Medicine is a scientific discipline, but it is sometimes difficult to separate what is scientific and what is a clinical, practical activity. Man is the object, but he is always the subject of medical research and therefore these two elements become closely bound together by a thread of moral interdependencies. Every mentor of a young academic and all institutions dealing with the teaching of and research into medicine must understand multidimensional, multifaceted, and multilevel aspects of their activity and give them (...) due regard in the educational process. The educational mission of an academic institution and of the teacher working there may be summed up in one phrase: Teach thinking! At the same time, the task of a school and the individual mentor is to teach the student to distinguish personal freedom from a lack of the feeling of responsibility. The medieval principle “Universitas magistrorum et scholarium”, and thus the corporation, the community of teachers and students, has not lost any of its relevance and value today. The situation is, in its far-reaching consequences, tragic in which the “insufficiently tutored teach”. Both physician and teacher, and especially physician-teacher, are not only professions, but also callings. (shrink)

This is a new edition of the manual published in 1974 and 1984. Compared with those earlier editions it is revised, enlarged and more precise in its argumentation. In its beginnings the manual aimed at meeting the didactic needs to present students of the Faculty of Christian Philosophy at the ATK a complete handling of Christian ethics. The author, who wrote his manual in difficult times of communist ideology, decided to include in one work, besides a positive exposition of Christian (...) ethics, a critical discussion with other ethical systems as well as his own explicit theory on Augustinian and Thomistic ethics, which he endeavoured to develop. Thus the work interlocked the didactic objectives and the process of growth and justification of the Author's views, Krakow 2001, p. 308). (shrink)

The book introduces Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s philosophy of action into the mainstream of contemporary action-theoretical debates. Piotr Makowski shows that Kotarbiński–Alfred Tarski’s teacher and one of the most important philosophers of the renowned Lvov-Warsaw school—proposed a groundbreaking, original, and (in at least a few respects) still fresh perspective in action theorizing. The book examines and develops Kotarbiński’s ideas in the context of the most recent discussions in the philosophy of action. The main idea behind Kotarbiński’s action theory—and thus, behind this (...) book—is the significance of the philosophical investigations of the general conditions of effectiveness, efficiency, and economy of intentional actions. Makowski presents and reinterprets Kotarbiński’s views on these dimensions of our activities and sheds new light on the most important areas of action theory. (shrink)

Argues that the key distinction between human and nonhuman social cognition consists in our complex, diverse and flexible capacities to shape each other's minds in ways that make them easier to interpret.

Argues that the key distinction between human and nonhuman social cognition consists in our complex, diverse and flexible capacities to shape each other's minds in ways that make them easier to interpret.

The eminent 20th-century Polish philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński is the author of a novatory philosophy of combating global suffering. Kotarbiński’s theory states that although humans are by nature rational, and additionally endowed with goodwill, human life nonetheless offers an endless stream of pain and suffering. Some of this suffering results from the essence of the human condition and can not be helped, mostly, however, it is the effect of the meanderings of the human mind and can be eliminated by education. (...) More than by anything else, the human mind is brought to err by so-called phantasmats, or emotion-laden intellectual mirages, mainly of a religious, national and political nature. Such phantasmats are the source and fundament of humanity’s divisions into hostile cultures, nations and political systems, which in turn gives rise to conflict between civilizations, countries and ideologies, inadvertently accompaniedby mounting mistrust, suspiciousness, xenophobia, hatred, armaments—and ultimately war. All this means an ocean of suffering for countless individuals. Both in philosophy and praxis Kotarbiński strove to eliminate all sources of suffering, including that stemming from differences in culture, development, nationality, and politics. He believed in the motivating powers of reason and the creative powers of persuasion, and consequently sought to attain his goal by rationalization, or focusing solely on the logic-driven and common experiencing of the human fate in a bid to eradicate cultural, national and political difference. Thus united, humanity would melt into one big human state devoted to lingering inevitable suffering. Today similar views are promoted as “global humanism”—which makes Kotarbiński a pioneer of the Humanistic Manifesto 2000. An Appeal for New Global Humanism brochure. (shrink)

One of the factors that adversely influenced the worldwide reception of Fleck was the rather narrow critical interest that his ideas had aroused in Poland. Apart from a few reviews of his book, only two polemics were published before WWII, and these likewise fell into oblivion. The philosophical views of one of those polemists, Tadeusz Bilikiewicz, shared the same fate. Since an acquaintance with Bilikiewicz’s background would seem to be a necessary condition for a understanding of his controversy with (...) Fleck, the aim of this paper is to sketch his views on the history and sociology of science, and to clarify certain errors regarding the facts of his life. (shrink)

The paper depicts the evolution of the conception of the method of analytical description of Czeżowski, one of the most important figures of the Lvov-Warsaw School of Philosophy. It portrays Czeżowski as an author, whose voice on relation between theory and experience, as well as language and empirical reality, can be still considered important and significant. Generally speaking, Czeżowski distinguishes between two kinds of methods: the inductive ones and the no inductive, i.e. the method of analytic description. The results of (...) the former are the base of every further scientific activity, from the empirical sciences to philosophy. The method serves, first of all, to define abstract concepts and to precise scientific terms, what allow next to set and to express relations between them. Its application is an indispensable and essential part of process of building every abstract scientific theory. Despite some similarities between Czeżowski’s method and other methods of conceptual analysis, the former is not subjected to the paradox of analysis, according to the author of the paper. (shrink)

I briefly review the three basic strategies for naturalizing intentionality discussed by Haugeland 4:383–427, 1990, and Hutto and Satne, recounting their deficits. Then, I focus on Dennett’s version of what Haugeland calls the “second-base … neo-behaviorist” strategy. After briefly explaining Dennett’s proposal, I defend it against four common objections: circularity, relativity, under-specified rationality, and failure to track robustly natural facts. I conclude by recounting the advantages of Dennettian neo-behaviorism over the neo-Cartesian and neo-pragmatist alternatives, as well as Hutto and Satne’s (...) proposal that intentionality comes in two distinct kinds. (shrink)

Although Brandom is critical of some features of narrowly conceived classical pragmatism, at the same time he explicitly embraces a version of pragmatism, both in his overall philosophical outlook, and in his philosophy of language. Brandom’s distinctive theoretical approach is based on what he calls rationalist pragmatism, which is a version of fundamental pragmatism. Within the philosophy of language it takes the form of semantic pragmatism. The paper briefly discusses Brandomian version of fundamental pragmatism and its semantic underpinning, and subsequently (...) formulates a basic dilemma it encounters there. (shrink)

The problem of evil is a metaphysical problem bound up with the conditions of human existence. The radical evil of fascism and communism, according to Józef Tischner, opens up the possibility that we live in the time of a modern Manichaeism, understood as having two faces: nihilism and pessimism. The possibility of thinking of such a modem form of Manichaeism necessarily calls for a new inquiry into the question of evil. For Tischner, evil, like good, is not an object, but (...) something in which man participates, and for this reason it cannot be objectified and defined. One can only ask how it appears. (shrink)

I pose the following dilemma for Millikan's teleological theory of mental content. There is only one way that her theory can avoid Gauker's [(1995) Review of Millikan's White queen psychology and other essays for Alice, Philosophical Psychology, 8, 305-309] charge that it relies on an unexplained notion of mapping or isomorphism between mental state and world. Mental content must be explained in terms of the mapping relation that is required for mental state producing and consuming mechanisms to perform their biologically (...) proper functions, i.e. producing mental states that are consumed in systematically adaptive practical inferences. However, this proposal leads to unacceptably counterintuitive ascriptions of content to mythological beliefs and related desires: such beliefs and desires must "map onto" environmental states that make them adaptive, not onto the mythological states of affairs that (would) make them true or fulfilled. I conclude by discussing the merits and drawbacks of a potential solution to this problem: the view that the contents of mythological beliefs and desires are determined by the non-mythological concepts out of which they are constructed, rather than by the environmental states that make them adaptive. The affinities of this proposal with Pascal Boyer's recent theory of mythological concepts [(2001) Religion explained, New York: Basic Books] are also discussed. (shrink)

Sir Michael Dummett belongs to a small group of the greatest analytical philosophers of the second half of the 20th century, and presumably it would be no exaggeration to consider him the most prominent and influential British philosopher over the last three decades. He has published numerous articles, not only in the field of philosophy. However, a reader willing to learn his recent views is going to face some problems. Although Dummett’s most extended monograph — The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (...) — being a systematic exposition of his own views, was published relatively not so long ago, large parts of it, presented as The William James Lectures at the Harvard University, originally have even come from 1976. From this earlier material, the reader can hardly separate what Dummett has added when preparing this monograph to publication, at the end of the 1980s. (shrink)