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.
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development in this time of confusion when, to quote Rémi Brague: “From the point of view of technology, man appears as outdated, or at least superfluous”?
Business ethics – together with other branches of applied ethics – faces a challenge of the validity of its claims. These ethical claims must be convincing for participants of economic life and meet the requirement of impartiality. Of course, philosophical ethics helps in this search. Among many ethical propositions, the emphasis is on those that have sufficient epistemological grounding (often taking the form of a meta-ethical recommendations). Considering this condition, the choice of ethical tools is significantly reduced. For this reason, the search for ethical standards applicable in social practice is continued in the sphere of culture. Meanwhile, this widening of the research field must be done with caution. It is hard to find in culture an answer to the question about the criteria for ethical behavior. Culture, of course, is founded on such criteria. However, there are more of them than would be expected by an ethicist seeking – in this area – a solution to the problem of the validity of an ethical norm. The fact that complicates this search is that the changes that have been taking place in Western culture since the mid-twentieth century are very powerful. Their multi-faceted nature means that their systematization (carried out using the principle of non-contradiction) is not possible. The hypothesis regarding the complexity and heterogeneity of normative beliefs held by Western societies is confirmed (among others) by the analysis of processes initiated by the performative turn. Hence the choice of arguments offered by performance studies. They harmonize with the leading intention of this research paper. They explain why the world of cultural values – despite the multitude of practices of giving them significance – legitimately aspires to be the normative foundation of collective life, including economic life.
The death of a person, particularly my own death, is the most momentous occasion that happens in a lifetime. It seems to be an inevitable end of any possible experience, ceasing any relationship, the end of memories and hopes. It evokes various reactions in the living, just to mention some as: fascination, fear, stress, consent, willingness to familiarization. Each of them may be analysed, while each one shows also the death in a different aspect. In the proposed article, the author indicates another reaction - that is experiencing anxiety. It appears that this is the key experience, both when I am thinking about it as something that may afflict me at any moment, as well as when I become aware that there is a possibility of exit of the loved ones or just a popular person. Some texts by Joseph Ratzinger have inspired me to carry out such analyses.
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 onymic image of the world in a translation through an intermediary language as exemplified by the anthroponyms in a collection of short stories “Baummoos pflücken” (lit. “The Lichen Collector”) by Zhang Wei.
The article addresses the issue of the linguistic image of the world — reflected in proper names — and of its translation. Chinese onyms and their related forms of address contain information about mutual relations between the speaker and the named object, thus offering a better insight into social relations in small language and cultural communities. The challenge for the translator is not only to translate these onyms, but also to preserve their social function in the text. This has been exemplified in the article by a translation of a collection of short stories from Chinese to Polish through German, where the intermediary language adds another coherence layer. The theory of the linguistic image of the world and proper names per se are a starting point for a critical analysis of this specific translation in view of the translation of onyms and of their potential for conveying the image of the world. Emphasis is placed on the transfer of the social functions of onyms into the target language. The influence of onyms and of their consistent treatment in the translation on the coherence of the studied text has also been taken into account.
The dual nature of water (acqua) in feminine portals – The work is an attempt to show how the concept of acqua (water) is conceptualized in Italian persuasive discourse regarding the health and beauty of modern women. The conducted research mainly based on the notion of imagery in language (Langacker) and linguistic picture of the world (Bartmiński) reveals a number of semantic and axiological aspects involved by the analyzed concept. The valuation of acqua is also noteworthy, as water functions in the linguistic system as a neutral concept, while the corpus subjected to the analysis shows that it has a double face: it is benevolent and destructive at the same time.
The paper considers the vision of the world and the person of Józef Kazimierz Plebański (1831–1897), the Warsaw historian, one of two Polish students of Leopold von Ranke. In my article, I analyse the essential categories and objects which structure his thinking about reality, such as liberty, Providence, moral laws, state, nation, and humanity. At the end, I try to compare the worldview of Plebański with the worldview of historicism.
This paper focuses on three issues. First, it is about the context and environment of pre-Nicene theology. It is emphasized that pre-Nicene theology did not neglect ca-techetical and liturgical reflection (ad intra) while at the same time successfully ente-red into a critical and creative dialogue with both the Semitic and Greco-Roman world where first Christians lived (ad extra). For contemporary theology its means that it cannot reject historical reasoning, placed in space and time. The second part stresses that, in spite of different situations and all historical and cultural contexts, theology before Nicea was above all an understanding of Sacred Scripture to which the key is the Risen Christ as the source and definitive fulfilment of the inspired writings. Finally, the third part of the paper focuses on the existential and spiritual experience from which pre-Nicene theology originated. For this theology the Gospel of Christ is not just the rule of faith but also the rule of life. This leads to a conclusion that a contem-porary theologian is a to take up an existential-personalistic reflection on Revelation using the historical-hermeneutic method .
The article focuses on the translation of non-literary Chinese proper names, a subject which to date has not enjoyed much research interest as a result of the common belief that proper names are untranslatable. The article discusses techniques used in the translation of Chinese anthroponyms, toponyms and brand names into Polish and English. The author refers to the strategies used in the process of transferring names to the target language and presents the consequences of applying given techniques from the cognitive perspective, which entails analysing the names in terms of their structure and meaning. Particular attention is paid to the connotations of the names, the impact they have on the speakers of a given language, as well as the mental images that can be derived from their structure. In the contrastive analysis of the names of tourist locations in Beijing and their Polish and English equivalents, the author applies the cognitive grammar approach as developed by Ronald W. Langacker. The image schemas of the names are used to present the distinct conceptualizations embodied in the names with the same references in diff erent languages. One of the chapters describes how European names are adapted into Chinese. The study also provides an overview of the characteristics of the Chinese onomasticon, a factor which makes translation from Chinese to European languages particularly complicated. The observations made in the course of the analysis permit conclusions to be drawn on the linguistic worldview created by Polish, Chinese and English propria.