This work attempts to reconstruct the culture that contributed to the philosophical way of thinking. My goal is to extract two important factors: religion carrying individual experience and the importance of certain ideas which are present in that culture. Sources of philosophical thinking can be found in the structure of polis. Only on its basis could the idea of the wise man and citizen as well as religion-oriented individual experience be raised. Greek polis paves the way for a new style of thinking by creating the conditions for its citizens to follow the ideal, regardless of the position they occupy in society. Sustainability, which should be a feature of a good citizen, is also the essence of society. Highly positioned wisdom as moral reflection tinged with religiosity allows thinking according to the laws of logos. Finally, the experience offered by the mystery cults leads to the transformation of their own existence and the emergence of a way of recognition of reality different than before. Undeniably, all the elements related to structure policies with its ideals contribute to the emergence of a new way of thinking in the form of philosophy. One could say that the philosophical objectivity is preceded by the subjectivity and rationality of its roots dating back to irrationality.

According to Descartes, it is possible to doubt successfully that there is external world, all around us, yet still to have language, in place, without any complication. According to Wittgenstein, to doubt everything about the external world except language means nothing more than to doubt everything about the external world including language. Why? No speaker is more certain about the meaning of his words than about the external things he believes to be unassailable (for example, that he has two hands and two legs). Without this constitutive connection there would be no communication of a definite sense. Wittgenstein suggests that, after the author of the Meditations on First Philosophy adopts the hypothesis of evil deceiver, we are only under the impression that we deal with language (or that we read a text). We instead deal with symptoms of something rather different. The objective of this paper is to critically reassess Wittgenstein’s criticism of the possibility of holding such a radical sceptical position.

The aim of the study was to examine identity statuses in various life domains and the relationship between identity and well-being. We adopted the three-dimensional model of identity (Crocetti et al., 2008), including: in-depth exploration, commitment, and reconsideration of commitment. Moreover, in accordance with domain-specific approach (Goossens, 2001), we sought to empirically derive identity statuses in various life domains. The participants included 835 emerging adults (Mage = 21.81, SD = 2.33). We examined eight domains previously identified in qualitative research: personality characteristics, past experiences, family, friends and acquaintances, worldview, hobbies and interests, aims and plans for the future, and occupation. To measure three identity processes, we used a modified version of the Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (Crocetti et al., 2008) and to measure well-being we used the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (Keyes, 2013). Results indicate that, although the statuses identified in previous research were, to a large extent, replicated (except moratorium), people were classified in different statuses in different domains; thus, we conclude that talking about statuses should be limited to a given domain. Well-being was the highest in achievement statuses and the lowest in diffusion, but only in two examined domains: personality characteristics and past experience.

Evaluation apprehension is the anxiety arising from a concern that one’s knowledge or expertise may be evaluated unfavorably by an audience. In this regard, the educational field comprising students’ discussions, lectures, presentations, and interactions is not an exception. Plethora of studies on student apprehension demonstrated that the construct is under the influence of different factors and can create various consequences. The aim of the present review is to complement and encapsulate previous research on student apprehension by providing an updated review on the concept in different disciplines. Data from 30 studies published in Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and System were coded based on a coding scheme. The studies were broadly classified into four categories in the realm of education in terms of students’ disciplines; namely, Second/Foreign Language Learning (9 studies), Accounting and Finance (4 studies), Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy (6 studies), and miscellaneous disciplines (11 studies). The focus of this review pivoted around antecedents and consequences of student apprehension in each field. The analysis demonstrated the multidimensional nature of the construct caused by a host of variables and resulting in a multitude of ramifications. Based on these findings, some implications and strategies for mitigating student evaluation apprehension are presented.

Bullying at work is a long-standing area of research interest that requires investigation of the role of the individual exposed to systematic negative behaviour. Studies using cross-sectional samples and broad personality measures have found some distinguishing personal characteristics of employees who are bullied compared to others. Few, however have applied theoretical frameworks to explain why personality can play a part in why an individual ends up at the receiving end of bullying and harassment at work. This article applies an overall and specific theoretical model, the vulnerability thesis, to investigating the role of temperament in relation to workplace bullying. The results show that (1) some employees exposed to bullying at work also acted as perpetrators (provocative victims), that (2) exposure to bullying at work is connected with temperamental emotional vulnerability, and that (3) hostility and self-oriented aggression mediate the role of personality in the form of temperament in relation to workplace bullying. Strengths and weaknesses and potential practical implications for helpers of employees exposed to bullying at work are discussed.

Maternal mortality has posed a great problem in the health sector of most African countries. Nigeria’s maternal mortality ratio remains high despite efforts made to meet millennium development goal 5 (MDG5). This study used the Lagos state community health survey 2011 and the Lagos state health budget allocations 2011 to examine the effect of government expenditure on maternal mortality ratio. Factors like inadequate transportation facilities, lack of awareness, inadequate infrastructures, which contribute to high maternal mortality rate, can be traced back to revenue though under different ministries. The other ministries need to work and support the ministry of health in the fight against maternal, especially in Lagos state. Secondary data was compiled from the state budget, records of death in different local governments in the state and relevant reviewed literature. Regression analysis was used to analyze the hypothesis and it was discovered that government expenditure does not have a significant effect on maternal mortality based on the R-square coefficient. However, correlation coefficient gives a contrasting result. Hence, further research work, government expenditure from other local government areas need to be taken into consideration to arrive at a valid conclusion. It is difficult to ascertain how much of the revenue allocated was put to appropriate use, due to a high level of corruption.

This paper presents the results of a study on the Polish version of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (GCBS), which was designed to measure individual differences in conspiracist thinking (Brotherton, French, & Pickering; 2013). The Polish version of the scale had excellent internal consistency as measured by Cronbach alpha: .93. The Polish version also had excellent test-retest stability. To check the validity of the questionnaire, various tools were used to measure the characteristics that can be correlated with conspiracist thinking. As a result, it was found that conspiracist thinking is positively correlated with the external locus of control, the results obtained in the Scale of Belief in Zero-Sum Game and the results of the MMPI-2 Paranoia scale. It was also found that patients with paranoid personality disorder and paranoid schizophrenia had higher results on the adapted scale than healthy subjects. In sum, the Polish version of GCBS had satisfactory psychometric properties, which makes it useful for measuring conspiracist thinking.

While personality is strongly related to experienced emotions, few studies examined the role of personality traits on affective forecasting. In the present study, we investigated the relationships between extraversion and neuroticism personality traits and affective predictions about academic performance. Participants were asked to predict their emotional reactions two months before they will get their results for one important exam. At the same time, personality was assessed with the Big Five Inventory. All the participants were contacted by a text message eight hours after that the results were available, and they were requested to rate their experienced affective state. Results show moderate negative correlations between neuroticism and both predicted and experienced feelings, and that extraversion exhibits a weak positive correlation with predicted feelings, but not with experienced feelings. Taken together, these findings confirm that extraversion and neuroticism shape emotional forecasts, and suggest that affective forecasting interventions based on personality could probably enhance their efficiencies.

Correctional staff is particularly exposed to occupational stress which in turn can have a negative impact on their job performance. This study attempted to analyse the role of personality, organizational factors, and stress coping strategies in shaping job satisfaction. 163 correctional staff members who were being trained at the Central Training Centre of Correctional Services in Kalisz, Poland, participated in the study. The following tools were used: The Bochum Inventory of Personal Work Features (BIP), the Multiphasic Inventory for Measuring Coping (COPE), and the Satisfaction with Job Scale (SSP).

Staff working directly with inmates scored the lowest in terms of job satisfaction. Social sensibility is a predictor of job satisfaction among each study subgroup and each correctional department and correctional staff as a whole. Correlates of job satisfaction among correctional officers were: Active coping with stressful situations and Seeking social support for emotional and instrumental reasons.

Animal behaviour and its underlying causal factors are investigated by numerous behavioural sciences. Ethology, one of the most important classical behavioural sciences, is concerned with the description and quantification of behaviour and the analysis of a wide spectre of its causal factors. Ethology also lays stress on the importance of comparative behavioural research and field research. Specific behaviour paterns were considered by classical ethology as elements of hierarchically organised behavioural systems focused on specific functions. The notion of instinct was, however, far from unequivocal and is no more frequently used in behavioural sciences. We also know that information flow between the levels of organization existing in the nervous system and in living systems in general is multidirectional. The assumption that processes running on higher levels of organization can and should be explained solely in terms of processes running on lower levels becomes thus largely groundless. In behavioural sciences reductionism can manifest itself also as the so called law of parsimony adopted during explanations of observed phenomena (Occam’s razor, Lloyd Morgan’s canon). Since the introduction of Karl Popper’s falisifiability criterion to the methodology of scientific research, reductionistic explanations of observed phenomena are, however, less frequently proposed in behavioural sciences. Instead, an approach currently used involves experimental testing of sets of hypotheses proposing alternative explanations of the observed phenomena, not necessarily the simplest ones. Classical ethology was the so called objectivist science of behaviour: its adherents did not deny the existence of subjective phenomena in animals, however, explanations of mechanisms of investigated phenomena in terms of underlying subjective processes were not considered to be sufficient. Presently we may put forward increasingly daring hypotheses concerning subjective experiences of animals thanks to the development of advanced techniques of neuroimaging such as the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Behavioural sciences are constantly progressing and their methods become increasingly sophisticated. We can thus hope that philosophy and behavioural sciences will continue during a long time yet to contribute jointly to achieve new insights enriching our knowledge on factors influencing animal and human behaviour.

Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo-Devo) is becoming to be popular in psychology, and by certain is even seen as a new biology for psychology (Hofer 2014). In particular, it is about the concept of extended inheritance This concept claims to be (neo-) Lamarckian. According to it inherited is everything that contributes to resemblance across generations and that strongly affects the fitness of the offspring—starting by nuclear genes, by genes expression, maternal care, ecological niche, cultural niche, language, etc. In this paper I analyse the potential of the concept of extended inheritance on the example of transgenerational transmission of attachment style and mentalizing capacity. I present the neuroendocrine mechanism of transmission. Then I show that a) DNA methylation is complementary to neuroendocrine mechanism, but it does not revolutionize the latter as it is claimed; b) the concept of extended inheritance confounds the three questions rightly separated by Neo-Darwinism: origin of variation, fate of variation and inheritance, c) although the motivation of Evo-Devo goes against the alleged genetic determinism of neodarwinism, the concept of transgeneration inheritance is determinist (although it is an epigeneetic determinism).

This paper presents an outline of the relationship between the categories of living individual, organism and life. I argue that although these categories are related with each other and often treated as the same, we should strive for their separation. The main argument for the distinction between the individual and life is of a methodological character: the definitions of life are mainly interested for astrobiologists and scientists working in the field of origin of life or artificial life, while the individual is important, among others, in standard evolutionary biology and ecology. Among the concepts of living individual various forms of evolutionary definition (individual as a unit of selection) currently dominate. The living individual understood in this way is not identical with a structurally limited and functionally integrated self-sustained entity, which is usually called “organism.” Moreover, the explanatory success of the evolutionary concept of individual, in my opinion, implies the adoption of some version of the evolutionary definition of life. In the last part of this paper I propose a process-evolutionary definition of life, which also indicates a relationship between the three aforementioned categories.

Biology is a science on life. This definition, concise and most commonly used, is satisfactory for almost everybody. It is otherwise when one asks: What is life? Then it appears that no one feature can be indicated which distinguishes “the living” from “the non-living.” The author presents the sources of these difficulties and then gives his own attempt to solve the problem of definition of live—which is based on the idea of levels of the biological organization. In author’s view, to characterise the objects of research in biology we should apply not one concept of life (or of living organism) but three concepts: of organized biological matter (for the molecular and sub-cellular levels), of living organism (for the level of the specimen), and of life (for the sphere of phenomena which occur on the population-species-biocenotic level).

This article provides an initial analysis, from a historical standpoint, of the problematic nature of conceptualizations of the notion of gene in molecular genetics. The starting point is an historical outline of the relation between classical genetics and molecular genetics; it is indicated how the conceptual baggage of classical genetics influenced the development of the concepts of gene used later in molecular biology. I also reveal two problems of genes in the philosophy of science, i.e., skepticism concerning genes and the concept of nominal gene. I conclude that concept of gene functioning within the framework of molecular genetics should be considered from the point of view of experimentalism and pragmatism. It seems that the concept of gene on the molecular level should be conceptualized—in order to remain functional—as broadly as possible and in relation to genetic material.

The aim of this paper is to discuss possible connections between the categories of mind and life. Some authors argue that life and mind are closely connected or even are two sides of the same phenomenon. I analyze and examine this thesis in the light of different approaches to defining life: the metabolic approach (which stresses the importance of self-maintenance and self-making) and the evolutionary approach (which focuses on evolution by natural selection). The first way of defining life is Maturana and Varela' conception of autopoiesis, the second is Korzeniewski's cybernetic definition of life and van Hateren's modified Darwinian definition of life. Especially interesting is the possibility of connecting mind and life in the evolutionary framework. The text does not provide exact results, but rather it proposes possible modes of thinking of the relation of these two categories.

Currently, the “Lamarckian dimension” and “Lamarckian mechanisms” are vividly discussed, indicating that they are compatible with Darwinism. However, they require an extension of Modern Synthesis to Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Both the terms, unfortunately connected to Lamarck, really indicate a group of phenomena which can be symbolized by Jablonka’s wording: “some evolutionary changes are non-random in origin, or even result from instruction.” The Lamarckian mechanisms leading to these evolutionary changes arose, however, in the Darwinian way much earlier. This earlier stage is said too rarely, and the typical understanding of Lamarckism strongly suggests its lack. The term “Lamarckism” was and is understood very differently both at different times and in different national and ideological traditions but usually fraught with a simplified understanding of Lamarck. Most of the controversies in these issues arise from the insufficient precision of the utterance, and this from undervaluation of definition, specification of assumptions and abstract reasoning.

Two formal types of models of living processes, especially evolutionary ones, may be distinguished: the well-known mathematical type and the less-known logical one. The latter applies the terms “class” or “set”; both the terms are understood either in a collective sense (in mereology) or in a distributive sense (in set theory). These formal terms may be used among others to such organic multiplicities as populations or species of organisms, and to organic constituents (molecules, cells, organs) of living organism. Collective concepts refer to objects existing in nature, whereas distributive concepts refer to the linguistic and research constructions of models of natural objects, developed to cognitively grasp natural regularities.

The aim of the article is to compare the thought collective and the interpretive community, two surprisingly similar notions formulated independently by Ludwik Fleck and Stanley Fish. In contemporary discourse, both concepts are used as synonims, while an accurate analysis of the contexts of the use of interesting terms proves that the equivalent of the interpretive community is rather thought collective, as well as the thought style, both of these concepts in the deliberations of Fish are subject to contamination. The exact repartition of the notion of interpretive community seems to be important due to the frequency of its use in works in the field of literary interpretation and cognition. The article also presents more general remarks on the functioning and possible origin of twin terms and their role in scientific cognition.

The text was created on the basis of interviews with Caltech scholars (Pasadena, USA) in 2018. The talks concerned various contemporary theories of biogenesis and the role of their philosophical premises. The researchers also addressed the issue of popularizing science. The worldview is shaped (and established) by popularizing publications. They also answered the questions how their personal beliefs influenced on research.

Author’s aim is to highlight problems related to the course of regulatory processes in the structures of the living organism. In this research area the question arises what is the task of causal factors and mechanisms governing regeneration processes, including building new parts of the body. Despite the vast knowledge already gained in this field, the way to restore the functional regeneration of some structures of the organism is still to be discovered.