Nauka

Academic culture is a set of rules (norms and values) regulating the institution of the university. The central component of academic culture is autonomy both in the sense of independence from external interference and the capacity to decide on research, teaching and organization of the university. Autonomy is endangered by the interference in academic culture of other cultural complexes characteristic for modern society: corporate culture, business culture, bureaucratic culture, financial culture, consumer culture. The resulting cultural clash is the reason for current crisis of the university. The defense of autonomy is the ethical and professional duty of scholars.

Hundred years ago education aimed mainly at memorizing as much information as possible. Such an approach lost its sense in the digital age of today since we are overwhelmed by an easily accessible ocean of true information mixed with “fake news”. Hence, the role of the teachers nowadays must be to guide and organize the learning process rather than provide knowledge. The students must no longer be passive recipients but active participants in the process of acquiring knowledge. A new approach of “phenomenon-based learning” introduced in schools in Finland, Norway and other countries agrees also with the holistic process of human cognition rather than absorbing information in a way sliced into traditional disciplines. In the future, say, fifty years from now, the role of teachers may be partly modified by the use of robots, which however could not replace creative thinking of human beings.

The essay critically approaches the current state and directions of changes in the university education. We see the critical point in the unconditioned endorsement by the university of the market values of intense competitiveness of global economy and the cult of the pro-market education which is its inevitable result. We would like to argue that although the university must respect economic conditions and limitations, nevertheless we fear that the ongoing process of corporatization of the university with its management strategies such as cutting costs, scanning environments for competitive purposes, re-engineering highly competitive efficiency criteria for the staff will bring about a neglect of the humanist values rooted in intellectual and social sensibility and hence undermine the social mission of the university which, apart from professional skills and research, must cultivate intellectual pluralism by providing space for intelligent conversation, sharing critical views of the present state of things thus fostering social criticism and the spirit of responsible dissent.

With this paper we try to contribute to the debate on the nature of research intensive universities and the chances to create this type of institution in Poland. Research universities are presented as elite, flagship institutions for educating students mostly at the doctoral level and to produce the bulk of the research output. Examples of world-class research intensive universities from various countries are presented. It is shown that intensified competition among universities exists to prove their performance through global university league tables or ranking exercises and it is discussed whether Poland is at the stage to create at least one such institution playing important role in that competition. We argue that the establishment of a University of the Polish Academy of Sciences could be a solution. This University stands to become a unique research institution in Poland and one of very few establishments of its type in Central and Eastern Europe. The University will conduct scientific research and provide programs of the highest standard, exploiting the research and teaching potential of the PAS institutes as well as the competence and experience of members of the Academy's corporation. It is intended as a higher education institution with a decentralized organizational structure, based on the PAS research institutes. The University of the Polish Academy of Sciences will have a quality-boosting impact on the PAS institutes as well as initiate their consolidation and reorganization in the field of teaching.

Public education is educating influence of wide range media on political beliefs, worldviews and patterns of the everyday life of the audience, and of the potential electorate. The public intellectuals (the Henry A. Giroux concept), significant and respected experts (academics, journalists, politicians) play a special role. The article contains the presentation and analysis of the reaction of American public intellectuals to the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States – from the perspective of critical-emancipatory pedagogy. These are extremely critical to the consequences of D. Trump's choice: Ken Wilber's, Henry A. Giroux’s, Noam Chomsky’s, and several authors in the Berkeley Review of Education 2017/1 publications and speeches are recalled. The author concludes that Poland no longer has to imitate America, because in authoritarian drift (turn) it is ahead of it.

This article discusses the challenges and problems caused by predatory journals in scholarly communication. By focusing on the editorial practices, I describe the case of Dr. Anna Fraud (Anna O. Szust in Polish): a bogus scientist created by four Polish scholars. Dr. Fraud became a member of editorial boards in over 40 scientific journals although she is a fake person and, obviously has no experience in journal editing. The present paper aims to show that scientist always have to care about a quality control and a peer review system. The article concludes with a presentation of the ‘Think. Check. Submit’ Initiative which provides useful and helpful tools for analysing journals by potential contributors.

In this article, I am examining the role of categorization in understanding. The problem arises from well-known distinction between explanation and understanding, which has been for a century pursued in hermeneutic tradition. Categorization belongs to explanatory endeavor and its role in understanding is unclear. In order to delimit the scope of inquiry I am focusing on the weakest kind of categorization, so called categorization ad hoc. I am examining the hypothesis to the effect that categorization plays its role in hermeneutic circle as some sort of preunderstanding. Eventually, however, I reject this hypothesis. It is because it leads to hermeneutic paradox: The notion of pre-understanding has a meaning only in the context of full-fledged understanding, which is an unattainable ideal. Such ideal cannot be used as a personal criterion of the quality of one’s understanding. There is a tension between the feeling of understanding and the scarcity of personal means to justify this feeling. I am suggesting that similar, albeit weaker effect occurs also in more elaborate, scientific categorizations. What is really wrong in the passage from categorization to understanding is some form of self-understanding: We do not know whether we understand better, or at all when we put some categorical order onto our experience. We do not seem to have the required meta-understanding.

Health psychology was founded as a response to social needs for better understanding and regulation of psychological aspects of biological, mental, and social well-being. Despite initial enthusiasm and optimism in its early days, three decades of development yielded results that are disappointing to many scholars in terms of health psychology practical meaning. Thus, in this paper we review several challenges for health psychology. We believe that health psychology might benefit from revival of aims and values that distinguished the discipline at its onset such as bio-psycho-social perspective that has been narrowed to somatic illness in recent days. Second, more integration is needed in theory and terminology to eliminate overlapping concepts labeled with different names. Furthermore, social practice would benefit from greater responsiveness of health psychologists to new technologies. Finally, health psychology is likely to derive benefits from more general well-established perspectives on diffusion of innovation in social practice. We conclude that health psychology as a practice-related scientific discipline is likely to regain its initial momentum once these problems are solved and novel areas of scientific exploration are identified.

The authors of this paper examine the ancient concepts of translatio, imitatio and aemulatio. The text goes over some problems of the heritage of antiquity and its reception in European culture of the early modern period. These questions were discusssed during the international conference “Heredes et scrutatores. Attitudes towards Antiquity in the Renaissance and in the Early Modern Period”, which was held on 19–20 May 2016 at the University of Warsaw. It celebrated the 200th anniversary of classical studies at this university. The conference seeked to explore the changing attitudes towards the heritage of classical antiquity in post-classical European culture. The scholars participating in the meeting tried to (re)examine the diversity of these attitudes in the period between the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times and to reflect on a number of related problems, among which were the theoretical viewpoints that had been suggested to describe this diversity. One of them, which gave its name to this conference, distinguishes between two general approaches: that of the “users”, concentrated on adapting the classical legacy by means of procedures inherited from the ancient Romans, and that of the “researchers”, which replaced the former procedures with ones typical of scholarly cognition. The participants discussed theoretical issues and concrete cases illustrating the ways that the intellectuals of the Renaissance and Early Modern Times approached the Greek and the Roman legacy. The connections between past and present attitudes towards antiquity have also been be the subject of the debate.

In the second half of the 19th century in the European culture appears an increased interest in evil. This phenomenon is widely spread particularly in France and England. In his famous volume of poems Les Fleurs du Mal Charles Baudelaire publishes The Litanies for Satan where the Devil replaces God as the addressee of a blasphemous prayer. Joris-Karl Huysmans, an author of the novel LB-bas, describes a black mess and a litany addressed to Satan who seems to be closer to sinful people than perfectly indifferent God. A poet from the Huysmans’ artictic circle, Édouard Dubus, devotes his litany to a „Lady of grace and immorality” – a blasphemous double of Mary, mother of Jesus. An English poet Charles Algernon Swinburne writes Dolores, a poem addressed to „Our Lady of Pain” and recognised as the apogee of the satanic litany. In all these cases the choice of a litany as a literary genre results in acceptance of a vision of the world broaden with spirituality. In spite of their seemingly blasphemous plots, all these texts express a deep hunger for the sacred – the hunger that could not be satisfied with official religion.

”Bio” technologies are significant for the future prospects and for knowledge based bioeconomy in general. In the article we examine two areas of problems – one connected to the issue of use of genetic resources and traditional knowledge and another – connected to new plant breeding techniques. We examine whether the law is up to date with the developments in the area of biotechnology and if there is a need for legislative changes in these areas. As it turns out, the necessary legislation may be significantly behind the progress of bio-science. Also, we present potential paths for solving such problems.

Adopting and developing a knowledge-based economy as the current stage of global economic development is an important stimulus to successful innovation. The transition to a knowledge-based economy and achieving economic convergence, especially in the case of emerging economies, requires the appreciation of science and technology coexistence on the one hand, and the development of innovation on the other, as well as the raising of human resource competences and skills for further development. Latin American countries, in search of an effective development strategy after moving away from the Washington Consensus, which set economic priorities through the last decade of the twentieth century, become increasingly aware of the importance of the development of STI policies. They try to identify the most important institutions and the capacities and resources needed to support economic development. Such policy generally includes at least three objectives: to create research and development opportunities in public research institutes and universities; to stimulate the demand of companies for scientific and technological knowledge by establishing close relationships between universities, business and government, and supporting and developing national innovation systems in each country. In this article the author analyzes the policies introduced and attempts to assess their effectiveness.

This article is confrontational with the theses presented in the paper: O pewnym (chybionym) studium przypadku [About a (wrong) case study ] (Chybińska 2017), which is the answer to the issues presented in the article: Etyka w przekładzie specjalistycznym a kompetencje tłumacza tekstów specjalistycznych — studium przypadku [Ethics in specialized translation and competence of specialist translator: case study] (Boroch 2017). In this article (Boroch 2017), the methodological principles in the specialist translation and the substantive and ethical consequences of their violation have been presented. Exemplary material was the Polish translation of Henryk Hiż's article: Peirce's Influence on Logic in Poland (Hiż 1997, 264–270) published in ”Studia z Filozofii Polskiej” in 2015 (Hiż 2015, 21–29) along with a biographical section (Chybińska 2015, 29–33) which both constitute a coherent publication. The article has raised the following issues: (1) the lack of justification of the basis of translation, i.e. the primacy of the manuscript over the printed version, that is the last one controlled by the author; (2) inconsistency with regard to termination of translation; (3) unauthorized introduction of a Polish neologism “dylematyczny” derived from the (non-existent) English lexical unit “dylemmatic” (Sic!); (4) proposal of the notation of Peirce's law: (p, q, r ) (Sic!).