What kind of challenge does sexual and racial difference pose for postmodern ethics? What is the relation between ethical obligation and feminist interpretations of embodiment, passion, and eros? How can we negotiate between ethical responsibility for the Other and democratic struggles against domination, injustice, and equality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other? We cannot address such questions, Ziarek argues, without putting into dialogue discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, (...) and the idea of radical democracy. Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers - including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray - the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism. (shrink)

This book is the first presentation in Polish scientific literature of the views and concepts of social constructivists on the complex and varied problems of the philosophy of science with particular consideration of mathematics. It is based on numerous publications and comments of the founders and supporters of social constructivism.

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological responses. Based (...) on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also faced problems, (...) which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 479-491.

L'intention de ce texte est de présenter l'opinion de Leszek Kołakowski sur la relations entre le discours de la rationalité et celui de la foi. Chacun de ces domaines a son propre discours qui lui est specifique et intraduisible. En general, la réflexion de Kołakowski tand à prouver que la présence d'un Absolu est necessaire. Ici, cet Absolu a le visage de Dieu. C'est Lui qui permet de reconnaître comme valables les principes moraux qui en dehors de la foi sont (...) dépourvus de fondement. Ces principes ont évolué à partir du discours de la foi et ont été adaptés à l'ordre de la vie quotidienne. (shrink)

How do wealth managers understand and comply with the social norms embedded in banks’ codes of conduct (CoC), and how do they cope with ethical dilemmas? Do they have a tendency after the global financial crisis to prioritize banks’ financial security over clients’ interests? To answer these and related questions, we conduct a nonincentivized online survey with wealth management employees of the Swiss legal entity of a large multinational bank. We propose a method to estimate the comprehension and the level (...) of expected adherence to the CoC principles that we test with our sample. We further show that framing questions under the label of “Financial Security” increased response accuracy and that employees’ honesty helped guide their decision-making toward integrity in ethical dilemmas. Thus, in addition to validating a method for testing the level of CoC comprehension and the expected adherence to its principles, our study is among the first to show that in the wealth management business, honesty and social injunctive norms defined in the bank’s CoC reinforce one another. (shrink)

This paper examines early syntactic development from a usage-based perspective, using transcripts of the spontaneous speech of two Englishspeaking children recorded at relatively dense intervals at ages 2;0 and 3;0. We focus primarily on the children’s question constructions, in an effort to determine (i) what kinds of units they initially extract from the input (their size and degree of specificity / abstractness); (ii) what operations they must perform in order to construct novel utterances using these units; and (iii) how the (...) units and the operations change between the ages of two and three. In contrast to nativist theories of language development which suggest that children are working with abstract syntactic categories from an early point in development, we suggest that the data are better accounted for by the proposal that children begin with lexically specific phrases and gradually build up a repertoire of increasingly abstract constructions. (shrink)

While many linguists view language as either a cognitive or a social phenomenon, it is clearly both: a language can live only in individual minds, but it is learned from examples of utterances produced by speakers engaged in communicative interaction. In other words, language is what (Keller 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Taylor & Francis) calls a “phenomenon of the third kind”, emerging from the interaction of a micro-level and a macro-level. Such a dual perspective (...) helps us understand some otherwise puzzling phenomena, including “non-psychological” generalizations, or situations where a pattern which is arguably present in a language is not explicitly represented in most speakers’ minds. This paper discusses two very different examples of such generalizations, genitive marking on masculine nouns in Polish and some restrictions on questions with long-distance dependencies in English. It is argued that such situations are possible because speakers may represent “the same” knowledge at different levels of abstraction: while a few may have extracted an abstract generalization, others approximate their behaviour by relying on memorised exemplars or lexically specific patterns. Thus, a cognitively realistic usage-based construction grammar needs to distinguish between patterns in the usage of a particular speech community (a social phenomenon) and patterns in speakers’ minds (a cognitive phenomenon). (shrink)

I present the scope andcharacteristics of Marx''s interest in Russiaand review its evolution. Initially, Marx''sattitudes were marked by russophobia,pronounced anti-panslavism, assessments ofRussia as an outpost of European reaction andcounterrevolution, and even as the head of aconspiracy to block the world revolution. Withtime, however, Marx came to consider Russia asthe country in which the outbreak of theRevolution was most likely. In his research forsucessive volumes of Capital, he readRussian theoretical works by, among others, V.Bervi-Flerovskij and A. Koshelev. Marx''sattitudes to the anticipated (...) peasant revolutionin Russia remained ambivalent; to a certaindegree he feared its occurrence suspecting thatit could take on an `asiatic'' hue. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 4 Seiten: 617-653.

We consider an example of a sentence which according to Hintikka's claim essentially requires for its logical form a Henkin quantifier. We show that if Hintikka is right then recognizing the truth value of the sentence in finite models is an NP-complete problem. We discuss also possible conclusions from this observation.

Mediating role of coping styles in the relationship between anxiety and health behaviors of obese adolescents Obesity is one of the major health problems in adolescents. Health-detrimental lifestyle as well as maladaptive styles of coping with stress are regarded as belonging among determinants of obesity. The aim of the study was to establish factors mediating between anxiety and diet-related health behaviors. Participants in the study were 113 adolescents with obesity whose body weight was over 97th centile. They were examined using (...) a set of self-report questionnaires to measure anxiety, coping styles and health behaviors. Emotion-focused coping and seeking social contacts were found to act as mediators between adolescents' trait anxiety and their health behaviors. The findings suggest that to enhance obese adolescents' health-promoting behaviors appropriate conditions should be ensured that would not only enable them to express their emotions, but also promote their socializing with peers. (shrink)

This article shows that the question of “Historical Thinking and the Human” demands expanding the field of the philosophy of history. What I propose is to investigate the issue from two perspectives: firstly, by positioning it in the broader philosophical context, one that increasingly transcends the boundaries of the humanities to enter the realm of the life sciences; and secondly, by drawing on a wider range of analytical material than has usually been the case in classic works in the philosophy (...) of history. I will critically reflect upon history’s anthropocentric biases, highlighting the need to develop an alternative to history. My thinking is aligned, on the one hand, with notions of the agency of images that have emerged from art criticism and visual culture studies, and, on the other hand, with the idea of theriomorphism, which I explore in terms of new animism, new totemism and philosophical ethology. In my analysis of works by the South African artist Nandipha Mntambo, I argue that a future-oriented redefinition of the human should transcend the limited categories that have emerged within the framework of history understood as a Eurocentric approach to the past rooted in Greco-Judaic-Christian tradition. (shrink)

The increase in suicidal behaviour among elderly people makes it necessary to take action in the field of broadly understood prevention. This includes helplines, which play an essential role in anti-suicidal measures. The aim of this study was to obtain information about the experience of Polish helpline workers in communicating with older people in suicidal crisis. The study was conducted among 106 helpline workers from various helpline centres across Poland. It proved that helpline workers in Poland have considerable experience in (...) communicating with elderly people in suicidal crisis, albeit the majority of respondents feel they need additional training in the area of broadly understood suicidology. (shrink)

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the global economy, including the provision of health services, with medical facilities and patients cancelling or postponing medical appointments. An alternative to in-person appointments was through the available forms of telemedicine. Scientific reports around the world have suggested that the accessibility and quality of health services declined. The aim of this study was to investigate the accessibility and quality of health services in Poland and to verify whether there were differences (...) between men and women in this respect. The study was based on the authors’ own survey questionnaire filled in by 265 respondents, including 181 women, 82 men, and 2 persons without a defined gender. The study revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the accessibility and quality of health services declined. Additionally, women were more likely to use general and specialist health services than men, but a comparison of changes in the assessment of accessibility and quality of services by gender revealed no differences in the assessment of accessibility and quality. (shrink)

The study aims to analyse the clinical proceedings in pregnant women diagnosed with brain death. Apart from the diagnostic premises and the patient’s rights, the ontological status of the foetus proves to be a severe problem. In reference to the principles of zeroth-order logic, the assumption of potential used by personalists is not a tautology.

The aim of this study was to analyse the relationship between the following three assessments: the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, the Alberta Infant Motor Scale, and the General Movement Assessment. 29 patients from the neonatal unit of the Gynecology and Obstetrics Clinical Hospital were examined. The study was conducted between feedings by a person properly trained in the use of the NBAS, the AIMS, and the GMA. The average postmenstrual age of the examined newborns was 35.6 weeks. The average week (...) of gestation was the 29th, the average birth weight was 1469 g, and the Median Apgar score in the fifth minute of life was 7. A relationship was found between the AIMS and the NBAS. It was concluded that the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale and the Alberta Infant Motor Scale may be used to determine the motor development of preterm infants. Moreover, it is advisable to use more than one assessment method in order to adjust the intervention. (shrink)