I argue that sports clubs should be punished for bad behaviour by their fans in a way that affects the club’s sporting success: for example, we are justified in imposing points deductions and competition disqualifications on the basis of racist chanting. This is despite a worry that punishing clubs in such a way is unfair because it targets the sports team rather than the fans who misbehaved. I argue that this belies a misunderstanding of the nature of sports clubs and (...) of the nature of sporting success. Further, I argue that fans should want to be held responsible in such a way because it vindicates the significant role that they play in the life of their club. (shrink)

Although mathematical philosophy is flourishing today, it remains subject to criticism, especially from non-analytical philosophers. The main concern is that even if formal tools serve to clarify reasoning, they themselves contribute nothing new or relevant to philosophy. We defend mathematical philosophy against such concerns here by appealing to its metaphysical foundations. Our thesis is that mathematical philosophy can be founded on the phenomenological theory of ideas as developed by Roman Ingarden. From this platonist perspective, the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in (...) philosophy”—to adapt Wigner’s phrase—is analogous to that of mathematical explanations in science. As success-criteria for mathematical philosophy, we propose that it should be correct, responsive, illuminating, promising, relevant, and adequate. (shrink)

The authoress shows a simple way to avoid paradoxical consequences of the Czerniawski's argument.

The special links between money and history transcend that routine course of events with which are associated the great - majority of the works of mankind. It is rare to come across articles that since their initial manufacture have preserved their form almost intact for twenty-five centuries, and thus for almost the entire historical span of the civilized world, while playing an identical role in the lives of societies as diverse as those of Europe and the whole of Asia. It (...) is rare, furthermore, to find articles that are of such generalized use and interest, often even the source of common feelings. Finally, similar articles are rare, if they exist at all, which—as is the case with money—may be just as closely connected with the great currents of the political, economic and social history of entire nations and continents as with the personal fates of individuals and families: in other words, articles whose presence might equally well record the succession of epochs as the passage of days. (shrink)

Cooperation between doctors of various specialties and other medical specialists is the standard of care in the treatment of patients. Due to the variety of diseases and the dynamic development of medicine in general, it is difficult to be an expert in every field and know all the recommended treatments. An example of such cooperation is the joint treatment of patients with the problem of ingrown toenails. The article contains an analysis of patients who received treatment in a doctor’s office (...) in cooperation with podiatrists. A conservative approach towards the treatment of this condition sees the patient being initially diagnosed and treated by a podiatrist and then later, if necessary, being referred to a doctor for surgical treatment. The exchange of experiences and information on patients treated by interdisciplinary teams allows doctors and podiatrists to find the best possible treatment and improve the quality of life of patients. The follow-up of patients after surgery can be performed later in podiatry offices. Owing to modern electronic communication, it is possible for a doctor to constantly monitor the patient’s condition without the need for direct visits to the doctor’s office. (shrink)

Do sports fans really care about their team winning? According to several philosophers, the answer is no. Sports fans engage in fictional caring during the match, which involves a game of make-believe that the result is important. We will argue that this account does not provide a full account of the way in which fans relate to the teams they support. For many fans, the team they support forms a core part of their identity. The success or failure of their (...) team impacts the community they are a part of and around which they build a central part of their identity. For these fans, it really does matter whether their team wins or loses. We will finish by articulating a more limited role that fictional caring may play in sports fandom. (shrink)

This book offers readers a pitch side seat to the ethics of fandom. Its accessible six chapters are aimed both at true sports fans whose conscience may be occasionally piqued by their pastime, and at those who are more certain of the moral hazards involved in following a team or sport. Why It's OK to Be a Sports Fan wrestles with a range of arguments against fandom and counters with its own arguments on why being a fan is very often (...) a good thing. It looks at the ethical issues fans face, from the violent or racist behavior of those in the stands, to players' infamous misdeeds, to owners debasing their own clubs. In response to these moral risks, the book argues that by being critical fans, followers of a team or individual can reap the benefits of fandom while avoiding many of the ethical pitfalls. The authors show the value in deeply loving a team, but also how a condition of this value is recognizing that the love of a fan comes with real limits and responsibilities. Key Features Provides an accessible introduction to a key area of the philosophy of sport Closely looks at some of the salient ethical concerns around sports fandom Proposes that the value of community in partisan fandom should not be underestimated as a key feature of the good life Examines how the same emotions and environments that can lead to violence are identical to those that lead to virtuous loyalty Argues for a fan's responsibility in calling out violence or racist behavior from their fellow fans. (shrink)

An Antique Prototype of the Modern Mathematisation of Psychology Ryszard Stachowski. (1) matter or that which is not in itself a particular thing, (2) form or essence, which is that precisely in accordance with which a thing is called a this, and ...

This paper aims to present the main contours of Burns’s literary output which, interestingly enough, grows into a personal understanding of the collective mindset of -Troubles Northern Ireland. It is legitimate, I argue, to construe her fiction as a body of work shedding light on certain underlying mechanisms of sectarian violence. Notwithstanding the lapse of time between 1998 and 2020, the Troubles’ toxic legacy has indeed woven an unbroken thread in the social fabric of the region. My reading of the (...) novelist’s selected works intends to show how the local public have been fed by an unjustified—maybe even false—sense of security. Burns, in that regard, has positioned herself amongst the aggregate of writers who feel anxious rather than placated, hence their persistence in returning to the roots of Northern Irish societal divisions. Burns’s writing, in the above context, though immersed in the world of the Troubles, paradoxically communicates “an idiosyncratic spatiotemporality”, namely an experience beyond the self-imposing, historical time limits. As such, it gains the ability to provide insightful commentaries on conflict-prone relations, the patterns of which can be repeatedly observed in Northern Ireland’s socio-political milieu. Overall, the main idea here is to discuss and present the narrative realm proposed by Burns as determinate, liminal in terms of time and space, positioning readers between “then” and “now” of the region. (shrink)

W tomie zamieszczono teksty powstałe w ramach programu "Demokracja - idee, dylematy, praktyka", który obejmował cykl wykładów i dyskusji organizowanych przez Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej w roku 2001 na Papieskiej Akademii Teologicznej w Krakowie.

Artykuł analizuje problem kosztów powstałych w wyniku realizacji obowiązku udzielenia pomocy osobie znajdującej się w niebezpieczeństwie. Autorzy prezentują trzy odmienne stanowiska dotyczące tego problemu, rozważając scenariusz, w którym osoba decyduje się, z własnej woli lub przymuszona za pomocą prawa, uratować inną osobę, w sytuacji, w której taka pomoc wiąże się z naruszeniem praw trzeciej strony. Przykładowo, A ratuje tonącego B, ale w trakcie ratowania narusza prawa C. Pytanie, które stawiają autorzy brzmi: zakładając, że istnieje obowiązek udzielenia pomocy osobie znajdującej się (...) w niebezpieczeństwie, kto powinien ponieść koszty odszkodowania za naruszenie praw trzeciej strony? Autorzy rozważają następujące możliwości: koszty pomocy powinny zostać poniesione przez (a) ratującego, (b) osobę, której prawa zostały naruszone, (c) ratowanego, (d) całe społeczeństwo. (shrink)

Relations between individual traits and frequency of causing accidents have been analyzed. On the basis of results from 465 women and 277 men it has been found that the causing of accidents correlates with risk propensity and with risk taking influenced by self-destructive motivation. Persons often causing accidents are also absent minded to a greater degree, and experience depressive moods more frequently than persons rarely involved in accidents.

When the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup was awarded to Qatar, it raised a number of moral concerns, perhaps the most prominent of which was Qatar’s woeful record on human rights in the arena of migrant labour. Qatar’s interest in hosting the event is aptly characterised as a case of ‘sportswashing’. The first aim of this paper is to provide an account of the nature of sportswashing, as a practice of using an association with sport, usually through hosting an event (...) or owning a club (such as Newcastle United, owned by Saudi Arabia), to subvert the way that others attend to a moral violation for which the sportswashing agent is responsible. This may be done through distracting away from wrongdoing, minimising it, or normalising it. Second, we offer an account of the distinctive wrongs of sportswashing. The gravest moral wrong is the background injustice which sportswashing threatens to perpetuate. But the distinctive wrongs of sportswashing are twofold: first, it makes participants in sport (athletes, coaches, journalists, fans) complicit in the sportswasher’s wrongdoing, which extends a moral challenge to millions of people involved with sport. Second, sportswashing corrupts valuable heritage associated with sporting traditions and institutions. Finally, we examine how sportswashing ought to be resisted. The appropriate forms of resistance will depend upon different roles people fill, such as athlete, coach, journalist, fan. The basic dichotomy of resistance strategies is to either exit the condition of complicity, for example by refusing to participate in the sporting event, or to modify one’s engagement with the goal of transformation in mind. We recognize this is difficult and potentially burdensome: sports are an important part of many of our lives; our approach attempts to respect this. (shrink)

It is a well-known fact that mathematics plays a crucial role in physics; in fact, it is virtually impossible to imagine contemporary physics without it. But it is questionable whether mathematical concepts could ever play such a role in psychology or philosophy. In this paper, we set out to examine a rather unobvious example of the application of topology, in the form of the theory of persons proposed by Kurt Lewin in his Principles of Topological Psychology. Our aim is to (...) show that this branch of mathematics can furnish a natural conceptual system for Gestalt psychology, in that it provides effective tools for describing global qualitative aspects of the latter’s object of investigation. We distinguish three possible ways in which mathematics can contribute to this: explanation, explication and metaphor. We hold that all three of these can be usefully characterized as throwing light on their subject matter, and argue that in each case this contrasts with the role of explanations in physics. Mathematics itself, we argue, provides something different from such explanations when applied in the field of psychology, and this is nevertheless still cognitively fruitful. (shrink)

Nursing has a considerable history of theory development but has consistently struggled to reconcile theoretical reality and practice realities. Many authors have attempted to reconcile what has been called the “theory–practice gap,” but the space where these two realities enmesh has remained problematic and contentious (Aimei, Macau Journal of Nursing, 14, 2015, 13; Factor, Matienzo, & de Guzman, Nurse Education Today, 57, 2017, 82). The idea of the theory–practice gap has a significant history in nursing, but also continues to have (...) a significant presence within nursing literature and mythology up to the present (Aimei, Macau Journal of Nursing, 14, 2015, 13). In this paper, the space between theoretic reality and practice reality, as evidenced by the theory–practice gap, will be examined. A Heideggerian perspective of “dwelling” (Heidegger, 1971, Poetry, language, thought, New York, NY: Harper Colophon) will be used as a guiding discourse to move nursing away from this classic tension between theory and practice, towards a perspective where theory and practice are woven together as part of one reality. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest ukazanie podstaw prawnych i przebiegu sporu prawnego między królami Polski a władcami Hiszpanii dotyczącego praw do neapolitańskiego dziedzictwa królowej Bony, na które składały się księstwa Bari i Rossano, majątek ruchomy oraz pożyczka udzielona przez Bonę królowi Hiszpanii w wysokości 430 tys. dukatów zabezpieczona na komorze celnej w Foggii (tzw. sumy neapolitańskie). Skomplikowany i trwający półtora wieku spór dynastyczny dokumentuje kilka tysięcy różnego typu źródeł rozsianych po archiwach całej Europy od Krakowa po Simancas i od Neapolu po Sztokholm. (...) Część z nich, zwłaszcza z lat 1548–1572, została opublikowana w polskich i włoskich wydawnictwach źródłowych. Całość działań królów polskich w sprawie odzyskania spadku Bony nie doczekała się nowoczesnego opracowania, a jedynym pełnym opracowaniem jest popularnonaukowa książka Klemensa Kanteckiego wydana w 1881 r. Temat ten pojawiał się na marginesie w wielu pracach dotyczących Bony i Zygmunta Augusta, dziejów dyplomacji za ostatniego Jagiellona oraz w pracach dotyczących relacji polsko-hiszpańskich w XVI i XVII w. Punktem wyjścia analizy jest ustalenie sytuacji prawnej, w jakiej znajdowały się neapolitańskie posiadłości królowej w momencie podejmowania przez nią decyzji o wyjeździe z Polski. Na tym tle wskazano najważniejsze elementy gry dyplomatycznej, jaką Bona prowadziła z cesarzem Karolem V i królem Filipem II, oraz uwarunkowania jej powrotu do Bari. Śmierć królowej w listopadzie 1557 r. i jej testament, w którym księstwa Bari i Rossano zapisywała Filipowi II, a Zygmunt August dziedziczył jedynie dobra ruchome i sumy neapolitańskie, otworzyły nowy etap w dziejach sporu polsko-hiszpańskiego. Na potrzeby rokowań mających na celu odzyskanie całego spadku po matce Zygmunt August zbudował wyjątkowo rozległą i dobrze funkcjonującą sieć dyplomatyczną. Niepowodzenia w odzyskaniu Bari i Rossano spowodowały, że król zdecydował się na mediację cesarza w toczonym sporze z królem Hiszpanii. Arbitraż stwarzał dla Zygmunta Augusta nową sytuację prawną i modyfikował sposób i zakres działania. Wydaje się, że król nie do końca uświadamiał sobie, w jak skomplikowany labirynt prawno-administracyjny wprowadza sprawę spadku po matce i wkracza w świat odmiennych obyczajów i mentalności. Ostatecznie królowi udało się odzyskać jedynie część majątku ruchomego i zachować prawo do sum neapolitańskich, które wraz ze śmiercią Anny Jagiellonki przeszły na własność Rzeczypospolitej. W konsekwencji kolejni królowie elekcyjni aż do czasu wojny o sukcesję hiszpańską zabiegali w Madrycie i Neapolu o regularną wypłatę odsetek z sum neapolitańskich. (shrink)

This article explains how people synchronize their thoughts through empathetic relationships and points out the elementary neuronal mechanisms orchestrating this process. The many dimensions of empathy are discussed, as is the manner by which empathy affects health and disorders. A case study of teaching children empathy, with positive results, is presented. Mirror neurons, the recently discovered mechanism underlying empathy, are characterized, followed by a theory of brain-to-brain coupling. This neuro-tuning, seen as a kind of synchronization between brains and between individuals, (...) takes various forms, including frequency aspects of language use and the understanding that develops regardless of the difference in spoken tongues. Going beyond individual-to-individual empathy and SYNC, the article explores the phenomenon of synchronization in groups and points out how synchronization increases group cooperation and performance. (shrink)

We can speak about individual and social (characteristic for a population) values, but it is difficult to present universal, specifically human values, except for biological needs. The reason of it follows from the fact that superior values, related to two human needs (world model cognition and the meaningful sense of life) depend upon a world-view, in advance accepted and inculcated in us. From this world-view we as its followers draw our notions of good and bad, we shape our ideas on (...) proper human relations and on what for us should be the most important. So what can be of universally human character? It seems that only the possibility of possessing a system of values, of forming its features and defining its components. (shrink)

It is an attempt to exemplify the style of Wierciński’s scientific approach. The first part (A. Zamojski) presents his concept of the peculiarity of the specific human nature which is polarized into the animal side versus the human potential. The second part (R. Stefański) describes the anthropological concept of ideological development with the focus on the notion of ideological control subsystem. The latter can be employed as a tool of surveying the internal consistency of social organizations.

It is widely believed that mathematics carries a substantial part of the explanatory burden in science. However, mathematics can also play important heuristic roles of a different kind, being a source of new ideas and approaches, allowing us to build toy models, enhancing expressive power and providing fruitful conceptualizations. In this paper, we focus on the application of dynamical systems theory (DST) within the extended cognition (EC) field of cognitive science, considering this case study to be a good illustration of (...) a general phenomenon. In the paper, we justify both a negative and a positive claim. The negative claim is that dynamical systems theory hardly plays any explanatory role in EC research. We justify our claim by analyzing several accounts of the explanatory role of mathematics and stressing the way mathematical arguments are used in explanations. Our positive claim is that even though, for now, DST has no explanatory power in many of the EC approaches, it still plays an important heuristic role there. In particular, using mathematical notions improves the expressive power of the language and gives a sense of understanding of the phenomena under investigation. The case study of EC allows us to identify and analyze this important role of mathematics, which seems to be neglected in contemporary discussions. (shrink)

The difference between what's possible and what's not is a construct of the human mind, a matter of perspective, and it's one that can be changed. Working Wonders explains the fundamentals that shape the mind: how it builds walls to protect itself and how a person can tear those walls down to tackle challenges that would have previously been discounted as unrealistic. This volume shares case studies featuring people making the impossible a reality and, in doing so, changing the world (...) for the better. On a deeper level and yet still using non-technical language, the book identifies possible neurological and psychosocial mechanisms that limit the brain, and techniques that may open it up to exploring the seemingly unachievable. Praszkier also introduces the concept of 'possibilitivity', a personality trait that reflects the propensity to perceive insurmountable challenges as doable, and concludes by presenting a portfolio of 'Do It Yourself' techniques. (shrink)