Computational modeling plays an important role in the methodology of contemporary science. The epistemological role of modeling and simulations leads to questions about a possible use of this method in philosophy. Attempts to use some mathematical tools to formulate philosophical concepts trace back to Spinoza and Newton. Newtonian natural philosophy became an example of successful use of mathematical thinking to describe the fundamental level of nature. Newton’s approach has initiated a new scientific field of research in physics and at the same time his system has become a source of new philosophical considerations about physical reality. According to Michael Heller, some physical theories may be treated as the formalizations of philosophical conceptions. Computational modeling may be an extension of this idea; this is what I would like to present in the article. I also consider computational modeling in philosophy as a source of new philosophical metaphors; this idea has been proposed in David J. Bolter’s conception of defining technology. The consideration leads to the following conclusion: In the methodology of philosophy significant changes have been taking place; the new approach do not make traditional methods obsolete, it is rather a new analytical tools for philosophy and a source of inspiring metaphors.

The paper tries to defend the thesis that it is impossible to decide upon moral issues without any references to the ontology of the world we live in. An illustrative example of the main argumentation line is the choice made by Cypher—a second plan character in the movie Matrix. Cypher decides to betray human rebels fighting against machines for freedom and, as a reward, accepts affluent life in the virtual reality. His choice seems to be superficially reprehensible because of the abandonment of the real world and authentic life. However, one can argue that the dichotomy between the real and virtual world is seeming. By choosing the virtual reality Cypher decided to act in a world which, like the real world, makes it possible to be a moral subject and enables authentic experience. The difference between both the worlds lies in the type of determination limiting any conscious subject. Cypher prefers to live in a world determined by the algorithm of Matrix more than in a world where his behaviour is determined by genes and other biological factors.

The article presents the phenomenon of increasing sharing in-formations for free on the Internet and the contemporary development of gift economy in the form of a movement most often called cybercommunism. The article points out two basic attitudes in treating information. According to the first one, information should be treated as a commodity to which property rights can be attributed and which is subject to market play. This involves such issues as copyright, fees, licenses and other ways of protecting the interests of market players. The second attitude is to treat valuable information as a common good, often with a moral imperative to share it (to varying degrees Open Source and Open Acces, the idea of copyleft, DIY, P2P network, YouTube, The Pirate Bay domain etc.). Since every concept or movement proclaiming a community of goods is called communism (in a broader sense of the word, in a narrower sense it is a specific political system, e.g. the Soviet Union), today we are dealing with digital communism on the Internet. Some researchers (Firer-Blaess, Fuchs) point to Wikipedia as an example. The Internet encyclopedia operates on the basis of principles that go beyond the capitalist way of production and represent an informational-communist way of production: in the subjective dimension, it is a cooperative work and in the objective dimension, a shared ownership of the means of production. The text also presents the division of ethics into an abstract and concrete one, applied to the behaviour of network users. If someone within the framework of an abstract ethics preaches the principle of “You will not pirate.” (copying and distributing illegally) is a corresponding principle of specific ethics that says “You will not pirate unless O1 or O2...or he.” In practice, concrete ethics push many Internet users to treat Internet resources as a common good, from which everyone can draw according to their own needs. Digital communism can be treated, on the one hand, as a partially implemented idea and, on the other, as a postulate. From an axiological point of view, this postulate would be connected with the Internet implementation of equality (access to resources for everyone) and freedom (access to all information).

The article focuses on selected problems which have now appeared and fall under the ideas “industry 4.0” and “society 5.0”, namely on anthropological issues. Changes in the relationships between man and technology based on trust lead to an increase of the role of the technological factor in these relations. Other aspects of the analyzed changes concern the new requirements of the responsibility and changes of human subjectivity and rationality. The future of man appears to be an area of uncertainty related to inter alia the conditions of functioning and living in the order of the post-digital world.

In the paper the phenomenon of big data is presented. I pay my special attention to the relation of this phenomenon to research work in experimental sciences. I search for answers to two questions. First, do the research methods proposed within the paradigm big data can be applied in experimental sciences? Second, does applying the research methods subject to the big data paradigm lead, in consequence, to a new understanding of science?

In this paper we show how formal computer science concepts—such as encoding, algorithm or computability—can be interpreted philosophically, including ontologically and epistemologically. Such interpretations lead to questions and problems, the working solutions of which constitute some form of pre-philosophical worldview. In this work we focus on questions inspired by the IT distinction between digitality and analogicity, which has its mathematical origin in the mathematical distinction between discreteness and continuity. These include the following questions: 1) Is the deep structure of physical reality digital or analog, 2) does the human mind resemble a more digital or analog computational system, 3) does the answer to the second question give us a cognitively fruitful insight into the cognitive limitations of the mind? As a particularly important basis for the above questions, we consider the fact that the computational power (i.e., the range of solvable problems) of some types of analog computations is greater than that of digital computations.

This is a modest endeavour written from an engineering perspective by a nonphilosopher to set things straight if somewhat roughly: What does artificial intelligence boil down to? What are its merits and why some dangers may stem from its development in this time of confusion when, to quote Rémi Brague: “From the point of view of technology, man appears as outdated, or at least superfluous”?

The article presents a brief exposition of alternative ways of creating virtual objects and the status of their existence inspired by the relevant views of Plato, Aristotle, Franz Brentano and Karl Popper as well as various conceptions of representation. I argue that the present state of research on the problem of “computer” virtuality shows that it is necessary to explore first the ontological issues of virtual objects. Only these issues will solve the mystery of the creation and existence of virtual objects. The consideration of these issues are suppressed by the fact that contemporary philosophy has removed both metaphysics and, with-it, ontology. That is why, and for reasons for reasons of substantive accuracy, I show how traditional ontological and ontologically inspiring approaches are—when modified— promising candidates for exploring the nature of virtual objects, first of all, problems of their existence and creation.

The purpose of this study is to answer the question of whether informatics is a field or just a discipline of knowledge. Analyzes of info-computer-based problems, consider that informatics in Poland should be treated as a field. It was emphasized that the English term computer science is only one of the informatics-oriented specializations. The word “informatics” can be associated much more often with terms; IT in the US and ICT in Europe except France, where l’informatique terminology is used). Which name to use since the narrow understanding of information processing and handling is losing its full potential for the right development. In practice, it means a reduction in undertaking ambitious tasks and the higher costs of its development. Social implications confirmed that, despite a lot of capable informaticians, Poland had not been seen (except for computer devices), the right development of informatics-oriented applications. Hence the essential general informatics oriented strategy is offered because the digital equipment-oriented strategy alone is not enough to apply in success looking ICT applications.

Artificial Intelligence, both as a hope of making a substantial progress, and a fear of the unknown and unimaginable, has its roots in human dreams. These dreams were materialized by means of rational intellectual efforts. We see beginnings of such a process in Lullus’s fancies. Many scholars and enthusiasts participated in the development of Lullus’s art, ars combinatoria. Amongst them, Athanasius Kircher was distinguished. Gottfried Leibniz ended the period in which the idea of artificial intelligence had been shaped, and started a new one when artificial intelligence could be considered a part of science, according to today’s standards.

Science means here mathematics and those empirical disciplines which avail themselves of mathematical models. The pragmatic approach is conceived in Karl R. Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (p. 276) sense: a logical appraisal of the success of a theory amounts to the appraisal of its corroboration. This kind of appraisal is exemplified in section 6 by a case study—on how Isaac Newton justified his theory of gravitation. The computational approach in problem-solving processes consists in considering them in terms of computability: either as being performed according to a model of computation in a narrower sense, e.g., the Turing machine, or in a wider perspective—of machines associated with a non-mechanical device called “oracle” by Alan Turing (1939). Oracle can be interpreted as computer theoretic representation of intuition or invention. Computational approach in another sense means considering problem-solving processes in terms of logical gates, supposed to be a physical basis for solving problems with a reasoning.

Pragmatic rationalism about science, seen at the background of classical rationalism (Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz etc.), claims that any scientific idea, either in empirical theories or in mathematics, should be checked through applications to problem-solving processes. Both the versions claim the existence of abstract objects, available to intellectual intuition. The difference concerns the dynamics of science: (i) the classical rationalism regards science as a stationary system that does not need improvements after having reached an optimal state, while (ii) the pragmatical version conceives science as evolving dynamically due to fertile interactions between creative intuitions, or inventions, with mechanical procedures.

The dynamics of science is featured with various models, like Derek J. de Solla Price’s exponential and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm model (the most familiar instances). This essay suggests considering Turing’s idea of oracle as a complementary model to explain most adequately, in terms of exceptional inventiveness, the dynamics of mathematics and mathematizable empirical sciences.

The presented paper sets out to answer the question: did the achievements of medieval mathematical theology and philosophy of nature contribute to the development of modern science? The article focuses primarily on the achievements of English thinkers before and up to the fourteenth century. To answer the main question, a brief history of introducing mathematics to the philosophy of nature is presented, then the concepts preceding the theory of Oxford Calculators, which was a new and original interpretation of Aristotle, are discussed. This review is intended as an answer to the question contained in the title.

In the skeptical tradition self-consciousness was transparent and it served as a basis for expressing doubts and developing arguments leading to certainty. After the linguistic and naturalistic turns, contemporary philosophy developed skeptical arguments against certainty and epistemic priority of the data of self-consciousness (both reflective and pre-reflective). Self-reflection reports on the stream of consciousness ex post, but the reports are meager and dependent on subject’s conceptual scheme, while the pre- -reflective data is unclear. Two contemporary skeptical hypotheses have been developed: H. Putnam’s content externalism hypothesis and so-called Kripkenstein’s quus hypothesis. I put forth the question what kind of self is immune to erroneous misidentification. The immunity seems to be limited to the contentless self, reducible to the pre-discursive feeling of one’s own existence. There is no guarantee that any content whatsoever can be attributed to self without error. I cannot negate that I exist any more than I can negate that something external exists, but any description of either is fallible. So the content of self-consciousness is not in an epistemically better position than the content of external perception.

In the first part, ‘Visions’, a pattern of interpreting Western philosophical thought, as an attempt to deal with the problem of axiological catastrophe, is outlined. In the second part, ‘Vastness’, the author tries to show how far human speculative thinking (metaphysical thinking) can be extended, regardless of whether the ‘vastness’ that human metaphysics aims at is realized one way or another. The third part, ‘God’, deals with the relationship between the concept of God and the concept of metaphysical vastness. The fourth part is called ‘Cradle’ and its intention is to show that in comparison with real or only possible metaphysical vastness, the world in which we live is a kind of beginning of an infinite life, and therefore serves as a cradle. In the last part, entitled ‘Fullness’, some ideas are proffered to show how the eternal life of such entities as human persons may appear against the background of metaphysical vastness.

This article is an attempt to look at how individual freedom is realized in the world of consumption. Consumer freedom understood as a social relationship – and not for example as a gift received from God and the ability to make independent choices between good and evil according to one’s free will – is not a given once and for all. In the case of consumer freedom, some people have this type of freedom, while others are deprived of it, which often results in moral evil. Freedom in a world where ‘a menu replaces the Decalogue’ is first and foremost a freedom to consume, a freedom of those who have the appropriate material means to make use of them. Therefore, it is not a gift given once and for all, but it requires from us – free consumers – constant activity in acquiring funds that allow us to meet the needs of ownership. It only pretends to be accompanied by freedom of choice but in fact is not. Freedom in the world of consumption is implemented mainly in the sphere of everyday life practice and it does not constitute the implementation of any lofty philosophical ideas. It is an impoverished form without proper theoretical foundation. The problem is whether in the world of consumption there is any freedom at all. Unfortunately, most often we only have an illusion of freedom, because choosing to participate in it (more or less consciously), we agree to its prevailing rights. One of the most important rights in the domain of consumption implying is freedom of consumption, or ironically speaking, the free-dom to choose between Coca Cola and Pepsi. But even in its narrow application consumer freedom does not seem to realize any moral good. It is true that various attempts are being made to codify the ethical activity of consumers, traders, producers, etc., but this has nothing to do with the real moral dimension of actions, concerning instead instrumental and performative aspects of those actions by sustaining unreflective choice automatisms.

The term “cause” is ubiquitous in life and science. It is surprising how, generally speaking, the existing all-purpose dictionaries, and even «professional» ones, are clumsy in their attempts to define “cause” and its derivative terms. We urgently need a more satisfactory definition of these words, along the following lines: an acting of object x on object y is the cause of the change in object y, when at the same time object x acts on object y, object y changes, and if something of the type of object x acts on an object of the type of object y, then object y changes. When expanding the proposed definition, I consider, among others: (a) traditional counterarguments aimed at the existence of cause-effect relation, (b) the question of necessity as a component of the notion of causality, (c) the notion of acting on something and the circumstances of its occurrence, (d) the essence of change, and (e) the causality principle. In addition, I sketch the relation of the reconstructed notion of causality to the notions of motivation, perpetration, and the act of creation (in arts and in Catholicism).

Ethicists have thus far not paid much attention to uncertainty, very often concentrating on highly idealized hypothetical situations where both empirical (e.g. the state of the world, the spectrum of possible decisions and their consequences, the causal connections between events) and normative (the content of norms, value scales) matters were clearly defined and well-known to the decision-maker. In this article, which stems from a project on different types of decisions under uncertainty related to the rapid progress in biomedical research, I analyze some situations of normative uncertainty, cases when an agent must make a decision, but does not know which choice is correct, for example, because he/she has contrary intuitions about the permissibility of available decisions. The view termed comparativism claims that in such cases the appropriate decision depends not only on the credences that one assigns to different norms, but also on how much possible decisions are worth taking in the light of these norms. I analyze a few cases of normative uncertainty, and a specific counter-argument against the current versions of comparativism, showing that under normative uncertainty this view imposes risk neutrality, although it permits us to have different risk attitudes under empirical uncertainty. I also argue that a precautionary approach to situations of normative uncertainty is overly simplistic.

Production companies face the challenge of choosing a suitable process optimization method

from a variety of methods, even though their effect on operational processes is uncertain.

This study shows, using a statistical hypothesis test, the impact of the methods Kanban

and Standard Worksheet on an autonomous team in comparison to a team that applies

these methods. For this purpose, 44 companies – of different size and operating in various

industries – across Germany completed a business game and generated data regarding the

KPIs adherence to delivery date, number of reworks and inventory costs. Based on these

data, the team’s performance could be ascertained and compared with each other.