The study aims to analyse the clinical proceedings in pregnant women diagnosed with brain death. Apart from the diagnostic premises and the patient’s rights, the ontological status of the foetus proves to be a severe problem. In reference to the principles of zeroth-order logic, the assumption of potential used by personalists is not a tautology.

Opatrzność Boża a przypadek w świecie Celem artykułu jest obrona dwóch tez: pierwszej, że istnienie zdarzeń przypadkowych jest do pogodzenia z istnieniem Boga oraz tezy drugiej, że przypadek może być częścią Bożej opatrzności. Koniunkcja obu powyższych tez nazwana jest w artykule tezą kompatybilizmu. Argumentacja w obronie kompatybilizmu opiera się na danych współczesnej nauki oraz na idei wszechmocnego Boga Stwórcy. Porządek argumentacji w artykule jest następujący. W części drugiej przedstawiony jest historyczny kontekst oraz podstawy doktrynalne pojęcia opatrzności. W części trzeciej omówiony (...) jest argument za nieistnieniem Boga oparty na założeniu głoszącym istnienie zdarzeń przypadkowych w świecie oraz przedstawiona jest krytyka tego argumentu. W części czwartej prezentowane są możliwe modele działania Boga w świecie, w ramach których przyjmuje się istnienie zdarzeń przypadkowych. W części piątej i ostatniej rozważana jest idea Bożej doskonałości obejmującej takie atrybuty jak wszechmoc, wszechwiedzę, doskonałą dobroć i suwerenną wolę Bożą. (shrink)

The article reviews the book The Problem of Evil, by Peter van Inwagen.

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 1 Seiten: 13-38.

In the article, I present the main assumptions of the natural-order theodicy and the free-will theodicy defended by William Hasker. Next, I pose the question of whether Hasker’s theodicies are compatible with the Christian doctrine of continuous creation accepted by Hasker himself. I consider several different ways of how the doctrine of continuous creation can be understood and the difficulties associated with them. Finally, I propose a modified conception of continuous creation and I claim that it is consistent with the (...) main assumptions of William Hasker’s theodicies. (shrink)

In this paper, we study natural language constructions which were first examined by Barwise: The richer the country, the more powerful some of its officials. Guided by Barwise’s observations, we suggest that conceivable interpretations of such constructions express the existence of various similarities between partial orders such as homomorphism or embedding. Semantically, we interpret the constructions as polyadic generalized quantifiers restricted to finite models. We extend the results obtained by Barwise by showing that similarity quantifiers are not expressible in elementary (...) logic over finite models. We also investigate whether the proposed readings are sound from the cognitive perspective. We prove that almost all similarity quantifiers are intractable. This leads us to first-order variants, which only approximate the strong readings, but are cognitively more plausible. Driven by the question of ambiguity, we recall Barwise’s argumentation in favour of strong readings, enriching it with some arguments of our own. Given that Barwise-like sentences are indeed ambiguous, we use a generalized Strong Meaning Hypothesis to derive predictions for their verification. Finally, we propose a hypothesis according to which conflicting pressures of communication and cognition might give rise to an ambiguous construction, provided that different semantic variants of the construction withstand different pressures involved in its usage. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to characterize the conventions employed in the interpreting of conversational implicatures. The main objective is to justify the hypothesis that language utterers confronted with conversational implicatures not only use knowledge about rules of the language system and extralinguistic knowledge but also refer to special instructions for interpretation of implicit meanings. The article presents possibilities of verbalizing such instructions and compares them with linguistic rules showing some differences and similarities between them.

Główną część artykułu stanowi przykładowa analiza ilustrowanego ogłoszenia reklamowego, której celem jest zaprezentowanie sposobów perswazji, jakimi posługują się twórcy takich komunikatów. Na poziomie słowa przedstawiona została przede wszystkim strategia wykorzystywania faktu, że poszczególne wyrazy posiadają określone konotacje. W następnym etapie, analizie składni jednej z części tekstu reklamy, wyjaśniono, jak poprzez odpowiednie konstruowanie zdań udaje się stworzyć wrażenie rzeczowej argumentacji. Kolejny krok stanowi - podobnie jak na poziomie słowa - semantyczna analiza dłuższego fragmentu tekstu, jak również części wizualnej reklamy. Analiza ta (...) ma na celu pokazanie, jak m. in. poprzez budowę tzw. płaszczyzn izotopii semantycznej można przedstawić nic tylko obraz reklamowanego produktu, lecz także obraz adresata komunikatu. Ostatnia część analizy zawiera szczegółową prezentację werbalno-wizualnych figur retorycznych występujących w całym ogłoszeniu. Część właściwą artykułu poprzedzają rozdziały zawierające podstawy' teoretyczne do analizy o naszkicowanych ramach. I tak w pierwszej części publikacji przedstawione zostało rozszerzone pojęcie języka reklamy, cechy odróżniające go od języka standardowego, jak również jego aspekty semiotyczne. Następny rozdział poświęcony jest charakterystyce takich lingwistycznych aspektów reklamy jak leksyka, składnia i stylistyka W kolejnym rozdziale omówione zostały problemy semiotycznej analizy komunikatów wizualnych, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem analizy tych treści obrazu, które nie są wyrażone bezpośrednio, lecz tworzą tzw. implikaty. Ostatnia z części teoretycznych dotyczy werbalno-wizualnych figur retorycznych, których istota została tu krótko wyjaśniona na przykładach wybranych z analizowanego w artykule ogłoszenia reklamowego. (shrink)

Nowa Zelandia to jedno z najlepiej rozwiniętych państw świata. Pomimo ogromnej odległości od Polski zamieszkuje tam, począwszy od XIX w., wielu polskich migrantów. Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie aktualnej sytuacji zachowania archiwaliów dotyczących działalności Polaków w Nowej Zelandii oraz stanu ich cyfryzacji. Materiał źródłowy do tego typu badań posiadają archiwa oraz biblioteki państwowe w Nowej Zelandii. Jest on również dostępny w niewielkiej ilości jako cyfrowy zasób polskich organizacji w Nowej Zelandii, obecny na ich oficjalnych stronach internetowych. W Polsce kilka instytucji na (...) własnych stronach internetowych także posiada cyfrowe wersje materiałów Polonii nowozelandzkiej. Dzięki zastosowanym metodom badawczym wskazano poziom cyfryzacji materiałów polonijnych. Podstawową tezą pracy jest stwierdzenie faktu znacznego rozproszenia dorobku kulturowego Polonii nowozelandzkiej, nie tylko pomiędzy instytucjami państwowymi w Nowej Zelandii i miejscowymi organizacjami polskimi, ale również poza jej granicami, w tym nad Wisłą. Głównym wnioskiem artykułu jest utworzenie na antypodach jednego, centralnego archiwum Polonii nowozelandzkiej posiadającego doświadczonych pracowników i dysponującemu środkami pozwalającymi na konsekwentne zachowywanie śladów naszej obecności w Nowej Zelandii. (shrink)

Opatrzność Boża a przypadek w świecie: odpowiedzi W artykule przedstawiam odpowiedzi do zarzutów, zawartych w innych artykułach tego numeru, wobec proponowanej przeze mnie w artykule otwierającym oraz monografii z roku 2014 koncepcji opatrzności i przypadku. Argumentuję, że istnienie różnie rozumianych zdarzeń przypadkowych nie implikuje tezy, że Bóg Stwórca świata nie interesuje się losem indywidualnych bytów stworzonych, w tym istot ludzkich. Staram się w swoich odpowiedziach pokazać, że powodem, dla którego Bóg może dopuszczać występowanie zdarzeń przypadkowych jest Boża wola stworzenia świata (...) względnie autonomicznego, który ma zdolność samodzielnego rozwoju. W świecie takim może występować zło bezcelowe, za które Bóg nie ponosi bezpośredniej odpowiedzialności. (shrink)

Many contemporary writers misunderstand early Christian views on philosophy because they identify the critical stances of the ante-Nicene fathers toward specific pagan philosophical schools with a general negative stance toward reason itself. Dariusz Karlowicz's Socrates and Other Saints demonstrates why this identification is false. The question of the extent of humanity's natural knowledge cannot be reduced to the question of faith's relationship to the historical manifestations of philosophy among the Ancients. Karlowicz closely reads the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, (...) Clement of Alexandria, and others to demonstrate this point. He also builds upon Pierre Hadot's thesis that ancient philosophy is not primarily theory but a "way of life" taught by sages, which aimed at happiness through participation in the divine. The fact that pagan philosophers falsely described humanity's telos did not mean that the spiritual practices they developed could not be helpful in the Christian pilgrimage. As it turns out, the ancient Christian writers traditionally considered to be enemies of philosophy actually borrowed from her much more than we think-and perhaps more than they admitted. -- back cover. (shrink)

Max Weber’s thesis on the decisive influence of Protestant ethic on the formation and development of modern capitalism has become one of the best-known and widely shared canonical claims in social sciences. Since its publication at the beginning of the 20th century, this thesis, supported by subsequent great works by the German classic, has rarely been the subject of major controversy. The work of correcting Weber’s thesis was undertaken in the late 20th century by Michael Novak. Novak’s correction is not (...) confrontational, but complementary. The American thinker abandons the research area of minority Protestant communities, which caught Weber’s attention, and undertakes an analysis of the broader religious tradition, developing both before and after the Reformation. In particular, the achievements of Pope John Paul II, interpreted by Novak in terms of the renewal of a liberty current of Catholic social thought, provide important corrective data. (shrink)

Genocide as a part of nation or ethnic group extermination process is not a well-defined concept. Its meaning is understood intuitively. When law intervenes, the issue of defining the term comes back. Nevertheless, the Polish nation has been recognized as subjected to genocide activities during the Second World War by the Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. The paper focuses on the genocide against mainly one group of Poles that is to say foresters. The martyrologic evidence proves that foresters were an (...) occupation group which for a variety of reasons suffered most. The research carried out in this respect by the National Forests in Poland has revealed that over 20% of pre-war staff of the institution actually lost their lives. They were killed by the German and Soviet occupiers, as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In the eastern parts of Poland foresters and their families were deported and sent to various labour and extermination camps e.g. in Siberia. The aim of the paper is to present the scale of genocide with the main emphasis on genocide against foresters. The definition of genocide provided by Lemkin, who coined the term, is a starting point for the analysis. The main research methods included the analysis of pertinent literature and source materials as well as the semiotic analysis of genocide circumstances. The thesis put forward by the authors is that foresters due to their education, practical skills, professional experience and insight knowledge turned out to be the group especially vulnerable and subjected to extermination on purpose. (shrink)

In the first part of this article, we point out and discuss these the contained in Marcin Tkaczyk’s book, Futura Contingentia, with which we agree completely or at least partially. In the second part of the paper, we seek to consider whether the solution of the futura contingentia problem, rooted in the basic intuitions of William of Ockham, is the only one possible and available for us. We argue that there is another possible approach to the problem of how to (...) reconcile divine omniscience with contingent events rather than the Ockhamist solution. The alternative view, which we suggest, is “eternalism”, meaning that God is timeless, and that temporal necessity is compatible with contingent events and free decisions. (shrink)

The article presents problems of intellectual intuition in metaphysics from a semiotic point of view. There are various types of intuition in philosophy: rational intuition, irrational intuition, and sensual intuition. All of them are immediate ways of cognition. Classical metaphysics uses intellectual intuition as its main method to find out and justify its statements. The main problem of intellectual intuition is an intersubjective approach to the object of metaphysics. The main aim of this paper is the objectivization and rationalization of (...) intellectual intuition in language. The semantic notion of meaning and the pragmatic notion of understanding are the fundamental tools which are used to translate the issue of intuition from the subject-ma$er level into the language level. This operation allows to look at intuition in a non-psychological manner. It enables the objectivization of the method of intellectual intuition in the light of the understanding of meanings. (shrink)

Psychiatrists' accounts of clinical significance in depression Clinical significance is a crucial element in the diagnosis of mental illness, yet, it is practically untheorised and significantly under-researched. This article takes up the question of how the criterion of clinical significance is translated into psychiatric practice. More particularly, it examines how psychiatrists account for the threshold between health and depression. The paper is anchored in the constructionist view of discourse underpinned by the assumptions of critically oriented discourse analysis. It is based (...) upon a convenience sample of 39 semi-structured interviews with specialist-psychiatrists in south-western Poland. There is no discursive space for clinical significance in psychiatrists' accounts. There is no boundary, no decision to be taken as to whether the symptoms are clinically significant. Depression, invariably constructed in terms of diagnostic criteria, is always represented as fully developed, appearing out of thin air, with no period of falling ill. The article raises the issue of the validity and usefulness of psychiatric diagnosis. (shrink)

In the article two key chapters of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”, namely “Walpurgis Night” and “Snow” are interpreted in the categories of aesthetic experience. In both of them Hans Castorp is lead into a dream, which could be treated as a hermeneutical symbol. Castorp experiences the feeling of the sublime which is a source of the spiritual metamorphosis. Seen from this angle Castorp turns out to be a literary expression of a new anthropological conception of man, and “The Magic (...) Mountain” – a critique of the attempts to realize such a conception by the help of a solely intellectual argumentation. (shrink)

Przedmiotem artykułu jest paradoks Zenona z Elei Korzec prosa. Wszystkie zachowane argumenty Zenona znane są z przekazów filozofów późniejszych. Korzec prosa jest zdawkowo przedstawiony przez Arystotelesa w Fizyce oraz znajduje się w Komentarzu do „Fizyki” Arystotelesa autorstwa Simplikiosa. Obydwa fragmenty, które stanowią przedmiot rozważań, zawierają częściowo odmienną terminologię oraz występują w nich rozumowania, oparte na innych schematach wnioskowania. Celem analiz zawartych w tekście jest uzasadnienie, że fragment z Fizyki Arystotelesa może sytuować omawiany paradoks jako argument przeciw ruchowi, a nie jako (...) argument przeciw wielości, jak przedstawia się go zazwyczaj w świetle przekazu Simplikiosa. W artykule zostały przedstawione obydwa fragmenty w języku greckim wraz z autorskimi tłumaczeniami oraz szczegółową analizą ich treści. -------------- Zgłoszono: 28/09/2020. Zrecenzowano: 30/10/2020. Zaakceptowano do publikacji: 18/11/2020. (shrink)

Plato did not express any single and uniform theory of meaning. The paper presents different conceptions of meaning that can be attributed to Plato. The first presents meaning of names as imitating reality. Primary names are phonetic imitations of things, secondary names are built-up with the former ones. The second presents meaning as a representation in mind. There are two kinds of representations: individual and abstract. Individual representation is an imagination of empirical thing and the abstract representation is a picture (...) of idea - a property. The third conception describes the notion of meaning as a denotation. Denotations of general names are ideas. Plato treats names in an extensional manner. If two names about different forms refer to the same thing, they are the same name. The fourth is the association conception of meaning. It is connected with the theory of anamnesis. This theory says that humans remember ideas, which they observed in the time between death and birth. In the last conception the meaning is interpreted as connotation: the meaning of a name is the feature of the object that is referred to by this name. (shrink)

In this article we examine the role of vocative forms of address in shaping the political space in public/political discourse. We are particularly interested in strategic uses of forms of address by participants in political debates in order to gain legitimacy for their ideologies. Our data come from four formal television debates between Lech Wałęsa, the former Solidarity trade union leader and president of Poland, and two other Polish politicians, which were held between 1988 and 1995. Due to this historical (...) perspective, we are able to contextualize discursive patterns in the rapidly changing political and social situation in Poland, and show the diachronic development of the ideological underpinnings of discourse. (shrink)

Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings.To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as (...) “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans-dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness.Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co-appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event-horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on ‘excentric positionality’ in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar ‘crisis of experience’ used to diagnose ‘what has gone wrong’, it allows us to re-learn how to work with ‘the experience of (...) crisis’ itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on ‘xeno-communication’. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these ‘excentric’ dynamics in turn suggests new ‘excentric methodologies’ based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. ‘Excentric methodologies’ constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. (shrink)

BackgroundRemotely provided psychotherapy due to the COVID-19 pandemic became common. One of the most significant changes related to providing online psychotherapy services is that clients no longer travel to their sessions.AimsIn the article we are interested in the narrated experience of the absence of journey to psychotherapy sessions. We study clients' stories of past journeys and how their absence, resulting from the change of the mode of therapy provision, is coped with and replaced by other activities in their narratives.MethodsThe study (...) takes a constructionist approach to discourse and focuses on the lexico-grammatical form of the notes. The data come from 12 semi-structured interviews with people who declared attending remote psychotherapy sessions after the national lockdown had been introduced.ResultsIn the collected data, the physical journey is constructed not only as travel time, solitude which can be used for reflection, but, importantly, as an active process which ends with a resolution. In contrast, in narratives of the time before an online session, constructions of unfettered agents are replaced with those of people whose actions are hedged and qualified.ConclusionWe argue that in the informants' narratives the journey to psychotherapy is meaningful and is part of the therapeutic process. We propose that it is a time of passing between two states—one before therapy and one in session. The journey therefore is experienced as a process of change, and not only a process of traveling. (shrink)

This article discusses pilot data for a major research project into the discursive construction of identity in three-generation families living in border communities where each generation has experienced fundamental changes in their socio-political environment. The oral data on which the analysis is based were triggered by photographs from the communities in question, and are being analysed with discourse-analytical procedures. The article demonstrates how an innovative method of using symbolically-charged photography as triggers for oral narratives can solve a major dilemma for (...) discourse analysts interested in oral data. It also demonstrates the processes of identity construction under highly conflictual circumstances. Using examples mainly taken from the narratives of three individuals from three different generations, living in a town on the border between the former GDR and West Germany, the article discusses the discursive means of coming to terms with different kinds of difficulties encountered by each generation in constructing for themselves an identity in the new Germany. (shrink)

METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM —A NECESSARY CONDITION OF SCIENCE? S u m m a r y Due to the success of Darwinian theory of evolution, with its methodological presuppositions, modern science is dominated by the principle of methodological naturalism, according to which only explanations invoking natural causes are acceptable in science. Supernatural or—in a broader sense—non-natural explanations, such as creationism or so-called intelligent design theory, are regarded as unscientific. The article analyzes the following questions: 1) Is it possible—contrary to methodological naturalism—to detect (...) scientifically the marks of the activity of intelligent beings, both natural and supernatural, in bio-logical and cosmic processes and structures? 2) What are the implications of methodological naturalism for science defined realistically, that is understood as a search for truth about the world of nature? 3) If one accepts that the inner-scientific per-missibility of concepts contradicting the principle of methodological naturalism is justified, would it be tantamount to the absolute exclusion of methodological naturalism as a principle directing the scientific inquiry? (shrink)

Intelligent design theory claims that certain biological and cosmic phenomena point to the activity of some unspecified intelligent being behind them and that it is a fully scientific conclusion. Critics often respond that, in fact, intelligent design is a religious idea because the real agenda of proponents of the theory is to reintroduce supernatural, Christian beliefs into science, public education, and other domains of western culture. In other words, it is said that the source of inspiration for the theory reveals (...) its religious, and therefore unscientific, nature. The purpose of this article is to evaluate validity of this objection, both with regard to the actual views of intelligent design proponents, as well as from the perspective of philosophy and history of science. It is argued that to express this objection is to commit the so-called genetic fallacy — evaluating the merits of an idea solely on the basis of its origin — and it can be easily applied to the proponents of naturalistic theories as well. Moreover, it is clear that intelligent design can be and is formulated without reference to any kind of religious doctrine. Hence, it is concluded that from methodological point of view the objection concerning the putative religious motivations of design theorists is an illegitimate rhetorical strategy in order to exclude intelligent design from serious scientific consideration and that the proper critical reaction to the theory requires a different basis for counter-argumentation. Key words RELIGION, INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY. (shrink)

In the article, first I present the atheistic argument from pointless evil and the argument from chance. The essence of the argument from chance consists in the incompatibility of the existence of purposeless events and the existence of a God who planned the universe to the last detail. Second, I would like to show that there is a relation between the evidential argument from evil and the argument from chance. An analysis of the theistic argument from small probabilities is a (...) helpful starting point for the presentation of how the two arguments are related. (shrink)

The book deals with martyrdom understood as a philosophical category. The main question pertains to the evidential value of the Christian witness through death. The author approaches an answer through a philosophical interpretation of the belief in the evidential role of martyrdom. Numerous historical documents confirm that ancient martyrdom might have been considered as a kind of proof also by people unaffiliated with the Church. The author observes the theology and the reality of martyrdom through the perspective of the ancient (...) philosophy of death and radical personal transformation. He believes that the Christian stance in the face of persecutions could have been understood as the realization of the unrealized ambitions of philosophy, thereby proving indirectly the veracity of the teaching revealed by Jesus Christ. (shrink)

Analyses of the dynamics of change present in Europe are not complete without taking into account the role and function of the critical approach as a founding element of European culture. An appreciation of critical thinking must go hand-in-hand with reflection on its essence, forms, and centuries-long tradition. The European philosophical tradition has thematized the problem of criticism since its appearance. This book contains articles on the history of philosophical criticism and ways that it has been understood in European thought. (...) Individual chapters contain both historical-philosophical and problem-oriented analyses, indicating the relationships between philosophical criticism and rationalism, logic, scepticism, atheism, dialectic procedure, and philosophical counseling, among others. Philosophical reflection on critical thinking allows for an acknowledgment of its significance in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of politics, aesthetics, methodology, philosophy of language, and cultural theory. The book should interest not only humanities scholars, but also scholars in other fields, as the development of an anti-dogmatic critical approach is a lasting and indispensible challenge for all disciplines. (shrink)