The present text describes the attitude toward sources of law in the recent works of the International Law Commission (ILC) on custom, general principles of law, and jus cogens (with special emphasis on reports of the respective special rapporteurs). The three main tasks of the text are to verify whether the ILC rapporteurs: grasped the essence of unwritten sources (reality-concern); preserved the coherence of views when referring to different topics (coherence-concern); and last but not least allow states to have the decisive voice as regards the set of their obligations (sovereignty-concern). The author notes the nominal strict attachment of the ILC to two-element nature of custom as a general practice recognized as law. Though in fact it should be a good message for states, this strict attitude of the ILC seems not to be based on a real stress test. It seems to ignore the reality of lawyers and even international judges referring to several customary norms without the slightest attempt to verify the true existence of both the two elements of custom – namely practice and opinio juris. What is more, the ILC does not see any problem with calling all general principles as sources of law. What is overlooked is the element of state consent to be bound by several presumed general principles. This is qualified by the author as a threat to state sovereignty – with states being pressured to follow some patterns of conduct to which they have not given their consent.

In this article, the imperial idea and civilising missions in the Habsburg Monarchy, mainly of the nineteenth century, are refracted through the prism of the legacy of enlightened absolutism. The article tries to dispel mythologies about its demise around 1800, and about those who could subscribe to its programme throughout the nineteenth century. It questions templates of national history writing which too unanimously connect the Enlightenment to the origins of the various national revivals of the early nineteenth century, and discusses concrete examples of enlightened absolutism’s civilising impulses, among them law, Roman imperial patriotism, and the Catholic religion.

The authors describe the scope of Polish studies in the field of biology and ecology carried on during 20 years of activity of Polish Antarctic Station. Principal results are briefly summarized and ample literature is presented.

We discuss epistemological and methodological aspects of the Bayesian approach in astrophysics and cosmology. The introduction to the Bayesian framework is given for a further discussion concerning the Bayesian inference in physics. The interplay between the modern cosmology, Bayesian statistics, and philosophy of science is presented. We consider paradoxes of confi rmation, like Goodman’s paradox, appearing in the Bayesian theory of confirmation. As in Goodman’s paradox the Bayesian inference is susceptible to some epistemic limitations in the logic of induction. However, Goodman’s paradox applied to cosmological hypotheses seems to be resolved due to the evolutionary character of cosmology and the accumulation of new empirical evidence. We argue that the Bayesian framework is useful in the context of falsifiability of quantum cosmological models, as well as contemporary dark energy and dark matter problem.

The main goal of this article is to compare the opinions of citizens from four European countries (Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Poland) regarding basic income in the broader context, among other things, of welfare regimes these countries represent. Statistical analyses of the Europeans’ attitudes towards basic income are based on interviews carried out in 28 European Union countries. Four countries, representing four different types of welfare regimes that can be found in the literature (the Nordic model has been excluded due to the sample size), and differing in economic welfare as well as historical experiences in regard to socio-economic system formation, have been selected for further analysis. Our analysis is based on special use of the single posthoc test with the Bonferroni adjustment for evaluating cross-country differences in basic income support and use of logistic regression for verifying the within-country impact of particular effects on basic income attitudes. The results of our analysis do not confirm that either the type of welfare regime or the level of social services in particular countries have a significant impact on attitudes toward basic income attitudes. However, we found the clear and direct impact of basic income awareness on supporting the programme.