The paper seeks to understand the proper motivation of John McDowell’s interest in both Kant and Hegel. It reconstructs his arguments in favour of the Hegelian notion of conceptualized experience, and shows how it affects his reading of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. It concludes with a comparison of McDowell’s position on experience with Hegel’s by pointing out the most important difference regarding the notion of factivity.

The paper seeks to give an ontological account of idea as mental content in the philosophy of John Locke. The foundation on which to place and polarise philosophical standpoints with regard to this issue is the 17th- century controversy between J. Locke and N. Malebranche with respect to the genesis of human knowledge. Showing the foundation of this controversy, as expressed in the polemic work of Locke entitled An Examination of P. Malebranche\'s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God, I (...) shall outline two possible approaches to our mental contents, namely the psychologistic and anti-psychologistic ones. In this perspective Locke is a representative of the first standpoint, whereas Malebranche of the second. In the psychologistic approach, the content of our conscious acts (or according to 17th-century Cartesian philosophy ideas) is exclusively an internalelement of this consciousness. On the contrary – in the case of the anti- psychologistic characteristation, the content of our consciousness is described as ontologically antonomous, i.e. as independent from thr knowing subject. Following the analyses of An Examination, I obtain additional arguments on behalf of the psychologistic interpretation of Locke\'s conception of idea (expressed, among others, by J. Yolton and M. Ayers), contrary to the anti-psychologistic approaches (claimed by, among others, T. Reid, R. McRae, and N. Jolley). (shrink)

There is a long-standing dispute among scholars concerning Berkeley’s supposed commitment to an emotivist theory of meaning as the very first (and an early modern) instance of non-cognitivism. According to this position, the domains of religious and moral language do not refer to facts about the world, but rather express the emotional attitudes of religious or moral language users. Some scholars involved in the dispute argue for taking Berkeley to be an emotivist (non-cognitivist), while others hold that we should not (...) do so. This paper puts forward an interpretation that lends support to the non-cognitivist reading of his stance, but in expressivist rather than emotivist terms. It argues that the label “expressivism” does more justice to the textual evidence concerning his understanding of moral language, as what is distinctive where this philosopher is concerned is his interest in explaining the nature of our practice of employing moral language (i.e. how we come to formulate moral statements as expressions of our non-referential attitudes, and the meta-level considerations pertaining to morality associated with this), rather than whether morality is just a matter of our emotions or feelings (i.e. such first-order considerations about morality as whether moral rightness and wrongness correspond merely to our emotional states). (shrink)

The high point of the falsification of physical theories in a standard view of the philosophy of science is the so-called crucial experiment. This experiment is a kind of manipulated empirical test, which provides the criterion for distinguishing between two rival hypotheses, where one is an acceptable theory due to passing the test, and the other turns out to be an unacceptable theory as it does not pass the test. The crucial experiment was supposed to play a significant role because, (...) in virtue of an empirical disconfirmation of one theory, the experiment was assumed to confirm the other as true. However, in 1906, in La théorie physique, son object et la structure (hereafter quoted in English translation as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906/1954)), Pierre Duhem famously argued against this view and stated that crucial experiments in physics are impossible as they are necessarily ambiguous and logically incomplete. His contention rested on the claim that, “[a] physical theory is not an explanation [of true reality in itself in virtue of some broad metaphysical ramification of physics]. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which aim to represent as simply, as completely, and as accurately as possible a set of experimental laws” (ibid., p. 19). Furthermore, different theories could be equally suitable to represent a given group of experimental laws. And, assuming holism, no hypothesis could be tested in isolation, but merely as a part of a set of an entire scientific theory. The problem which Duhem identified in 1906 was slightly overshadowed and neglected in mainstream philosophy of science until the appearance of a challenging paper by Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951 and entitled “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. Quine’s paper caused a revival of interest in Duhem’s original formulation and gave a new impulse towards the problem in the form of the so-called Duhem-Quine thesis. The aim of this paper is to reconsider whether Duhem was right to argue that there are no crucial experiments in physics. In order to assess the validity of the thesis, first, this paper makes an exposition of Duhem’s arguments in their favour, and analyses the major criticisms of this position offered in the subject-literature of Adolf Grünbaum, who explicitly attacked the arguments for the thesis as inconclusive and false. Then, this paper presents possible modes of defence of the Duhem-Quine thesis and argues that the original formulation of the thesis is well qualified and plausible. Finally, this paper offers a pragmatic interpretation of the theory choice. (shrink)

This paper considers the alleged pragmatism of Berkeley’s philosophy using the two Sellarsian categories of ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images of the world and human beings. The ‘manifest’ image is regarded as a refinement of the ordinary way of conceiving things, and the scientific image is seen as a theoretical picture of the world provided by science. The paper argues that the so-called Berkeleian pragmatism was an effect of Berkeley’s work towards a synthesis of ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images through the creation (...) of one unified synoptic vision of the world and was a part of a new conceptual framework within which these two images could be combined. (shrink)

In this paper I would like to asses critically McDowell's argument to the effect that all experience is conceptualized and explain the role that this thesis plays within his general philosophical project. It has been argued that McDowell's conception of experience leads to idealism. I will demonstrate why this charge could be made and whether it is a charge which McDowell can adequately respond to. The paper will clarify McDowell's conception of conceptualized experience, and evaluate its efficacy for his philosophical (...) aim. In order to accomplish these goals, the paper will contain the following two components: a reconstruction of McDowell's position, and its critical analysis. To reconstruct the position of McDowell, I will try to establish his motives, and the sources of inspiration for his thought and its and context ; and to explain his arguments and his defence against the charge of idealism. In order to critically analyse his position, I will try to evaluate it in terms of whether his defence against the objections to his proposal, in particular the charge of idealism, is successful. (shrink)

Personality development takes place through mutual interactions involving the person and their environment. It can be analyzed and described on three levels: basic dispositions, characteristic adaptations, and personal meanings. The phenomena and processes involved are different on each level. Analyses of this are concerned with what promotes and/or inhibits developmental changes of personality. This article introduces the notion of reasons for great life changes, as well as Zenomena Płużek’s conception of personality development.

The epidemiological situation resulting from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic caused the Polish universities to fully switch to distance education in March 2020. Medical e-learning has not yet been broadly implemented into the education process. Therefore, examples of successful e-learning implementations or the organization of the process of medical e-learning offer a valuable source of knowledge today, which is needed immediately. The article presents e-learning practices at the Polish medical universities during the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic during the period from March to September 2020, (...) covering seven universities in Poland that offer medical and health studies. The organization and implementation of e-learning classes is presented, including knowledge evaluation practices, providing example decisions issued by university rectors, on which the teaching process was based. A detailed presentation of the schools’ organizational units or workgroups that played an important role in the process of coordination of measures supporting e-education is also included. The article also presents a description of the software applications, utilities, and services used at the schools in the course of the process of online education. Below are some examples of specific such implementations in selected university courses. (shrink)

The paper considers whether virtue ethics should be regarded as excluding duty ethics or any of its essential elements. The argument suggested here consists of two steps: (1) an argument that there are two different versions of virtue ethics (moderate and strong) and that moderate virtue ethics does not exclude the duty ethics; (2) an analysis of various difficulties with the strong version of virtue ethics, which shows that moderate virtue ethics is more plausible because of its capacity to avoid (...) these difficulties. This capacity makes moderate virtue ethics more attractive as an ethical theory because it covers the entire range of moral phenomena described both by strong versions of virtue ethics and by duty ethics without the attendant difficulties. (shrink)

Schizophrenia still poses the greatest theoretical problems in contemporary psychopathology. These problems should be investigated through the works of authors who deal with schizophrenia representing different psychological theories. The author takes into consideration psychoanalytic and phenomenological point of view. The statements of those theories are encountered in the field of humanistic psychology.

Participants of polemics connected with the psychotherapeutic aspect of psychoanalysis, discuss the most often about technique. Controversies considerable relating to psychological theory and philosophy, lying at bases of this technique, are treated as secondary. This approach creates conflicting directives of therapeutic technique, forges its ethical dimension and description of psychical life of individual, introduces in the area of culture notions and phenomena not dependent on the social control. Threats resulting from these should be counteracted by psychotherapist's theoretical and philosophical reflection.

Development of notion of energy resulted in appearing different interpretations in fields of physics and psychology. To psychology this concept was introduced by Mesmer. He believed that an influence of a physically perceptible fluid is the essence of therapeutic action. It was Freud who reformulated Mesmer's theory explaining that this influence should be understood as a transference. At the same time, the 19th century disputes between vitalism and mechanistic school of physiology brought a widespread consensus about the unity of all (...) types of energy. This consensus led later to a gradual elimination of the concept of energy from psychology. In the 20th century interpretation of notion libido caused that idea of a specific vital energy returned in Reich's pieces. It is important that Reich was one of the most prominent psychotherapists of the 20th century. He created contemporary Bioenergetic Therapy. Representatives of this kind of therapy claim today that a notion of energy announces a rise of a new paradigm in science. Actually this notion creates a danger of introducing activities independent of any rational valuation into a field of healing procedures. (shrink)

This paper is a study of the essential property of human existence - transcendence, whose characteristics can be derived from Karl Stern’s works. By criticizing the model of contemporary psychology for its mechanistic character, Stern tries to prove that it is psychoanalysis that enables us to found a humanistic base for understanding human transcendence towards God. In this way, Stern passes over the fact that the humanistic sense of transcendence was established in Victor Frankl’s philosophy of existence. Stern blemishes the (...) basic meanings of Freud’s psychoanalysis, which, as such, is not suitable for Stern’s procedure of humanization. (shrink)

This collection of essays focuses on the roles that coercion and persuasion should play in contemporary democratic political systems or societies. A number of the authors advocate new approaches to this question, offering various critiques of the dominant classical liberalism views of political justification, freedom, tolerance and the political subject. A major concern is with the conversational character of democracy. Given the problematic and ambiguous status of the many differences present in contemporary society, the authors seek to alert us to (...) the danger, that an emphasis on reasonable consensus will conceal exclusion in practice of some contending positions. The voices of vulnerable peoples can be unconsciously or even deliberately silenced by various institutional processes and operating procedures and a strong media influence can change the tenor of conversations and even lead to deception. To counter these factors, a number of the essays, in differing ways, urge the fostering of local community conversations or democratic agoras so that democratic debate and conversation might maintain the vitality necessary to a strong democratic system. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractScience and technology consortia provide a viable solution for the recent unsustainable academic growth in biomedical research.

There is a current effort to borrow the concept of trauma from medicine and psychiatry and to introduce it into sociological theory. The author explicates the notion of cultural trauma as applicable to the theory of social change. He defines cultural trauma as the culturally defined and interpreted shock to the cultural tissue of a society, and presents a model of the traumatic sequence, describing typical conditions under which cultural trauma emerges and evolves. Drawing on the work of Robert K. (...) Merton on anomie, and of Anthony Giddens on risk, he suggests a number of typical strategies by which societies cope with cultural traumas. Cultural trauma is treated as a link in the ongoing chain of social changes; depending on the number of concrete circumstances, cultural trauma may be a phase in the constructive morphogenesis of culture or in the destructive cycle of cultural decay. (shrink)

Jaquelyn Ann K. Kegley’s book, Josiah Royce in Focus, is well written, competently arranged, and worthy of being recommended to all those who have some interest in the philosophy of one of America’s classic philosophers, Josiah Royce (1855-1916). The present book confirms that she is one of top scholars on Royce. Her book profoundly investigates Royce’s thought and panoramically covers almost all its aspects – I say “almost,” because the practical thought (ethics, psychology, the self, religi...

The critique of Robert K. Merton in terms of the criteria relevant for the history of methodology is misdirected. Merton has never been a methodologist, and his influential notion of middle-range theories has been merely a polemical position taken both against pure abstract, conceptual constructs, and narrow fact-finding. It helped sociology to sustain fruitful directions of research, free from abuses of "grand theory" as well as pure empiricism. Merton's true and many "arrivals" (read: contributions to sociology) have been substantive and (...) not meta-theoretical. Because of them he is a classic of twentieth-century sociology. Key Words: middle-range theory • history of methodology • sociological theory. (shrink)

Within the scope of interest of deontic logic, systems in which names of actions are arguments of deontic operators (deontic action logic) have attracted less interest than purely propositional systems. However, in our opinion, they are even more interesting from both theoretical and practical point of view. The fundament for contemporary research was established by K. Segerberg, who introduced his systems of basic deontic logic of urn model actions in early 1980s. Nowadays such logics are considered mainly within propositional dynamic (...) logic (PDL). Two approaches can be distinguished: in one of them deontic operators are introduced using dynamic operators and the notion of violation, in the other at least some of them are taken as primitive. The second approach may be further divided into the systems based on Boolean algebra of actions and the systems built on the top of standard PDL. In the present paper we are interested in the systems of deontic action logic based on Boolean algebra. We present axiomatizations of six systems and set theoretical models for them. We also show the relations among them and the position of some existing theories on the resulting picture. Such a presentation allows the reader to see the spectrum of possibilities of formalization of the subject. (shrink)

The paper tackles two problems. The first one is to grasp the real meaning of Jerzy Kalinowski’s theory of normative sentences. His formal system K 1 is a simple logic formulated in a very limited language . While presenting it Kalinowski formulated a few interesting philosophical remarks on norms and actions. He did not, however, possess the tools to formalise them fully. We propose a formulation of Kalinowski’s ideas with the use of a set-theoretical frame similar to the one presented (...) by Krister Segerberg in his A Deontic Logic of Action. At the same time we enrich the language used by Kalinowski with more operators on actions and present an adequate axiomatisation of the resulting system. That allows us to disclose some unrevealed aspects of Kalinowski’s theory. The most important one is a relation between acts which we call moral indiscernibility. Our second problem is a proper understanding of moral indiscernibility. We show how a repertoire of agent’s actions, defined with the use of simple observable elements of actions, can be filtrated by the relation of moral indiscernibility. That allows us to understand the consequences of Kalinowski’s claim that not doing something good is always bad. (shrink)

We present some equivalent conditions for a quasivariety \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {K}}$$\end{document} of structures to be generated by a single structure. The first such condition, called the embedding property was found by A.I. Mal′tsev in [6]. It says that if \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${{\bf A}, {\bf B} \in \mathcal {K}}$$\end{document} are nontrivial, then there exists \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${{\bf C} \in \mathcal{K}}$$\end{document} (...) such that A and B are embeddable into C. One of our equivalent conditions states that the set of quasi-identities valid in \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{K}}$$\end{document} is closed under a certain Gentzen type rule which is due to J. Łoś and R. Suszko [5]. (shrink)

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a widespread tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which acts violate the rule. This tendency’s strength varied markedly across (k = 15) field sites, owing to cultural variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared to laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether, and consequently exhibited more pronounced textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for (...) the emergence of textualism: In a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (Ntotal = 5495) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an easily identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers and judges. (shrink)

A recursive enumerator for a function h is an algorithm f which enumerates for an input x finitely many elements including h(x), f is a k(n)-enumerator if for every input x of length n, h(x) is among the first k(n) elements enumerated by f. If there is a k(n)-enumerator for h then h is called k(n)-enumerable. We also consider enumerators which are only A-recursive for some oracle A. We determine exactly how hard it is to enumerate the Kolmogorov function, which (...) assigns to each string x its Kolmogorov complexity: • For every underlying universal machine U, there is a constant a such that C is k(n)-enumerable only if k(n) ≥ n/a for almost all n. • For any given constant k, the Kolmogorov function is k-enumerable relative to an oracle A if and only if A is at least as hard as the halting problem. • There exists an r.e., Turing-incomplete set A such for every non-decreasing and unbounded recursive function k, the Kolmogorov function is k(n)-enumerable relative to A. The last result is obtained by using a relativizable construction for a nonrecursive set A relative to which the prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity differs only by a constant from the unrelativized prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity. Although every 2-enumerator for C is Turing hard for K, we show that reductions must depend on the specific choice of the 2-enumerator and there is no bound on the quantity of their queries. We show our negative results even for strong 2-enumerators as an oracle where the querying machine for any x gets directly an explicit list of all hypotheses of the enumerator for this input. The limitations are very general and we show them for any recursively bounded function g: • For every Turing reduction M and every non-recursive set B, there is a strong 2-enumerator f for g such that M does not Turing reduce B to f. • For every non-recursive set B, there is a strong 2-enumerator f for g such that B is not wtt-reducible to f. Furthermore, we deal with the resource-bounded case and give characterizations for the class ${\rm S}_{2}^{{\rm P}}$ introduced by Canetti and independently Russell and Sundaram and the classes PSPACE, EXP. • ${\rm S}_{2}^{{\rm P}}$ is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g such that there is a polynomial time tt-reduction which reduces A to every strong 2-enumerator for g. • PSPACE is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g such that there is a polynomial time Turing reduction which reduces A to every strong 2-enumerator for g. Interestingly, g can be taken to be the Kolmogorov function for the conditional space bounded Kolmogorov complexity. • EXP is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g and a machine M which witnesses A ∈ PSPACEf for all strong 2-enumerators f for g. Finally, we show that any strong O(log n)-enumerator for the conditional space bounded Kolmogorov function must be PSPACE-hard if P = NP. (shrink)