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The present study comprises three selected ethical dilemmas of law but regarded as the most fundamental: death penalty, abortion, and euthanasia. What they have in common is a close relationship with the legal protection of the life of every human being as provided for in Art. 38, the Republic of Poland’s Constitution of 2 April 1997. The general character of the constitutional provisions caused these highly controversial issues to be left for ordinary legislation to address and for public debate, which was intensified in recent years. Public opinion polls concerning the issues in question show that in Poland supporters of the death penalty still outnumber its opponents. Opinions on the admissibility of abortion and euthanasia are divided almost in the literal sense of the word, the differences between the supporters and opponents of these kinds of behavior being negligible. It can, however, be observed that the number of abortion opponents is increasing, which may prove that the 1993 regulation successfully played an educational role, gradually strengthening the value of the protection of life, including that of conceived children. The practice of taking into consideration the influence of the public opinion on the content of legislation, arising from the principle of the democratic state ruled by law, requires that the legal awareness of Polish society be constantly improved.
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The article presents the 12th century Arab philosopher, scientist, poet and physician Ibn Bajja (Avempace) to the Lithuanian reading community; for he significantly influenced not only the development of Arab and Jewish philosophy but also that of the West. Nevertheless, as the survey of the Lithuanian philosophical literature shows, in Lithuania this philosopher is hardly known: mentioned only in one monograph on early medieval philosophy. In order to fill in the gap, the article proposes some concise information concerning Ibn Bajja’s life and philosophy. Starting with his political philosophy of Platonic origin it turns to his Peripatetic metaphysics and epistemology which constitutes the basis for eudemonistic ethics. In it Ibn Bajja teaches that living even in a bad state, the philosopher is able to reach genuine happiness by ascending the staircases of spiritual forms, or essences, up to the divine actual intellect and uniting with it. The article ends with some critical approaches to Ibn Bajja’s theory and prospect for some further inquiry.
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In article is discussed attitude of the Catholic Church to cloning phenomenon, witch is apprehensible not only as science discovery result but as sigh of time witch awakes concerns of its non-predictable practice after - effects and individual genetic insecurity in modern society. According to the Catholic Church documents, the Church appreciates the life of human from the moment of birth, so every manipulation of it is contradicting the essential virtue principles of the Church teaching. In absence of security mechanisms, exists real lure to experiment with human genes, seeking to create the individual by foreseen features under the veil of therapy, and this would be the encroachment to human genetic heritage, witch contradicts to its unique and identity. The Catholic Church is not objecting the investigation of embryo’s trunk cells. However, speaks about cells procuration from alternative sources - placental blood or from adult humans’ fabric. Also speaks for higher responsibility of investigation practice results’ social, economical and moral consequences, openness - right to society to get comprehensive information about executable investigations, its practice and reliable mechanisms, witch must ensure human’s.
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La linguistique indo-européenne, par la relativisation discriminante du sens de certains termes et vocables, tout en bénéficiant de l’éclairage que les différents sens se donnent les uns les autres, permet de resituer les phénomènes sociaux, religieux et juridiques, dans leur contexte évolutif et historique. Les travaux d’Émile Benveniste (1969) plus spécialement ont apporté aux concepts une signification historiquement profonde, apte à révéler certaines fonctions devenues imperceptibles mais inhérentes aux institutions désignées. Ce travail a eu cependant fort peu d’écho parmi les anthropologues. Mais ce désintérêt apparent viendrait probablement de ce que les terrains nobles de l’ethnographie n’ont généralement rien d’indo-européen et que les anthropologues croient n’avoir rien à attendre de ces étymologies.
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Based on the presupposition of conceiving abstract entities as never-ending results of construction, the present article aims at developing a view of truth that is focused on degrees of probability. They are defined as series of moving relations between similarities and differences, i.e. as time-dependent. Time itself is analyzed through the usual concepts for modal categories, from where certain critiques of linear re-presentations concerning the flow of consciousness within the framework of past, present and future seem relevant. A case is made in favor of simple ontological objects and their respective grasping as simple ideas, that helps to contribute towards some perspectives for nominalistic explanation of s.c. “negative facts” which challenges the „before”-vs.-“after dichotomy” pertaining to time-consciousness with a final hint that it seems appropriate to think the future not as something actual, but as something that has already (albeit “only” in a virtual manner) somehow “happened” (now being a “past-as-future”).
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This study aims to examine the relationship between Mihail Sebastian’s literary works and his autobiographical writings. Even though his life was influenced by several watershed events of the twentieth century, this particular author defended both his moral integrity and his cultural options. Sebastian’s diaristic writings are thus relevant to each and every one of us and demand to be re-assessed through our own individual lenses. Keeping a journal, the confessing self is definitively committed to writing “to the moment”. This type of discourse has all the makings of analytical drama, from which the “protagonist”, in the purest sense of the word, is never absent.
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In her work, Hannah Arendt has devoted a great attention on the character of the crisis in the modern society. To achieve this, she needed to understand the past and she often repeated the William Faulkner’s aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”Therefore, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, because the world we live in, is a world that comes to us from the past. Her reflections on the notion of the responsibility have taken a special importance for every society that emerges from a totalitarian regime, especially when her work about Eichmann’s process was criticized.
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The article researches the entity and the moral bases of medieval justice. Much attention is paid to reviewing the medieval intelligentsia’s role in the course of legal proceedings. Attention to dogmatic and common perception of a justice phenomenon by society is paid, its contents and value is set. The conclusion is drawn that the court was the most important element of culture of medieval society which found its expression even in the sphere of entertainment and leisure.
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With findings from cognitive science, neuroscience, information science, and paleoanthropology, an anthropologist and astronomer-priest team take a new look at the nature of morality, and suggest parameters that are often very different from the philosophical and theological literatures. They see morality as a biologically-based arbitration mechanism that works along a timeline with a valence of good to bad. It is rational, purposeful, social, and affected by emotion but not dominated by it. The authors examine the age and sex structure, family roles, environment, cognition, and lifeway of Homo erectus, an early hominin who arose 1.9 million years ago, and propose that he had a rudimentary moral system that his biology and culture enabled – but only after he learned to control fire. Hearths gave rise to an intense, social, emotional, experiential context where belief systems could be learned by youth before they achieved adult cognition.
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Are there brain differences between believers and nonbelievers? In order to investigate the effect of religious beliefs on cognitive control, Michael Inzlicht and his collaborators measured the neural correlates of performance monitoring and affective responses to errors, specifically, the error-related negativity (ERN). ERN is a neurophysiological marker occurring within 100 ms of error commission, and generated in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The researchers observed that religious conviction is marked by reduced reactivity in the ACC, a cortical system that is involved in the experience of anxiety and is important for self-regulation. Thus, they claimed that these results offer a mechanism for the finding that religion is linked to positive mental health and low rates of mortality.
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The aim of the article is to present a model of legal reasoning based of the concept of coherence, as this concept is understood in recent developments of cognitive science. More precisely, the model, hereafter referred to as CMLR (Coherence Model of Legal Reasoning) is based on the constraint satisfaction theory of coherence, elaborated and defended by Paul Thagard. The claim of the author is that CMLR appears very satisfactory when assessed against criteria typically employed for evaluation of legal-theoretical models of argumentation. It is able to represent legal reasoning either as a neural network or, more traditionally, as a formal dialogue game. In consequence, CMLR offers a plausible “third road” between traditional deductive and non-deductive models of legal thinking.
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The article analyzes the educational landscape in the subject field of the philosophy of education. Characteristics that distinguish this concept from other ways of representing educational reality are described: plasticity, dynamism, anthropology, vitality, spatialily, compositionality, semanticity, symbolism, temporality, rhythmicity, polyscale, hybridity, contextuality, situationalcity. The general paradigm of studying the educational landscape as a social phenomenon is proposed. The three poles are shown, around which the study of educational landscapes is centered: subjective ("individual"), intersubjective ("society"), symbolic ("culture"). Five basic approaches were identified: individual, typological, metaphorical, constructivist, and mythological. Prospects of research in the field of typology and methods of research of educational landscapes are outlined.
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When the phenomenological approach began to be studied by architects, due to its potential to bring back the essence of existence through direct contact with the world, the design process itself began to change. The way the perception of space once built is intercorrelated directly with the capture of its essence. Such a spot will instantly evolve into a place that will order and organize the space around it by its own presence. The amplitude of successive experiences in such a space, which we can call place, precisely because of these experiences, can be animated through formal searches, experiments with a range of materials, light and color that are no longer distinguishable from the existing context. The perception of space is interpreted as a product of experience, viewed as innate capacity, or as having a purely sensory nature, or, finally, as having a cognitive-intellectual nature. Cartesian coordinates become insufficient in trying to define a place, its limits being both uncertain and unclear; summing up the experiences, the sensations it induces, the feelings and sensations caused or exerted in that space. Thus, the connotations that a place can have for each of us become seemingly infinite but dazzling in precision, the compatible personalities often being attracted by similar places. The influence of the building, or its absence, as well as the materiality present in such places, on their connotations is the theme of this paper.
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Authors attempt to identify a set of ethical problems which, according to their opinion, sigificantly undermine the domination of modern normative as well as applicative models to include even ‘the death of ethical’, or the replace¬ment of ethics with esthetics. Lévinas’ reflections on the Face of the Other, or Derrida’s reflections on the meaning of death for ethics announce, as authors suggest, ‘the ethical turn’ within the confines of Postmodern philosophy that had occurred during 1980’s. After the analysis of Lévinas’ ethics and its fun¬damental terms such as Face-to-face, and responsibility, authors forcus on the Neopragmatist ethics of Richard Rorty in order to introduce specific ‘anglo¬phone’ view of Postmodern philosophy. In its final part, on the basis of Fou¬cault’s theory, authors introduce distinctions between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and genetic technology.
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Niniejszy temat kryje w sobie dwa dość obszerne, ale wewnętrznie powiązane zagadnienia. Pierwsze dotyczy obecności zasad etycznych w całości życia społecznego, gospodarczego i politycznego. Istnieje bowiem dzisiaj dość powszechne przekonanie, że polityka (rozumiana jako sztuka rządzenia i kierowania ludźmi) winna się inspirować zasadami etycznymi, gdyż jest wymiarem życia ludzkiego. Nie jest bynajmniej czymś nadrzędnym w stosunku do podstawowych ludzkich działań.
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Truth is widely accepted as important aspect of human communication. It is mainly regarded as an attribute of the message. It also represents concrete value for consumers. The aim of a paper is to identify the exact role of the category of truth from three perspectives: legal, ethical and technical. Stress is also on the position of truth in dynamic changes of communication tools, including digital media. First part of a paper shows the potential extent of values that may be included in communication tools. Next some philosophical origins of the truth are commented. Third part identifies an approach to the truth in popular legal and ethical regulations. Finally, an author explains some consequences of evolving new media for providing people the truth.
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The different approaches to the problem of sin frequently attributed to it an ethical connotation which would have assigned its role and place even in the history of religions. These approaches supposed implicitly a closer or looser connection between religion and ethics. The present author's historico-philological investigation, after having compared some basic linguistic and historical data of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, came to the conclusion that the early forms of the sin perceptions had not yet belonged to the sphere of ethics, while those forms which developed in early modern times have not become part of ethics. Evil and sin were originally associated with religion, later on, however, the judgement of sins has been taken over by the secularised law.
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At the turn of the 19th century German Upper Silesia became a battlefield for competing nationalisms that produced opposite narratives on the region's history and its true character. The German, backed by the state, was challenged by the Polish one and their rivalry continued on uneven terms till 1922 as part of the region was incorporated into the Second Polish Republic. Polish claims to Upper Silesia were legitimized by actions undertaken under the slogan of rediscovering Slavic and Polish roots. The official and sacral art was used to transmit these ideas to the regional community. The rule of the Piast dynasty was presented as a Golden Age, when Silesia flourished being part of the Polish kingdom. The monument to the king Bolesław I the Brave was planned in the center of the voivodship's capital Katowice. In the nationalist discourse the monarch embodied the power of the Polish state and its successful struggle against the German enemy. The Middle Ages were also a focus of the catholic-nationalist narrative but in the sacral art the accent was laid not on the warriors but on the Polish-Silesian saints. One of the most important threads of both secular and catholic nationalisms was the elevation of the people. It was the folk culture that - according to the nationalist propaganda - reflected the true spirit of the nation and the Upper Silesian wooden churches were referred to as the most convincing testimonies to the originally and homogenously Polish character of the region. Two of them were transferred from the rural areas to the main cities of the voivodship - Katowice and Chorzów.| The nationalist apotheosis of the common people - peasantry and workers - affected the official image of the Polish insurrections in the years 1919, 1920 and 1921. In the art their participants were stylized as folk heroes, deprived of any attributes of regular soldiers. With these relatively simple means the art of the Silesian Voivodship was to reflect the ongoing salvation drama of the community coming back to its sources, experiencing political and spiritual revival and purification of foreign influences.
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