The author attempts to investigate connections and interdependencies between periphery countries and the globalisation process, including the attitude of these countries to unification blocs, such as the European integration project. The basic research tool used in this work is a systemic analysis, as well as the core-periphery method, derived from social sciences. Its fundamental hypothesis is that the decline of the liberal architecture of the globe may translate into the periphery’s tendency to abandon real convergence in favour of the fragmentary (...) imitation of supranational bodies, potentially leading to intensified disintegration tendencies within phenomena, such as the consolidation of Europe. In the past, the powerless core of the community only contemplated the imitative Europeanisation of marginal territories. Today, however – because the idea to construct a homogeneous polity has collapsed – postulates of “multi-speed” integration can lead to the reconstruction of the historical division into the core and periphery of the old continent. (shrink)

Початок повномасштабного російського вторгнення в 2022 році викликав значні зміни в українській національній ідентичності. Соціологічні опитування демонструють трансформацію цінностей та повсякденних практик українців. Вони почали частіше вживати українську мову, змінили історичні та конфесійні вподобання. Необхідним є отримання об’єктивного соціологічного знання стосовно причин та наслідків цих змін. Передумовою цього є дослідження існуючих робіт по даній тематиці. Метою статті є систематизація та критичне узагальнення наукових праць по тематиці української національної ідентичності у вітчизняній науці. Автор розглядає роботи по цій темі, написані дослідниками в (...) галузі різних наук: історії, філософії, політології, філології, соціології. Особливу увага приділяється огляду дисертацій. Узагальнюються основні ідеї праць, даються авторські висновки по можливості їх використання в майбутньому. Показується, що автори зачіпають широке коло питань, що стосуються національної ідентичності: її історична ґенеза, трансформації, фактори мови та історичної пам’яті, відображення ідентичності в мистецтві та медіа, вплив на неї глобалізації та російської агресії. Автор констатує, що дана проблематика поки що слабо розвинута в рамках соціологічної науки. У відкритому доступі відсутні значні теоретичні роботи, здебільшого соціологи займаються виключно емпіричними дослідженнями. Також відсутні теоретичні роботи, присвячені аналізу трансформацій національної ідентичності, що стались з початку повномасштабної російської агресії в лютому 2022 році. Це пояснюється недостатнім проміжком часу, що пройшов на даний момент. Також складності додає швидка зміна політичних та військових реалій. Враховуючи значну суспільну значимість, автор робить висновок про необхідність посилення соціологічного осмислення цієї тематики. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Levy, Gadd, Kerridge, and Komesaroff attempt to defend the ethicality of homeopathy by attacking the utilitarian ethical framework as a basis for medical ethics and by introducing a distinction between evidence-based medicine and modern science. This paper demonstrates that their argumentation is not only insufficient to achieve that goal but also incorrect. Utilitarianism is not required to show that homeopathic practice is unethical; indeed, any normative basis of medical ethics will make it unethical, as a defence (...) of homeopathic practice requires the rejection of modern natural sciences, which are an integral part of medical ethics systems. This paper also points out that evidence-based medicine lies at the very core of modern science. Particular arguments made by Levy et al. within the principlist medical ethics normative system are also shown to be wrong. (shrink)

Pojęcie kompetencji do podejmowania decyzji terapeutycznych jest niezbędne dla teorii i praktyki autonomii pacjenta. Artykuł przedstawia różne podejścia do tego zagadnienia w ramach prawa, filozofii i nauk medycznych oraz wskazuje kierunki rozwoju i integracji badań pomiędzy dziedzinami. Istniejący dorobek analizy pojęciowej, badań empirycznych i rozstrzygnięć prawnych z różnych krajów wymaga dalszego uzgodnienia i wypracowania nowego pojęcia kompetencji zgodnego ze współczesną wiedzą z nauk kognitywnych.

The paper reviews three most widely discussed philosophical attempts of defining the notion of semantic content of information: Bar-Hillel's and Carnap's, Dretske's and Floridi's. Each of these theories is limited to a very narrow range of infor-mation phenomena. The study aimed at analysing these limits and their philosophical background.

O presente artigo tem como pretensão oferecer um olhar outro acerca da depressão. Nossa análise sobre tal fenômeno encontra na filosofia, sobretudo, de Byung-Chul Han, uma possibilidade interessante de ir além das explicações psiquiátricas. Entretanto, são nelas que esse texto inicia sua discussão: a hipótese serotoninérgica da depressão é apresentada, mas também, problematizada, pois, muito embora a psiquiatria encontre nela ainda hoje a sua tese nuclear acerca do comportamento depressivo, é mostrado aqui que, além de ser uma teoria ausente de (...) comprovação científica, também carece de consistência para explicar o avanço da depressão ao redor do mundo. É diante da impossibilidade de pensar a depressão biologicamente que, no segundo momento deste artigo, há um esforço para analisar os modos de estruturação social contemporâneos, baseados na positivação da sociedade e na busca desenfreada por desempenho, e buscar nos mesmos, fatores desencadeantes do comportamento depressivo. A última parte do texto se concentra em apresentar um panorama filosófico centrado nas perspectivas de Han acerca da depressão. Através da exposição do mito de Eros e Psique, o artigo encerra sua análise mostrando a influência que o desaparecimento do Outro e a pressão por desempenho exerce na formação de uma sociedade de pessoas depressivas. (shrink)

Peter Achinstein has argued at length and on many occasions that the view according to which evidential support is defined in terms of probability-raising faces serious counterexamples and, hence, should be abandoned. Proponents of the positive probabilistic relevance view have remained unconvinced. The debate seems to be in a deadlock. This paper is an attempt to move the debate forward and revisit some of the central claims within this debate. My conclusion here will be that while Achinstein may be right (...) that his counterexamples undermine probabilistic relevance views of what it is for e to be evidence that h, there is still room for a defence of a related probabilistic view about an increase in being supported, according to which, if p > p, then h is more supported given e than it is without e. My argument relies crucially on an insight from recent work on the linguistics of gradable adjectives. (shrink)

This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for risk-averse, (...) certainty-like states. The new proposal is compared to views within the increasingly popular debate opposing dualists to reductionists with respect to the relation between belief and degrees of belief. (shrink)

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

Studies presenting memory-facilitating effect of emotions typically focused on affective dimensions of arousal and valence. Little is known, however, about the extent to which stimulus-driven basic emotions could have distinct effects on memory. In the present paper we sought to examine the modulatory effect of disgust, fear and sadness on intentional remembering and forgetting using widely used item-method directed forgetting paradigm. Eighteen women underwent fMRI scanning during encoding phase in which they were asked either to remember (R) or to forget (...) (F) pictures. In the test phase all previously used stimuli were re-presented together with the same number of new pictures and participants had to categorize them as old or new, irrespective of the F/R instruction. On the behavioral level we found a typical directed forgetting effect, i.e. higher recognition rates for to-be-remembered (TBR) items than to-be-forgotten (TBF) ones for both neutral and emotional categories. Emotional stimuli had higher recognition rate than neutral ones, while among emotional those eliciting disgust produced highest recognition, but at the same time induced more false alarms. Therefore when false alarm corrected recognition was examined the directed forgetting effect was equally strong irrespective of emotion. Additionally, even though subjects rated disgusting pictures as more arousing and negative than other picture categories, logistic regression on the item level showed that the effect of disgust on recognition memory was stronger than the effect of arousal or valence. On the neural level, ROI analyses (with valence and arousal covariates) revealed that correctly recognized disgusting stimuli evoked the highest activity in the left amygdala compared to all other categories. This structure was also more activated for remembered vs. forgotten stimuli, but only in case of disgust or fear eliciting pictures. Our findings, despite several limitations, suggest that disgust have a special salience in memory relative to other negative emotions, which cannot be put down to differences in arousal or valence. The current results thereby support the suggestion that a purely dimensional model of emotional influences on cognition might not be adequate to account for observed effects. (shrink)

As the title of the present publication suggests, the ten essays of this book try to approach an inconvenient trauma of global human reality and the uniformity of media and cyberspace in which human lives suffer harm, loss of inner identity and of broader meaning. Indeed, our postmodern and post-identity times are characterized by a flux of rapid social changes, uncertainty, vague and shaking moral values, by violence and frightening information with its contradictory truths and genuine ambiguity; finally by the (...) violence of unpredictable climate change resulting in various and frequent calamities and devastation of life. Doubt and time are the central concern of modern philosophy and remind us that violence is inherent in the human condition and that reflection on it, regardless of different cultural sensibilities, is ipso facto part of the mainstream of our individual and global concerns. These, and many other fascinating topics from Western and Chinese history, were explored and brought to light by a learned forum of distinguished scholars and experts whose contributions are contained in this publication. (shrink)

We start by introducing the idea of echo chambers. Echo chambers are social and epistemic structures in which opinions, leanings, or beliefs about certain topics are amplified and reinforced due to repeated interactions within a closed system; that is, within a system that has a rather homogeneous sample of sources or people, which all share the same attitudes towards the topics in question. Echo chambers are a particularly dangerous phenomena because they prevent the critical assessment of sources and contents, thus (...) leading the people living within them to deliberately ignore or exclude opposing views. In the second part of this paper, we argue that the reason for the appearance of echo chambers lies in the adoption of what we call ‘epistemic vices’. We examine which vices might be responsible for their emergence, and in doing so, we focus on a specific one; ‘epistemic violence’. In assessing and evaluating the role of this epistemic vice, we note that it can be triggered by epistemic contexts characterized by high stakes that may turn ordinary intellectual virtues (such as skepticism) into vices (such as denialism). In the third part of this contribution, we suggest a way to deal with echo chambers. The solution focuses on advocating a responsibilist pedagogy of virtues and vices that -we claim- might be capable of preventing their emergence. (shrink)

Author: Szutta Artur Title: WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ’S CONCEPT OF THE ‘THIRD STATES’ (Stany trzecie w ujęciu Władysława Tatarkiewicza) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.13/14, number: 2011/2-3, pages: 617-627 Keywords: “THIRD STATES”, LEISURE, PHILOSOPHY, THEORY, INTELLECT, SENSE OF LIFE, WŁADYSŁAW TATARKIEWICZ, JOSEPH PIEPER Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The article treats on the concept of “third states” (as opposed to the other two kinds of states: those of work and entertainment) introduced by (...) Władysław Tatarkiewicz in his treatise On Happiness. A thorough analysis of the passage on “third states” as well as of the very concept allows to see its relevance to the considerations on such important philosophical questions as those of the nature of doing philosophy, the meaning of life, intellectual intuition, theoria or contemplation. The paper consists of five parts. The first part is focused on Tatarkiewicz’s understanding of “third states” as well as on a phenomenological analysis of the concept itself. The second part is a kind of extension of the analysis enriched by Josef Pieper’s interpretation of the idea of leisure which I find very close to what Tatarkiewicz means by “third states”. In the light of the analysis the concept of the ‘third states’ turns out to be very inspiring and useful in dealing with a number of philosophical questions, which is shown in the fourth part of the paper. The final step consists of questioning the above conclusion by short outlining a possible naturalistic interpretation of the ‘third states’ in the light of which the picture of philosophy, human life or human cognition, based on the concept of the ‘third states’ might turn out to be a mere illusion. I do not give a final answer to this question but treat the conclusion of the paper as an invitation to a deeper consideration of the matter. (shrink)

W artykule autor dowodzi, że u podstaw etyki Osho leżą indywidualizm i subiektywizm. Wraz z autonomicznym podmiotem, to znaczy człowiekiem postrzeganym jako twórca wartości, stanowią one najważniejsze źródła moralności tej koncepcji. Ponadto kluczową rolę odgrywają tutaj pojęta w sposób bliski Sartre’owi wolność, a także odpowiedzialność, świadomość i samorealizacja.

The topic of this paper I would like to divide into two other questions than that of its title. The first question is the historical one and sounds like this: Why had Tarski chosen physical objects as truth-bearers in his original work from 1933 about truth in formalized languages?1 This historical problem may be still of importance not only from a historical point of view. Tarski’s truth-definition is still seen as one of undeniable importance for any contemporary philosophical analysis of (...) truth. (shrink)

At a purely instrumental level, quantum theory is all about multiplication, addition and taking mod squares of complex numbers called probability amplitudes. The rules for combining amplitudes are deceptively simple. When two or more events are independent you multiply their respective probability amplitudes and when they are mutually exclusive you add them. Whenever you want to calculate probabilities you take mod squares of respective amplitudes. That’s it. If you are prepared to ignore the explanatory power of the theory (which you (...) should not) the rest is just a set of convenient mathematical tools developed for the purpose of book-keeping of amplitudes. Thus we tabulate amplitudes into state vectors and unitary matrices, and place them in Hilbert spaces. (shrink)

The text, starting from the classic picture taken from Polish literature on the barbaric destruction of higher culture, first shows the contemporary manifestations of an attack on one of the basic...

In a recent publication Travis Timmerman has claimed that sometimes it is morally permissible to not prevent something bad from happening, even if it is in one’s power to do so without sacrificing anything nearly as important.1 To defend his point, he has proposed a thought experiment and based his claims on putative common-sense morality intuitions. To aid in the subsequent discussion, Timmerman’s case is reproduced as follows.

This commentary addresses the proposal and argumentative line presented in the paper ‘Whole Body Gestational Donation’ (WBGD) by Anna Smajdor (2023), published as an intended ‘outrageous argument’ in a dedicated special issue of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. We believe that the paper is fatally flawed due to its lack of engagement with relevant approaches in ethics and essential sources in health sciences as well as its insufficient, superficial, and rash argumentation. Its critical weaknesses include, among others, that it does not (...) take any explicit ethical stance, it does not consider the societal impacts of its premise, and it hastily assumes a large degree of equivalency between WBGD and the usual organ donations. These scholarly flaws are made worse by the fact that the paper is not merely an academic thought experiment but contains important policy change proposals. As a consequence, the paper feeds into more general and systemic worries about the suitability of philosophy for public policy. (shrink)

The embodied approach of human cognition suggests that concepts are deeply dependent upon and constrained by an agent's physical body's characteristics, such as performed body movements. In this study, we attempted to broaden previous research on emotional priming, investigating the interaction of emotions and visual exploration. We used the joystick-based approach-avoidance task to influence the emotional states of participants, and subsequently, we presented pictures of news web pages on a computer screen and measured participant's eye movements. As a result, the (...) number of fixations on images increased, the total dwell time increased, and the average saccade length from outside of the images toward the images decreased after the bodily congruent priming phase. The combination of these effects suggests increased attention to web pages' image content after the participants performed bodily congruent actions in the priming phase. Thus, congruent bodily interaction with images in the priming phase fosters visual interaction in the subsequent exploration phase. (shrink)

Humans are often extraordinary at performing practical reasoning. There are cases where the human computer, slow as it is, is faster than any artificial intelligence system. Are we faster because of the way we perceive knowledge as opposed to the way we represent it? -/- The authors address this question by presenting neural network models that integrate the two most fundamental phenomena of cognition: our ability to learn from experience, and our ability to reason from what has been learned. This (...) book is the first to offer a self-contained presentation of neural network models for a number of computer science logics, including modal, temporal, and epistemic logics. By using a graphical presentation, it explains neural networks through a sound neural-symbolic integration methodology, and it focuses on the benefits of integrating effective robust learning with expressive reasoning capabilities. -/- The book will be invaluable reading for academic researchers, graduate students, and senior undergraduates in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive science and engineering. It will also be of interest to computational logicians, and professional specialists on applications of cognitive, hybrid and artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

The paper reports results of the very first survey-based study on the prevalence, frequency and nature of ethical or other non-medical difficulties faced by Polish physicians in their everyday clinical practice. The study involved 521 physicians of various medical specialties, practicing mainly in inpatient healthcare. The study showed that the majority of Polish physicians encounter ethical and other non-medical difficulties in making clinical decisions. However, they confront such difficulties less frequently than their foreign peers. Moreover, Polish doctors indicate different circumstances (...) as a source of the experienced problems. The difficulties most often reported relate to (i) patients (or their proxies) requests for medically non-indicated interventions; (ii) problems with communication with patients (or their proxies) due to the patients’ negative attitude, unwillingness to cooperate, or aggression; and (iii) various difficulties with obtaining informed consent. Polish physicians report difficulties associated with disagreements among care givers or scarcity of resources less frequently than doctors from other countries. The study’s findings provide support for the thesis that a significant portion of Polish physicians still follow a traditional, paternalistic, and hierarchical model of healthcare practice. Instead of promoting patient’s empowerment, engagement, and rights, they often consider these ideas as a threat to physicians’ professional authority and autonomy. The study leads to the conclusion that due to insufficient training in medical ethics, communication skills, and medical law, many Polish physicians lack the knowledge and competence necessary to adequately respond to challenges posed by modern healthcare practice. (shrink)

In this article I focus on some unduly neglected common-sense considerations supporting the view that one's evidence is the propositions that one knows. I reply to two recent objections to these considerations.

The idea of cognitive enhancement refers to multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach aimed at improving human mental processes. Cognitive enhancement is the amplification or extension of core mind capacities through improvement or augmentation of either internal or external information processing systems. This includes improvements of intelligence and attention, reinforcement of creativity and memory, or extension of perception range. The main feature of cognitive enhancement is voluntariness of use for overcoming natural mental limitations. This article is a synthesis of current trends in (...) cognitive enhancement from the perspective of transhumanism. The article presents various definitions of cognitive enhancement, methods of cognitive enhancement as well as challenges and questions concerning improving human mental processes. (shrink)

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs (...) elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a rather murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)

According to the good reasoning view of normative reasons, p is a reason to F, just in case p is a premise of a good pattern of reasoning. This article presents two counterexamples to the most promising version of the good reasoning view.

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

In recent years some archaeological commentators have suggested moving away from an exclusively anthropocentric view of social reality. These ideas endorse elevating objects to the same ontological level as humans – thus creating a symmetrical view of reality. However, this symmetry threatens to force us to abandon the human subject and theories of meaning. This article defends a different idea. It is argued here that an archaeology of the social, based on human intentionality, is possible, while maintaining an ontology that (...) does not involve dualistic conceptions of reality. Building upon the philosophical work of Vincent Descombes, it is contended that humans are intentional actors and society is predicated on triadic relations that involve humans, objects and meanings. These relations can only be understood holistically, given that these relations are merely parts of a meta-narrative. These meta-narratives contain specific historical and social settings, and it is only within these settings that social relations are intelligible. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)