffer is diminished if we are able to do so. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new theory of the nature of hypocritical blame and why it is objectionable, arguing that hypocritical blame is a form of dishonest signaling. Blaming provides very important benefits: through its ability to signal our commitments to norms and unwillingness to tolerate norm violations, it greatly contributes to valuable norm-following. Hypocritical blamers, however, are insufficiently committed to the norms or values they blame others for violating. As allowing their blame to pass unchecked threatens the signaling system, our (...) strong interest in maintaining valuable norm-following by tracking who has what commitments justifies objecting to hypocritical blame. This theory has a number of strengths over competing accounts: it delivers intuitive verdicts about when blame is objectionable across a range of cases, it is a naturalistic explanation, it is consistent with a leading theory of the nature of blame, it explains why hypocritical pronouncements that don’t feature blame are similiarly objectionable, it does not rely on contentious analyses of the nature of ‘standing’, and it preserves the common intuition that hypocrites are in some way dishonest. (shrink)

Many favor representationalism about color experience. To a first approximation, this view holds that experiencing is like believing. In particular, like believing, experiencing is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Once you view color experience along these lines, you face a big question: do our color experiences represent the world as it really is? For instance, suppose you see a tomato. Representationalists claim that having an experience with this sensory character is necessarily connected with representing (...) a distinctive quality as pervading a round area out there in external space. Let us call it “sensible redness” to highlight the fact that the representation of this property is necessarily connected with the sensory character of the experience. Is this property, sensible redness, really co-instantiated with roundness out there in the space before you? (shrink)

Reductive intellectualists hold that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. For this thesis to hold water, it is obviously important that knowledge-how and knowledge-that have the same epistemic properties. In particular, knowledge-how ought to be compatible with epistemic luck to the same extent as knowledge-that. It is argued, contra reductive intellectualism, that knowledge-how is compatible with a species of epistemic luck which is not compatible with knowledge-that, and thus it is claimed that knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart.

This thoughtful new abridgment is enriched by the brilliant commentary which accompanies it. In it, Laurence Dickey argues that the _Wealth of Nations_ contains--and conceals--a great deal of how Smith actually thought a commercial society works. Guided by his conviction that the so-called Adam Smith Problem--the relationship between ethics and economics in Smith's thinking--is a core element in the argument of the work itself, Dickey's commentary focuses on the devices Smith uses to ground his economics in broadly ethical and (...) social categories. An unparalleled guide to an often difficult and perplexing work. (shrink)

Robert Merrihew Adams has been a leader in renewing philosophical respect for the idea that moral obligation may be founded on the commands of God. This collection of Adams' essays, two of which are previously unpublished, draws from his extensive writings on philosophical theology that discuss metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues surrounding the concept of God--whether God exists or not, what God is or would be like, and how we ought to relate ourselves to such a being. Adams studies the (...) relation between religion and ethics, delving into an analysis of moral arguments for theistic belief. In several essays, he applies contemporary studies in the metaphysics of individuality, possibility and necessity, and counterfactual conditionals to issues surrounding the existence of God and problems of evil. (shrink)

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when (...) it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)