In this article, I compare two positions – emergentism and panpsychism, in relation to the problem of the nature of consciousness. I analyze arguments offered in support of both positions and undertake to question them. I focus on panpsychism as the less known and more controversial position. Panpsychism and emergentism are considered “metaphysical hypotheses”. Finally I propose emergentism as a preferable position in view of the fact that it is impossible to defend panpsychism as a coherent position, compatible with science.

O tym, w jaki sposób zwiększać społeczną świadomość problematyki wodnej, opowiadają prof. Monika Kalinowska i dr Agata Goździk z Instytutu Geofizyki PAN.

The article investigates the level of language awareness manifested by the advanced learners of Polish as a FL (146 students of the Polish Language Course attending the School of Polish Language and Culture at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland). The exact focus is on learning outcomes (areas of language progress and regress), and perception of the Polish language material learnt (including grammar, vocabulary and phonology), an emphasis being put on most problematic issues. Having presented learners’ opinions and reflections on language, implications for teachers including teaching materials raising language awareness are offered.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Roger Scruton’s views on patriotism and the attitudes of nationalism and oikophobia that endanger proper love of homeland. According to Scruton, patriotism is identical with loyalty to the people who inhabited a certain territory and share common culture, customs and history. The feeling of national loyalty so understood is peaceful by its nature and stabilizes the democratic system. Besides patriotism, Scruton distinguishes two attitudes, of worship of one’s nation and of hostility towards it. The first attitude may transform into nationalism, and then deifies nation and leads to wars and conflicts in history. Unlike the former, the attitude of hostility towards own nation (oikophobia) justifies development of transnational institutions that limited sovereignty of the democratic nation-states and – indirectly – undermine the sovereignty of one’s people. In the final part of the paper I paraphrase the concepts of nation presupposed in the attitudes of patriotism, nationalism and oikophobia, as they are discussed in the theoretical apparatus used by Leszek Nowak in his deformative conception of culture.

Weak mysterianism defines the situation in philosophy of mind in which we can neither formulate a solvable problem of consciousness nor prove that it is unsolvable. To develop the issue the author starts with a description of the theories and concepts described as mysterious. General mysterianism is a position in the philosophy of mind, according to which we are admittedly able to indicate scientific issues but cannot formulate them as scientific problems and thus solve them. These issues are called ‘mysteries’ by Noam Chomsky. The article presents several argumentation strategies typical for mysterian theories – evolutionary closure, autonomy of consciousness, and methodological mysterianism of William Seager. Each is subject to criticism, which shows that the mysterian argumentation is non-conclusive. It turns out, therefore, that the problem of mysteriousness is that indicating the possibility of mysteries in science does not entail a proof that we are dealing with specific mysteries (first and foremost the mystery of the mind).

In the author’s opinion the traditional image of a human is incorrect: it is not the rational soul that directs people’s behaviour, but a set of programs (neural applications) recorded in the brain. The ego (sense, awareness, will) is able to block their action as long as the upbringing of the person in question has created the right habits and thus initiated proper programs in the brain. Human (as well as animals) turns out to be a combination of the matter (‘body’), spirit (‘ego’) and abstracts (neural applications). The difference between humans and animals is the complexity of human’s neural software and the ability to pursue the non-utilitarian purposes.

The concept of conscience is analyzed here in two different ways: the systematic and the historical-literary. As to the first, systematic perspective, I distinguish (in part 1) three levels of conscience and on every level I identify two opposite categories (conscience that is ‛individual’ versus ‛collective’; ‛emotional’ versus ‛intellectual’; ‛motivating ex ante’ versus ‛evaluating ex post’). In the second, historical-literary perspective, I analyze two literary cases of fictional characters usually thought of as being guided or affected by conscience. The first case is the ancient Greek tragedy and here I offer (in part 2) a comment on the Sophoclean Antigone and the Euripidean Orestes presenting them both as dramas that contain an exemplary formulation of the phenomenon of conscience. Although Antigone and Orestes express their main principles of action in apparently different words, I suggest (in part 3) the two poetical visions of conscience are equally based upon a highly emotional behavior called pathos by the Greek. Thereby I provide a reason, why ancient philosophers created a new concept of conscience intended as an alternative to the poetical vision of human behavior. The new philosophical concept of conscience was based upon an axiological behavior called ethos. I also coin (in part 4) a concept of the ‛community of conscience’ where I distinguish four ‛aspects of solidarity’ in conscience, namely, somebody’s own self, a group of significant persons, a group of the same moral principles, and a sameness of life. In the end I turn (in part 5) to a historical-literary case in Joseph Conrad’s last novel The Rover (1923), which provoked a lively discussion among Polish authors and seems useful as an illustration of several levels of ‛solidarity of conscience’.

According to Nicolai Hartmann, the correlativistic prejudice is the claim that a being must be a correlate of a subject, and this, he argues, is the main prejudice of Husserl’s phenomenology taken as an eidetic science of transcendental consciousness with its correlates. In contrast to Hartmann, the author of this article claims that Husserl’s conception of the noetic-noematic correlation does not lead to the correlativistic prejudice. Husserl distinguishes between two concepts of object: the noematic ‛object simpliciter’ (the pure X) and the ‛object in the How of its determinations’ (a noematic sense), and he demonstrates that the noematic ‛object simpliciter’ transcends the limit of actual noetic-noematic correlation, it is a correlate of the Idea in the Kantian sense of the term and this idea cannot be intrinsically given in its content. In the article the author shows that Husserl’s concept of the noematic ‘object simpliciter’ as a pure X is similar to Kant’s concept of transcendental object as ‛something in general = X’. In analogy to a transcendental object, noematic ‛object simpliciter’ is partially knowable and it appears to be an irrational fact in its unknowable rest. As a consequence, the ‛object simpliciter’ is something more than a correlate of consciousness and retains always its extra-noematic content. Therefore, the world is only partially correlative to the possibility of experience.