The main aim of this article is to present an outline of the most important part of a theoretical-cognitive conception by Désiré Mercier, a founder of a Neo-scholastic Louvain school, showing not only the issue crucial to his philosophy, but also an evolution of an epistemological thought by a Belgian cardinal.In this main part, the article examines an evolution of Mercier’s means of interpretation of a classical definition of truth, and shows a prospect for the analysis of his understanding of a judgement’s nature, especially the nature of the references between its two basics constituents: a subject and predicate. In Mercier’s opinion, it is the most important problem in all theory of certainty, and he defines it like a first fundamental problem – a synthesis of the subject and predicate, i.e. the question on the status and cognitive value of different kinds of opinion. His effort in solution of this problem concerns mainly A general criteriology, Mercier’s main work in which a systematic theory of cognition is derived from Thomas Aquinas’s classical texts, confirming a Thomistic epistemology on the paths of a philosophical realism.

The legend of Galileo’s encounter with the Inquisition is one of the constitutive myths of modernity. That encounter is often seen as a prime example of the hostility between science and religion. This essay examines some of the events of the “Galileo Affair” in order to show how misunderstandings of what occurred in the 17th Century continue to have currency. In particular, Galileo did not demonstrate that the Earth moved; he did not think that his astronomical observations were sufficient to constitute such a proof. Both he and his opponents in the Inquisition accepted the prevailing Aristotelian conception of what a demonstration in science consisted. However misguided, the Inquisition’s actions were disciplinary not doctrinal. In ordering Galileo not to defend the view that the Earth moved, the Inquisition subordinated the interpretation of the Bible to geocentric astronomy. The “legend of Galileo” continues to be used as an ideological weapon in contemporary cultural debates, including discourse about the relationship between faith and reason, the Bible and science.

The purpose of this paper is to show the criterion of the choice of a correct logic. According to Vaidya such the criterion may be formulated only on the foundation of a philosophy of logic. The main elements of the laws of logic are logical constants. In fact logic is not the theory of variables, but the theory of logical constants. So, the goal of a correct logical system is to analyse in a proper way what logical constants are.

Professor Leon Koj presented his views on the nature of beliefs in some his papers. This article refers and discusses some main theses of Koj’s conception of belief. Koj treated beliefs as a kind of thinking and stressed a role of spontaneous beliefs a base of knowledge. This kind of belief does not require a justification until a change in belief is on offer.

In the article I reconstruct and analyse basic presuppositions of Hartshorne’s metaphysics leading to the thesis that events are more basic (in ontological sense of the word) entities than substances. Hartshorne defines the ontic priority in terms of determinateness and maintains that substances are less determinate that events and in fact they are universals. In the third part of the paper I give a short commentary of such a view from the standpoint of Roman Ingarden’s version of substantialism. I try to defend, among others, the following theses:1. Hartshorne wrongly recognizes the ontic structure of state of affairs and consequently of the event. He misunderstands the function of properties claiming that they complete the substance like an additional element with which it forms a more concrete compound object.2. He mistakenly interprets the potentiality of substance and suggests it depends on mysterious “places of indeterminateness” inherent in substance.3. Hartshorne wrongly holds that relations “substance — event” and “genus — species” are of the same type and have the same character. The reason of this mistake is Harsthorne’s belief that there are no accidental properties (ultraessentialism).

In his paper, Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories, Michael Stocker accuses modern ethical theories of affecting a moral agent with a kind of schizophrenia, where one of the agent’s „I” desires something while the other “I” of the very same agent commands to do one’s duty. The problem is that quite often one’s desires do not match with his or her duties, and the harmony of both – as Stocker says – is a sign, and therefore one of the goals of good life.Modern ethical theories mainly focus on the analysis of moral acts alone (as deontologies do) or on their external consequences (as utilitarianism does), Hus ignoring all that happens within a moral agent (his intentions, motives, moral dispositions and attitudes). In moral evaluation they concentrate merely on moral rightness of an act, leaving moral goodness, as it seems, out of the range of their interest.The aim of this paper is to show that one can overcome the schizophrenity of utilitarian and deontological approaches by resorting to the category of virtue. Currently, such a solution has been presented by the advocates of virtue ethics, recognized as a serious alternative to deontology and utilitarianism. A virtuous person is an agent who not only knows what one should do, but also desires to act so. Emotions and feelings are in harmony with moral judgments of practical reason; a moral agent acts as he or she should and finds satisfaction in acting so, even if it requires a change of one’s desires and the agent must properly work on shaping his or her own desires. One of the thesis of this paper is that one can solve the problem of schizophernity also within deontological or utilitarian theories by simply incorporating some aretology (theory of virtue).

The first part of the article discusses one of the more important issues in the contemporary philosophy of perception and mind, i.e. the problem of the relation between experience and concepts, and that against the background of the conceptualism vs. nonconceptualism debate. On the conceptualist account of empirical cognition, perceptual contents are (throughout) conceptual in the sense that concepts constitute (through and through) the contents of perceptual experience. It is a necessary condition of the ascription of an experience and an empirical belief to a subject that he or she possessed concepts figuring in the characteristic of his or her experience. The relation between experience and belief is described as rational (or logical) rather than causal. I suggest a critical approach towards the conceptualist view in that I spell out some of its inconsistencies. Further, I focus on some selected kinds of nonconceptualism supported by such theorists as Ch. Peacocke, F. Dretske and J. L. Bermúdez.In the second part of my paper, I criticize McDowell’s conceptualist reading of Kant, on which the author of the Critique of Pure Reason is considered as representing the originally conceptualist position. Some of the theses Kant argues for in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and earlier on in his 1770 Inaugural Dissertation allow us to conclude that, on a certain interpretation of the forms of empirical cognition (space and time), perception, on Kant’s theory, could be regarded as an active but not a concept-involving cognitive process.