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81. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Władysław Stróżewski Human Being and Values
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The axiological structure of man is by its nature defined by its relation to values. Its main task consists in their “implementation.” In this sense, the axiological structure has a teleological character. Its most important determining factor is the attitude of its subjects, man, towards values, or, to be more precise, towards the choice of values and their realisation within oneself. The arguments present a proposition of a multi-aspect stude of man in the context of values. It is remarkable that so far this background has not been taken into consideration, or at least not satisfactorily enough, in attempts aiming at explaining the essence of personality. Yet it does seem that what we call “man’s axiological structure” significantly affects an individual’s personality, and possibily constitutes it.
82. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Monika Piotrowska The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability
83. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Thomas Nys Full of Hope and Fear: The Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin Revisited
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In this paper I argue that Isaiah Berlin’s theory of freedom should not be interpreted in a reductive sense. The distinction between negative and positive freedom, as different concepts and possibly conflicting values, truly holds (thereby excluding reductive interpretations that claim there is only one concept of freedom). Moreover, Berlin’s theory as a whole leaves room for both a comprehensive liberalism which advocates autonomy, critical reflection and personal judgement, as well as a liberalism of fear which defends a minimal level of decency and modesty aims at a modus vivendi. I think Berlin’s liberalism is one of hope and fear.
84. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Marek Rembierz Epistemologia - poznanie, prawda, wiedza, realizm: (Epistemology. Cognition. Truth. Knowledge. Realism.)
85. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Ishtiyaque H. Haji Modest Libertarianism, Luck, and Control: Reply to Gerald Harrison
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Whether indeterminism undermines moral responsibility by subverting one or more of responsibility’s requirements is something that has received close attention in the recent literature on free will. In this paper, I take issue with Gerald Harrison’s attempt to deflect various considerations for the view that indeterminism threatens responsibility either by threatening the control that responsibility requires or by posing a problem of luck.
86. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Peter Baumann Persons, Human Beings, and Respect
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Human dignity seems very important to us. At the same time, the concept ‘human dignity’ is extrordinarily elusive. A good way to approach the questions “What is it?” and “Why is it important?” is to raise another question first: In virtue of what do human beings have dignity? Speciesism - the idea that human beings have a particular dignity because they are humans - does not seem very convincing. A better answer says that human beings have dignity because and insofar as they are persons. I discuss several versions of this idea as well as several objections against it. The most promising line of analysis says that human beings cannot survive psychologically without a very basic form of recognition and respect by others. The idea that humans have a very special dignity is the idea that they owe each other this kind of respect. All this also suggests that human dignity is inherently social. Non-social beings do not have dignity - nor do they lack it. It is because we are social animals of a certain kind that we have dignity - not so much because we are rational animals.
87. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Daniel Massey Moral Skepticisms
88. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Paweł Kawalec Metodologia nauk: (Methodology of Science)
89. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Piotr Bołtuć Why Common Sense Morality is Not Collectively Self-Defeating
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The so-called Common Sense Morality (C) is any moral theory that allows, or requires, an agent to accept special, non-instrumental reasons to give advantage to certain other persons, usually the agent’s friends or kin, over the interests of others. Opponents charge C with violating the requirement of impartiality defined as independence on positional characteristics of moral agents and moral patients. Advocates of C claim that C is impartial, but only in a positional manner in which every moral agent would acquire the same relational characteristics if that agent was in a certain relationship to the given moral patient. The opponents of C reply that a theory that allows for positional characteristics is self-defeating; it violates the requirement of prescriptivity due to its inability to provide moral recommendations what should happen all things considered. Advocates of C retort that a moral theory should be prescriptive by telling every agent what to do, not what should the joint outcome of those activities be. In this paper I analyze the last two moves of this debate: the objection that C is self-defeating and the reply that there is a plausible moral theory (C) that accommodates positional characteristics of special moral reasons. I argue that the last move wins. In the process I sketch out a theory able to accommodate agent-relative moral reason.
90. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Adam J. Chmielewski The Enlightenment’s Concept of the Individual and its Contemporary Criticism
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Communitarian social philosophy was born in opposition to some tenets of liberalism. Liberal individualism has been among its most strongly contested claims. In their criticisms, the communitarians point to the Enlightenment’s sources of the individualist vision of society and morality. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that, even if the communitarian line of argument has been justified in more than one way, it is at the same time important to remember that the greatest figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, that of of David Hume, does not fit the individualistic picture too well. I shall begin with a contemporary definition of individualism, as defined by John Watkins, then I shall proceed to argue that methodological individualism is rarely an innocent philosophical position, i.e. that it is very often a preliminary step in attempts to find a solution to many other, much more important and more practically relevant issues. For methodological individualism is usually associated with ontological, as well as moral and political individualistic doctrines, and they usually go hand in hand, influencing and strengthening each other.
91. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Robert Barnard Veritas: The Correspondence Theory and Its Critics
92. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 10 > Issue: 2
Anna Cremaldi Is Aristotelian Generosity a Unified Virtue?
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Commentators worry that Aristotelian generosity is a conglomeration of distinct virtues, rather than a single, unified virtue. This paper argues that the virtue of generosity is unified if we recognize that the generous person’s goal lies in promoting friendship — in particular, in ensuring that there is sufficient wealth to support a community of friends. One of the important consequences of this reading is that it reverses the standard interpretation according to which Aristotelian generosity resembles our modern conception of generosity as an impartial virtue. On the proposed view, Aristotelian generosity is undergirded by reciprocity, rather than impartiality.
93. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 10 > Issue: 2
Diego Fusaro The Role of Aesthetics in Fichte’s Science of Knowledge
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This paper aims to address the problem of aesthetics in relation to Fichte’s Science of Knowledge Wissenschaftslehre as System der Freiheit. We will focus more specifically on the role that aesthetics plays in connection with the supporting structures of the science of knowledge and on what has been happily referred to as Fichte’s praxologische Dialektik.
94. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 10 > Issue: 2
Wolfgang Barz A Note on a Remark of Evans
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In his seminal paper, ‘Can There Be Vague Objects?’ (1978), Gareth Evans advanced an argument purporting to prove that the idea of indeterminate identity is incoherent. Aware that his argument was incomplete as it stands, Evans added a remark at the end of his paper, in which he explained how the original argument needed to be modified to arrive at an explicit contradiction. This paper aims to develop a modified version of Evans’ original argument, which I argue is more promising than the modification that Evans proposed in his remark. Last, a structurally similar argument against the idea of indeterminate existence is presented.
95. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 10 > Issue: 2
Ryan J. Johnson Homesickness and Nomadism: Traveling with Kant and Maimon
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Solomon Maimon argues that while Kantianism does venture quite a way toward the establishment of an immanent critical project that more satisfyingly addresses real experience, it does not fulfill the aims of its own project. In order to negotiate Maimon’s claim, I utilize the primary metaphorics of the First Critique: homesickness. The Kantian longing for home is an insatiable yearning, a striving for the end of something that cannot end, namely, the end of the search for home (Zuhause). According to Maimon, although home is unattainable, there is a different sense of home: home is the path itself, a sort of nomadism, a roving life of the path that never leads home. The Kant of the first Critique did not fully realize that the project could not reach an actual final resting place; in fact, this realization, that home is a transcendental ideal, might be the very motivation for the third Critique. Thus, in order not merely to justify the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, but also to allow the application of such knowledge to reach the facts themselves, actuality as such, the “well-groundedness” of the critical project requires some re-direction from Maimon. To do this, Maimon renders Kantian transcendental conditions truly genetic.
96. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 10 > Issue: 2
Piotr K. Szałek Thomas Reid, Sensations, and Intentionality
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The paper attempts to examine whether Reid adopts, but does not articulate explicitly, a philosophical theory regarding intentionality, or rather if intentionality remains an unexamined assumption within Reid’s philosophy. In the recent interpretations, Reid is perceived both as the proponent of the notion of intentionality and at the same time as a forerunner of the anti-intentional view. I will argue that the crucial element to solving this puzzling opposition in the interpretations is an analysis of the relation between sensations and perceptions. Perceptions are intentional in Reid’s view, while sensations are not intentional. However, what seems to be missing in this dichotomy is Reid’s firm assumption about the role of ‘common sense’ in sensations. Both sensations and perceptions as two separate operations of the mind contain an immediate conviction on the part of the observer about the existence of some item that is apprehended. In that sense, sensations exhibit themselves intentionally, as do perceptions. Moreover, this view of sensations argues for Reid’s position as proto-Brentanian as regards the notion of intentionality, because Brentano also assumed an essential role of an assistant judgment in the formation of sensations of items that are apprehended.
97. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 11 > Issue: 1
Michael J. Shaffer Grounding Reichenbach’s Pragmatic Vindication of Induction
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This paper has three interdependent aims. The first is to make Reichenbach’s views on induction and probabilities clearer, especially as they pertain to his pragmatic justification of induction. The second aim is to show how his view of pragmatic justification arises out of his commitment to extensional empiricism and moots the possibility of a non-pragmatic justification of induction. Finally, and most importantly, a formal decision-theoretic account of Reichenbach’s pragmatic justification is offered in terms both of the minimax principle and of the dominance principle.
98. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 11 > Issue: 1
Adam Tamas Tuboly From ‘Syntax’ to ‘Semantik’ — Carnap’s Inferentialism and Its Prospects
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The aim of this paper is to provide context for and historical exegesis of Carnap’s alleged move from syntax to semantics. The Orthodox Received View states that there was a radical break, while the Unorthodox Received View holds that Carnap’s syntactical period already had many significant semantical elements. I will argue that both of them are partly right, both of them contain a kernel of truth: it is true that Carnap’s semantical period started after his Logical Syntax of Language — in one sense of semantics. But it is also true that Carnap had already included semantical ideas in LSL: though not (just) in the sense that URV maintains. This latter sense of semantics is related to what is usually called inferentialism, and by getting a clearer picture of Carnap’s original aims, context, and concept-usage, we might be in a better position to approach his alleged inferentialism.
99. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 11 > Issue: 1
Valeria Bizzari Aristotle, Phenomenology, and the Mind/Body Problem
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The mind-body relationship is a fundamental issue that has interested philosophers from very different schools of thought. Nowadays we can observe several positions being taken on this topic — my aim is to emphasize the phenomenological perspective on the mind-body relationship and, in particular, the role of Aristotelian thought in the contributions of philosophers such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. This paper consists of three different parts: in the first part, I will briefly sketch out a phenomenological account of the living body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty; in the second part, I will try to find parallels between phenomenology and Aristotle’s philosophy. Finally, I will argue for an Aristotelian reading of schizophrenia, a pathology that seems to be caused by a disruption of the corporeal Self.
100. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 11 > Issue: 1
Douglas Ian Campbell Against Lewis on ‘Desire as Belief’
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David Lewis describes, then attempts to refute, a simple anti-Humean theory of desire he calls ‘Desire as Belief’. Lewis’ critics generally accept that his argument is sound and focus instead on trying to show that its implications are less severe than appearances suggest. In this paper I argue that Lewis’ argument is unsound. I show that it rests on an essential assumption that can be straightforwardly proven false using ideas and principles to which Lewis is himself committed.