The relation of emergence allows to understand life as a key emergent quality for the biology. We find number of examples of emergent phenomena in the chemistry and in the biology. However, there is a lack of a clear explication of understanding both the emergence and its biological exemplification. Conditions of the biological emergence, which are formulated in the current literature, help to fill that gap and to provide a satisfying definition of that relation. At the same time it throws a new light on the debate for a research paradigma between the reductionism and the emergentism. After a time of underlying differences, today the main attention is given to their likeness and possibilities for cooperation of those two apprehensions.

In the modern human sciences, there is a lot of confusion with regard to the understanding of basic terms. Each author tries to develop his own terminology and thus makes any discussion of his ideas very difficult from the very beginning. This is, for instance, the case with theories of personality.Is it possible that the psychologists may use the tools that have for centuries been successfully used in philosophical anthropology?If we had at least one point of reference, we could probably do so. Is the classical concept of the human person a possible point of reference for a psychologist? This paper is an attempt to answer the question.

The aim of the article is to consider the problem of metaphysical realism that is defined as the thesis that there are objects that are independent of human consciousness. The problem was not solved by I. Kant, since he assumed, without a justification, that there are objects (“things in themselves”) that are the causes of human mental states. The author interprets the problem of metaphysical realism in the context of the so-called principle of immanence (“principle of consciousness”), according to which every entity (object) may be treated exclusively as a correlate of consciousness. The principle of immanence is the cause why even causal relations have to be treated as only certain data for the consciousness, and hence they may not be referred to by asserting that there is a factor that is the cause of states of human consciousness. Contemporary anti-realism, as the so-called conceptual realism, does not consider the problem of metaphysical realism in the context of the principle of immanence, and hence it is not a part of the traditional dispute on the existence of the (external) world. The author sees the solution to the problem of metaphysical realism in combining two arguments: in the reference to the ontological proof, which – via God’s veracity – is to “lead outside” the immanence of consciousness, and in the reference to the concept of participation in such a way that the human mind participates in God and it is Him that is the real entity (ens realissimum) that is referred to by the dispute about the existence of the world and the problem of metaphysical realism.

The article is devoted to the question of the origin of temporal logic. The aim of it is to answer to the question concerning the group of conditions and reasons of constructing such kinds of systems (especially of tense logic and G. H. von Wright’s temporal logic). As a result of conducted considerations, there is stated that there exist two reasons of arising some temporal systems. The first of them was the rebirth of interests of issues involving time in aspect of logic, the second (more essential) – insufficiency of the language of the classical logical calculus to give the formalization of tense clauses. In connection with this there was begun constructing temporal systems providing the linguistic and inferencional apparatus needed to control expressions and inferences containing such clauses. In the article there is also shown how there was led to formalize expressions including various tense clauses, and what follows, to introduce new functors to the language of logic.

Many authors have pointed out that notion of simplicity is unclear. For deeper understanding of this term, we investigate it in the conceptual framework of Akaike Informative Criterion (AIC). Advantages as well as troubles of such formulation are presented in the paper. We also discuss a role which plays the simplicity notion formulated in statistical framework within Sober’s philosophy of science conception.

The aim of the present article is to present José Ortega y Gasset’s philosophical thought, with special attention paid to his author’s project of vital philosophy. The author primarily focuses on the category of life that Gasset worked out, that is a reality with a radical and absolute character, both in the epistemological meaning enquiring about the foundation of our cognition, and in the metaphysical one, turning to the issue of being. Gasset is convinced about the necessity of overcoming the paradigm of modern philosophy that is based on hegemony of pure, mathematical reason, which, being unable to immobilize life and subject it to analysis, consequently turns away from it, assuming the thesis that the knowledge of what is dynamic and variable (doxa) is less valuable that the knowledge of what is stable and eternal (episteme) as a rule. Gasset’s aim, on the other hand, is the to bring back life and vitality to their proper place.

The main purpose of this paper is to present the concept of explanatory filter as developed by William Dembski, a proponent of intelligent design theory. The explanatory filter is intended as a tool for detecting design, i.e. for discriminating between the results of intelligent and unintelligent activity, in case when the underlying causal history is unknown. Dembski claims that the explanatory filter as a method of design detection is already widely used in various branches of knowledge, although in a pre-theoretic form. His goal is to give the filter a rigorous theoretical shape, as well as to apply it to natural sciences such as cosmology or biology. After outlining the foundations of Dembski’s proposal, various objections to the concept of explanatory filter will be analyzed.

Autogeny, sometimes also called “naïve”, spontaneous generation (Lat. generatio spontanea) is – most generally speaking – a view, according to which living creatures come into being spontaneously and voluntarily from inanimate matter. Such a broad formulation of the idea of autogeny, however, does not show significant differences that occur in understanding it. The basis for these differences is constituted by different definitions of what should be considered inanimate matter, and what – animate matter. A thorough consideration of the arguments that have been offered in the history of research into the nature in order to justify the idea of autogeny, and an investigation into the modern debates and controversies concerning this idea allow discovering a variety of interpretations of the view of a spontaneous and voluntary origin of biological organisms. The variety was formed together with the development of the scientific empirical method and with the participation of philosophical concepts explaining the way the animate world functions. With time, the idea of a spontaneous origin of organisms underwent many transformations, first consisting in limiting the range of its application (from macroscopic organisms with complex structure to relatively simple microorganisms), then in a change in its understanding, and finally to questioning the very idea. Also the way changed, in which the possibility of the occurrence of autogeny in the nature was motivated. However, it seems that the very core of the idea of autogeny, which contains a general thought about transformation of matter leading to the origin of living organisms is still maintained in the contemporary natural science.

A proof for God’s existence, inspired by Duns Scotus’s Tractatus de primo principio, is analyzed. The conclusion is based on three premises arranged in the matrix of a specific modal logic. The premises are: 1. it is possible for the world to be created by God; 2. if the world is created by God, then God exists; 3. if God exists, then God exists necessarily. In comparison to the original Scotus’s work the concept of essential order has been removed and replaced with a concept of creation. Modal expressions of the proof have been analyzed with an application of essentialism of Aristotle and Ibn Sina – the version of essentialism accepted by Scotus. Scotus’s underlying modal logic has been reconstructed and discussed in two versions: 1. as a modal logic with one pair of natural modalities; 2. as a multimodal logic with two pairs of modalities – natural and logical. The concept of natural modality is based on the essentialism discussed, the concept of logical modality is based on Scotus’s idea of non repugnantia terminorum.

In this article the two approaches towards representation of action, namely the Anselmian and Davidsonian ones, are described and compared. Especially the ontological commitment of the two approaches are brought to light. The central problem of the paper is the question of adequacy of these approaches to representation of actions.

In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was the heated discussion going on concerning a question: “what is life?” between the representatives of two opposing positions: “mechanism” and “vitalism”. The twentieth century adopted this dispute as a heritage of the past centuries. In the twentieth century many researchers, rejecting both mechanistic and vitalistic conception of life, proposed their own, alternative theory of life. Beside the theory of the „directness of life” that was proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century by J. S. Haldane and elaborated in the following years by L. von Bertalanffy in the system theory of an organism, the special attention should be paid to the “biosystemism” that was already introduced at the end of the twentieth century by M. Mahner and M. Bunge.According to the above-mentioned conception, bios is a new, emergent level, which is rooted in a chemical level. Living systems, despite the fact that they are created from physicochemical subsystems, have, as these two researchers claim, new emergent properties, which are not carried by their component parts.

The article presents the debate between truth relativism and truth absolutism. The source of relativism is the lack of certainty (if we have no guarantee that any of our proposition is true, we can think that our concept of objective truth is useless and should be replaced by a concept of subjective and so relative truth). Relativism is the thesis that truth depends on subject, time, place and circumstances of assertion, and so, two opposite propositions can be both true (for instance for two different persons). Truth absolutism is the negation of truth relativism. It is a thesis that one and the same proposition can not be both true and false relative to any circumstances of its assertion (time, subject, place). The main contemporary relativist argument is concept relativism (we must think in a conceptual scheme, so the truth of our beliefs depends in some way on the scheme). But, the concept relativism does not entail truth relativism. Only existence of a proposition depends on a conceptual scheme. The truth of the proposition need not be so dependent, if we accept the existence of the objective world and the concept of objective truth. Objectivism entails absolutism (objective truth is timeless).