The article presents the universe in cosmology of the Venerable Bede, British scholar of the eighth century. Bede’s description of the world as whole was made by the knowledge of ancient (Pliny the Elder) and Christian (St. Isidore of Seville). Geocentric cosmos conceived as a system of fixed stars and the planets on the circles. Celestial bodies are made of fire. On Earth, there are four elements. Bede was interested in philosophy of nature and enrichment of scientific knowledge with the theological reflection. Cosmology of Bede represents an important stage of development of science in Western Christianity in the early Middle Ages.

The article below consists of two parts. In the longer first one, we present the salient features of Sellars’ conception of the manifest and scientific images of the world, and seek to determine the ways in which these two elements may be said to be related to one another. On the basis of this, we then point out one of the sources of the contemporary mind-body problem. In the shorter second part, we outline a variety of philosophical and neuroscientific proposals for resolving the issue of the relationship between our everyday intuitive understanding of what the mental states of a person amount to and their brain states as described in strictly scientific terms.

According to the later Wittgenstein, religious beliefs are ethically and existentially meaningful, being an important guidance in the life of a believer, and expressing a rule “clothed” in a picture. In the article I try to determine the role of some religious pictures mentioned by the author of “Lectures on Religious Belief”, e.g. the picture of God and the Last Judgment. A key issue of this conception is a denial that religious pictures depict or denote metaphysical reality. The view that a language of religion is non-referential means its deontologisation and is the core of noncognitivism, within the scope of which Wittgenstein offers a functional approach: the philosopher’s task is to describe – by means of grammatical investigations – the use of religious pictures in the practice of a believer. Does Wittgenstein subscribe to radical reductionism, reject metaphysics and reduce religion to ethics? I point out that his analysis of the grammar of the word “God” can be interpreted in the spirit of negative theology. Religious concepts are dissimilar to the ordinary language concepts; the meaning of religious beliefs regarded as cognitive assertions is not clearly defined, they have, so to speak, no (clear) meaning. Hence, one may venture to say that the later Wittgenstein leaves to metaphysics a blank area for “the Inexpressible”. If so, it brings to mind a famous sentence from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.

The main aim of this article is to present Charles Darwin’s standpoint on religion. Polish as well as foreign literature gives much contradictory information on this topic. Depending on a source one can come across a theistic, agnostic or atheistic interpretation of his views. Darwin himself referred to this issue ambiguously. The author claims that Darwin did so intentionally for he wanted at all costs to avoid the controversy over his family and himself. In fact, later in his life, Darwin rejected God.

The paper contains references to a logical construction with two types of negation: an external (~) and internal (¬) one, where the substitution of the dichotomous law of excluded middle (with the αV~α schema) by the trichotomy (αV¬αV±α) is proposed. With reference to an object belonging to a given universe and a given set of predicates some of them apply to it, whereas others do not. There can also exist such predicates which cannot be sensibly said to apply to it – they are indeterminate to it. What is proposed here is transferring these distinctions to a sentence calculus and devising a construction with a functor of weak assertion (+) as its primitive functor. This functor together with the functor of external negation allow an additional interpretation of the sentences falling into the third category described above (indirectness) whenever there is a need to express sentences referring to indirect states between the positive state and its negative counterpart.

An extensional mereology was subjected to analysis of many authors. It was proved that it corresponds to a Boolean algebra without a null element. A slightly modified version of this model in which the primitive relation of being a part does not fullfill the Extensional Principle, will be called: Non-extensional Mereology. There is no systematic analysis for such a model until now. Some authors present partial descriptions of it. In this work we would like to propose a detailed and systematic analysis of Non-extensional Mereology. We present a minimal set of axioms and show that this model, under certain conditions, corresponds to an implicative lattice.