Warum ist das „Philosophieren mit Kindern“ an Grundschulen und insbesondere für den Sachunterricht sinnvoll?

Philosophizing with children is a valuable integrative method that should be practiced at primary schools, especially within the education of social sciences and technology. Children are confronted with existential questions that they learn to discuss and approach from different perspectives. Additionally, this method helps to foster children’s moral and cognitive skills and competences.

Lügenbegriffe und Lügenpraxis in der Moderne

Lies occupy a surprisingly favorable place within our daily life. As the Polish aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec once remarked: if you want to see the lie you need to face the obvious truth. With lies, we do not simply stigmatize the dark part or the “backside” of the humankind. To lie, meaning the ability to deceive, with or without words, even to deceive with the truth (for example in statistics), is one of the intellectual modalities of human existence, as well as an expression of misery. This leads to the paradox: One cannot live with lies or, at the same time, live without them. Lies thus reveal their double nature; they attempt to maintain vivid things, just as they generally tend to destroy them. This double nature of lies makes it impossible to condemn them by means of “ethical conviction”, as Max Weber would put it, or with the words of another famous French philosopher of our present time, Vladimir Jankélévitch, who says that consciousness is already provided with an inner disposi-tion to lie, as a litmus test of its noble and mean sides.

Księga Arystotelesa o dyspozycjach dianoetycznych (intelektualnych) „Etyka nikomachejska” VI

The article concerns book VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics on the integrated approach to the dianoetic (intellectual) dispositions in the field of thinking, action and production, with the leading con-cept of phronesis as practical wisdom. We propose here a new Polish translation of this book in a rendition as close to the Greek original as possible. For the sake of clarity, we highlight the chapters with vari-ous appropriate thematic headings. The introductory note is intended to prepare the reader for the difficult text that teems with important conceptual distinctions and sophisticated lines of argument.

‘The way we judge’ Observers’ assessing of elder care decisions of adult children who had been abused by the parents and the ultimate attribution error

In this essay I want to concentrate on observers’ baseline assumptions on how we should be, or should have become in order to be accounted as morally ‘good.’ I will point out the significance for adult children who decided to not care for their elder parents. In three selected studies I show that observers, in trying to explain the decisions of others, or their moral development, respectively moral standing, misjudge or ignore their own implicit baseline assumptions. These assumptions are symptomatic of an implic­it belief in all of us that wishes to see that ’good begets good’ for most of us, and infers, thereafter, that ‘bad begets bad’ for some who would show ‘no good.’ It is this implicit belief that guides the observers to make assumptions about the morally doubtful upbringing of a person, or their negative behavior that they wish to explain by flaws in the person’s personality. This biased belief says “it is this way, and only this way”, but, in fact, one cannot be certain about it. The baseline assumptions that observers bring along are basically the biased observer’s points of view which can be explained with the ultimate attribution error.

Etyka nikomachejska, Księga VI

Etyka nikomachejska, Księga VI

„Dopalacze” – nieprzewidywalne narkotyki. Problem społeczno-prawny

The aim of this article is to present the problem of new psy­choactive substances – designer drugs. New drugs are undoubt­edly a social and legal problem. The existing legal regulations lag behind the producers of designer drugs who use all the avail­able methods to bypass the law, which is a kind of race between criminals and the legislator. In the author’s opinion the current methods used by the Polish legislator are not effective. Prohibi­tion policy has led to the emergence of new deadly agents such as designer drugs. When looking for an answer to the question of how to fight new drugs, we need to look at various instruments, not just the criminal law. According to the author the adoption of a liberal strategy involving the legalization of soft drugs is an effective solution. Legal soft drugs would put an end to the prev­alence of high-risk designer drugs.

Conflicting representations on Armenian genocide: exploring the relational future through self-inquiring technique

Major lethal conflicts (war crimes, genocides) between large social actors include many times opposing social representations, narratives and practical approaches to the events worked out by those placed on the aggressor or aggressed, perpetrators or victims’ side. War crimes and genocides seem to be historically associated, mainly in the case of dictatorial regimes, with system-atic repression not only of the information about such events but also of the interrogative potential of common people about the events. The study proposes that such conflicting representations cannot be approached only by questions pre-established by the researchers to which the participants are supposed to answer. Methodologically and theoretically it is justified to explore the assumptions and the questions that can be triggered by the pres­entation of conflicts to the participants who are supposed to look to the same conflict from both sides. Besides the use of national representative samples and of convenience samples before and after the 100 years commemoration of the 1915 Armenian geno­cide the study presents the findings based on self-inquiry tech­nique applied at three levels of social complexity: (a) societal level, with questions directed to the general universe of discourse implied by the 1915 events; (b) at interpersonal level with ques­tions directed to actors with leading roles on both sides; (c) at the individual level stimulating questions about 1915 genocide that are explicitly self-directed. We suggest, based on the find­ings, that the expression of the questioning potential on trag­ic events is useful for the relational future of the sides involved in the conflicts.

On the construction of the system for forensic psycholinguistics

Forensic psycholinguistics is an emerging interdisciplinary subject that makes use of the psychological methods to analyze the linguistic phenomena in legal activities and therefore it is of the multiple and cross-disciplinary nature. In ancient Chinese culture there were written expressions with thoughts of foren­sic psycholinguistics and its practices. In Western countries the research started from European societies at the end of 19th cen­tury when Münsterberg and Cattell and some other scholars act­ed as the pioneers of this domain. After the WWII the research center of forensic psycholinguistics gradually moved to the Unit­ed States where the research of legal psychology and the use of psychological methods greatly facilitate the study and practic­es of forensic psycholinguistics. Its study object aims at the lin­guistic behavior in such legal activities as legislation, judicial, the obeying of the law and transgression, and its task should be the research on the behavior of the legal language in both levels of consciousness and unconsciousness. The construction of the system for forensic psycholinguistics should start from the perspectives of linguistic psychology of legislation, judicial, the enforcement and obeying of the law and the legal publicity so that a cross-cultural emerging subject with its values of prac­tical application could be created.

O pojęciach i praktyce kłamstwa w epoce nowoczesnej

Lies occupy a surprisingly favorable place within our daily life. As the Polish aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec once remarked: if you want to see the lie you need to face the obvious truth. With lies, we do not simply stigmatize the dark part or the „backside” of the humankind. To lie, meaning the ability to deceive, with or without words, even to deceive with the truth (for example in statistics), is one of the intellectual modalities of human existence, as well as an expression of misery. This leads to the paradox: One cannot live with lies or, at the same time, live without them. Lies thus reveal their double nature; they attempt to maintain vivid things, just as they generally tend to destroy them. This double nature of lies makes it impossible to condemn them by means of „ethical conviction”, as Max Weber would put it, or with the words of another famous French philosopher of our present time, Vladimir Jankélévitch, who says that consciousness is already provided with an inner disposition to lie, as a litmus test of its noble and mean sides.

Applying legal narratives. Some comments on Bernard Jackson’s sociolinguistic approach in legal semiotics

In the article some applications of the concept of legal nar­rative are undertaken in the perspective of Bernard Jackson’s legal semiotics. The analysis are developed in the perspective of Polish social and economical changes of recent decades. The leitmotif is constituted by remarks on sociolinguistic aspects of teaching legal narratives in changing reality. In this context a notion of “legal grapholect” is introduced to discuss possible influence of “deep layer” of legal language on evolving Polish law­yers’ language and vernacular. Additionally, issues of semiotic group of lawyers and legal register are discussed on the basis of the sociolinguistic paradigm. Reasoning is enriched by remarks of possible merger of Jackson’s legal semiotics and Ch. Perelman’s theory of legal argumentation.