The paper describes a system for dealing with nestings of belief in terms of the mechanism of computational environment. A method is offered for computing the beliefs of A about B (and so on) in terms of the systems existing knowledge structures about A and B separately. A proposal for belief percolation is put forward: percolation being a side effect of the process of the computation of nested beliefs, but one which could explain the acquisition of unsupported beliefs. It is (...) argued that the mechanism proposed is compatible with a general least effort hypothesis concerning human mental functioning. (shrink)

From a very young age till the last days of his life, Stanisław Staszic was occupied by the question of the relationship between God and Nature. In particular, the Polish thinker was interested in the vision of the world in which human life and Nature were seen in unison, in accordance with laws of reason and the outcomes of scientific investigations. His deliberations on Nature validated his monistic worldview, encompassed within a deistic general framework. Staszic pointed out many times (...) that natural order is the creation of God, however, earthly issues are in the hands of humans. In the last years of his life he withdrew from God. He did not accept the Church’s hierarchy, while his approach to the Creator was ambivalent. (shrink)

In the late forties, Stanisław Jaśkowski published two papers onthe discursive sentential calculus, D2. He provided a definition of it by an interpretation in the language of S5 of Lewis. The knownaxiomatization of D2 with discursive connectives as primitives was introduced by da Costa, Dubikajtis and Kotas in 1977. It turns out, however,that one of the axioms they used is not a thesis of the real Jaśkowski’s calculus. In fact, they built a new system, D∗2 for short, that differs (...) from D2 inmany respects. The aim of this paper is to introduce a direct Kripke-type semantics for the system, axiomatize it in a new way and prove soundness andcompleteness theorems. Additionally, we present labelled tableaux for D∗2.1. (shrink)

The article begins from a consideration of the relationships between ethics and method, dignity and trustworthiness of the scholar in his normal activity. Then the views of Stanisław Ossowski are presented concerning the conditions of the permanence and development of the normal academic life, and his commandments for the academic professions are quoted safeguarding the normal academic life. A discussion of the question of freedom and responsibility in academic research is combined with Ossowski’s conception of philosophy of science. Ossowski (...) had a conception of the historical mission and function of science. With it was connected a notion of indispensable freedom of the scientists which they must possess to be able to perform their professional tasks normally. Ossowski also had a conception of the duties and professional responsibility of the scientists. The article ends with a review of threats to the normal functioning of science and of the countermeasures that should be used, according to Ossowski, in order to ensure growth of science and unencumbered performance of scholarly tasks. (shrink)

Those who have written on Paweł Brzostowski have lacked to pay much attention to his patriotism and his activities as a priest. Some have disapproved the fact that in hard times he left his peasants and sought peace abroad. It is obvious that he lacked the courage of priest Stanisław Brzóska or one of priest Ignacy Skorupka to take the leadership of his own army of peasants to defend Poland. Yet he showed through his life much commitment to strengthen (...) Poland in order to avoid its defeat. He never stooped to the role of tsar’s confidant like other magnates and priests. His peasant army participated in the Kościuszko Insurrection and the November Insurrection. In 1798, after Napoleon’s army had entered Italy, he returned to Poland and gave away 3 000 Zlotys aid to peasants. He also made sure that the fund for the teacher, the doctor and the chemist’s always served the local community. J. Bartyś states that Paweł Brzostowski was a priest by choice: “he always strived to put into practice the Church’s teaching on neighbour-love, honesty and equality of all people regardless their social status”. (shrink)

Jezuici stanowili zawsze przedmiot licznych publikacji, ale szczególnie w ostatnim okresie literatura na ich temat wzbogaciła się o wiele cennych rozpraw naukowych. W ich świetle jawi się nowy obraz zakonu o różnorodnych odcieniach i barwach, zastępując dotychczasowy białoczarny. Dyskusjom nie ma jednak końca. „Sukcesom zakonu - pisał Janusz Tazbir - odpowiadały rosnące stosy literatury antyjezuickiej, która również w Polsce przetrwała szczytowy okres swego rozwoju. Spór o rolę zakonu w politycznych, kulturalnych, a nawet gospodarczych dziejach Europy trwa już od przeszło (...) czterystu lat i nic nie zapowiada jego rychłego zakończenia. Przy ocenie jezuióöw w zbyt małym chyba jednak stopniu zwracano uwagę na fakt, iż byli oni pionierami „wielkiego kompromisu'' we wszystkich niemal dziedzinach, z wyjątkiem oczywiście kompromisu z „herezją". I dzięki temu też, czysto wbrew wlasnym intencjom, stawali się prekursorami nowych rozwiązań". (shrink)

The Jesuit Faculty of Philosophy in Cracow has existed since 1934, when it was erected by the Congregation for Seminaries and Universities. For the first 55 years it educated only the Jesuits, but since 1989 it has been opened to the laity as well. A memorial book Philosophia Rationis Magistra Vitae was published to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Faculty of Philosophy with special dedication to its Professors: Fr. Roman Darowski SJ, Fr. Piotr Lenartowicz SJ, and Fr. Stanislaw Ziemiański (...) SJ. All of them have worked at the former Faculty of Philosophy which is now the Faculty of Philosophy of Ignatianum. In these past few years, Fr. Ziemiański and Fr. Lenartowicz have celebrated their 70th birthday, during this year Fr. Darowski will celebrate such jubilee. The book consists of two volumes. The first contains congratulatory letters from Provincials of the Polish Jesuits to the Jubilarians. It also contains a short history of the Jesuit Faculty of Philosophy in Cracow, and provides presentations of the professors celebrating their anniversaries. (shrink)

Democracy - hope or illusion? Blooming, failing or declining? Our doubts and hesitation make part of unbending efforts to endorse and explain democracy. Who is right - the custodians of promise or the prophets of decline? The book concentrates on doubts. The author tries to explore «the other side of the moon», emphasizing the role of critical thinking, opposing a main-current optimism. Defending democracy we want to generate hope, but hoping may be a dangerous craft. Protecting our hope we are (...) prone to believe that democracy - even if it is not a full success story - is justified in its nature and out of question. How much do we have to forget to sanction this view? This is, in fact, the main question the book raises. It gives voice to those who never, in their writing on democracy, used a flattering tone. Starting with Greek giants - Plato and Aristotle - up to modern and most recent times, going through a broad field of revealing criticism, leaving us with an unsettling feeling that democracy is rather something to be explained than something to be celebrated. Living in democracy, lamenting its underperformances, we must not overlook a fundamental question - in what part do our disappointments reflect the «art of forgetting», allowing us to cast into oblivion all serious doubts originating in a critical discourse on modernity and democracy? (shrink)

This article attempts to answer the question: what has the current migration crisis revealed in relations between Christianity and Islam, two religions with common Abrahamic roots? What conclusions can be drawn about the state of these relations, particularly with regard to ordinary members of the two religions? How should we assess the reaction of Christians in Europe to the inflow of refugees from Muslim countries in the light of the Gospel, the Second Vatican Council and the teaching of Pope Francis?The (...) article consists of four parts. Part I briefly presents Christian-Muslim relationships over the centuries. Part II focuses on the sense of danger occurring in European societies in connection with the influx of Muslims during the migration crisis. Part III presents the teachings of the Second Vatican Council about Islam and Part IV describes Pope Francis’s attitude towards refugees from Muslim countries. (shrink)

This volume explores the range of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy and his relevance to contemporary philosophical traditions.

Understanding the relationship between experts and laypeople is crucial for understanding today’s world of post-truth and the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. The emergence of post-truth has been linked to various phenomena such as a flawed social and mass media ecosystem, poor citizen education, and the manipulation tactics of powerful interest groups. The paper argues that the problem is, however, more profound. The underlying issue is laypeople’s inevitable epistemic dependence on experts. The latter is part and parcel of the “risk (...) society” in which people question the scientific consensus and thus are able to manipulate the facts. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of illiberal democrats, though liberal democrats can make no use of it. The latter downplay the problem of citizens’ epistemic deficits and of the epistemic asymmetries between them. The third and fourth generations of deliberative democrats are a perfect example. The paper argues that the concepts of interactional expertise and epistemic dependence explain why understanding between experts and laypeople is impossible. The said phenomena undermine liberalism’s unrealistic assumptions concerning citizens’ decision-making competence. (shrink)

The book by professor Stanisław Kowalczyk, renowned scholar in the field of social philosophy, is, without doubt, one of the most important studies on the idea of freedom. The concept of freedom is as old as mankind. It has many meanings and has been interpreted in many different ways. For instance, we also have the word „liberty," which means „freedom or right" and is synonymous with the word freedom, which means „the condition of being free." The author indicates that (...) in our times the notion of freedom is most frequently used; however, it is often misused or deceptive. Mass media and people of all walks of life talk of liberty; everyone talks of freedom and, for many, it is the highest value. Longing for freedom is rooted in the heart of every human being, for freedom is an existential correlate and the fulfilment of the rational human being. The semantic confusion about the notion of freedom leads to many misuses of the concept. Personalism, as a philosophical concept in which a person stands in the centre of all discussion, serves as a framework for the author's delineation on the concept of freedom. He further states that the appropriate understanding of this value is possible in the context of the personalistic interpretation of a human being. This is the focus of this informative and insightful book. (shrink)

In the first part I focus on the issue of progress, in particular progress in philosophy. Philosophical progress has a special property that it shares with the process of becoming a better person. It is constantly finding yourself “on the way”. This path is not only anchored in the Absolutely Perfect but it conditions and stimulates the reflection towards the truth about the relationship between Him and us. We can assume that the core of this reflection is philosophy. The second (...) part is devoted to the paradoxical nature of the most generally understood memory. I assume that the condition of awareness of a certain content is its outdatedness, that is, its transfer to the sphere of memory. Memory is a constantly updated and constantly re-ordered picture of everything that the subject has ever relegated from being, so that it can be replaced by something else. The foundation of this order is a certain axiology. In the third part I show how the sketched concept of memory is used to describe the mechanism of the evolution of philosophical thought. The “on the way” philosophy would consist of two constantly repeated activities: on reconstructing what is to be denied, and thus on the recognition of the previous philosophical achievements in its totality, and on its negation. This denial would concern the whole of this achievement as an axiologically reconstructed unity. The new system is only realized as a series of consequences of the negation of the current state. The vast majority of philosophical reflection focuses on the constitution of this current state, its supposed unity. In the short part of the fourth, I draw up prospects for further deliberations. (shrink)

The class of equivalential logics comprises all implicative logics in the sense of Rasiowa [9], Suszko's logic SCI and many others. Roughly speaking, a logic is equivalential iff the greatest strict congruences in its matrices are determined by polynomials. The present paper is the first part of the survey in which systematic investigations into this class of logics are undertaken. Using results given in [3] and general theorems from the theory of quasi-varieties of models [5] we give a characterization of (...) all simple C-matrices for any equivalential logic C. In corollaries we give necessary and sufficient conditions for the class of all simple models for a given equivalential logic to be closed under free products. (shrink)

The book is devoted to the thought of one of the 20th century's most interesting philosophers of religion. Heschel, a traditional Polish Jew who became a modern thinker, was also an impressive prophet of interreligious dialogue.

Once regarded as cellular ‘debris’ extracellular vesicles (EVs) emerge as one of the most intriguing entities in cancer pathogenesis. Intercellular trafficking of EVs challenges the notion of cancer cell autonomy, and highlights the multicellular nature of such fundamental processes as stem cell niche formation, tumour stroma generation, angiogenesis, inflammation or immunity. Recent studies reveal that intercellular exchange mediated by EVs runs deeper than expected, and includes molecules causative for cancer progression, such as oncogenes (epidermal growth factor receptor, Ras), and tumour (...) suppressors (PTEN). The uptake of oncogenic EVs (oncosomes) by various cells may profoundly change their biology, signalling patterns and gene expression, and in some cases cause their overt tumorigenic conversion. Moreover, EVs circulating in blood and present in body fluids provide an unprecedented access to the molecular circuitry driving cancer cells, and new technologies are being developed to exploit this property as a source of unique cancer biomarkers. (shrink)

We are facing a crisis of trust in expertise today. Fewer and fewer people trust experts, and more and more politicians openly ignore expert consensus. 'Democracy in the Post-Truth Era' asks what might happen to democracy if we reject the fundamental liberal assumption that people are capable of making informed choices. The book explores the potential impact on society if people, including politicians, never appreciate the relevance of expert opinions. What if people cannot choose between supporters and opponents of key (...) issues such as the causes of climate change, effectiveness of vaccines and ways of combating economic and social crises? Applying social epistemology to these questions, the book considers whether democracy can be defended in the post-truth era. (shrink)

This book is both suitable for logically and algebraically minded graduate and advanced graduate students of mathematics, computer science and philosophy, and ...

There exist different kinds of averaging of the differences of the energy–momentum and angular momentum in normal coordinates NC(P) which give tensorial quantities. The obtained averaged quantities are equivalent mathematically because they differ only by constant scalar dimensional factors. One of these averaging was used in our papers [J. Garecki, Rep. Math. Phys. 33, 57 (1993); Int. J. Theor. Phys. 35, 2195 (1996); Rep. Math. Phys. 40, 485 (1997); J. Math. Phys. 40, 4035 (1999); Rep. Math. Phys. 43, 397 (1999); (...) Rep. Math. Phys. 44, 95 (1999); Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) 11, 441 (2002); M.P. Dabrowski and J. Garecki, Class. Quantum. Grar. 19, 1 (2002)] giving the canonical superenergy and angular supermomentum tensors. In this paper we present another averaging of the differences of the energy–momentum and angular momentum which gives tensorial quantities with proper dimensions of the energy–momentum and angular momentum densities. We have called these tensorial quantities “the averaged relative energy–momentum and angular momentum tensors”. These tensors are very closely related to the canonical superenergy and angular supermomentum tensors and they depend on some fundamental length L > 0. The averaged relative energy–momentum and angular momentum tensors of the gravitational field obtained in the paper can be applied, like the canonical superenergy and angular supermomentum tensors, to coordinate independent analysis (local and in special cases also global) of this field. Up to now we have applied the averaged relative energy–momentum tensors to analyze vacuum gravitational energy and momentum and to analyze energy and momentum of the Friedman (and also more general, only homogeneous) universes. The obtained results are interesting, e.g., the averaged relative energy density is positive definite for the all Friedman and other universes which have been considered in this paper. (shrink)

The notion of local deduction theorem (which generalizes on the known instances of indeterminate deduction theorems, e.g. for the infinitely-valued ukasiewicz logic C ) is defined. It is then shown that a given finitary non-pathological logic C admits the local deduction theorem iff the class Matr(C) of all matrices validating C has the C-filter extension property (Theorem II.1).

In the paper we study the class of weakly algebraizable logics, characterized by the monotonicity and injectivity of the Leibniz operator on the theories of the logic. This class forms a new level in the non-linear hierarchy of protoalgebraic logics.

This study investigates performance of portfolios composed of British socially responsible investments (SRI) stocks. Using the ‘Global-100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World’ list (known also as ‘Global-100’) to select the SRI companies, we found that, in the period 2000–2010, the returns of the SRI portfolios were on average higher compared with the corresponding returns of the market indexes. The annual average difference in returns of the SRI portfolios (with dividends) was 5.26 % and 5.69 % relative to the FTSE100 (...) and FTSE4GOOD indexes (the total return versions), respectively, but the differences in returns in the whole period, in individual years and in other sub-periods were in most cases not statistically significant. Positive performance of SRI stocks in the whole sample is, however, evidenced by risk-adjusted measures such as the modified Sharpe ratio (MSR) and certainty equivalent (CEQ) returns, as well as by incorporating various levels of transaction costs. Furthermore, a simple trading strategy relying on selection of SRI stocks from the Global-100 list would beat the market indexes in the whole period 2000–2010, even after inclusion of various levels of transaction costs. We also estimated the Fama–French and Carhart multi-factor models and found that the returns of the SRI portfolios cannot be consistently explained by conventional factors other than the market factor. (shrink)

The main result of the present paper — Theorem 3 — establishes the equivalence of the interpolation and amalgamation properties for a large family of logics and their associated classes of matrices.